¶ There is only one word for our response to Elisabeth Rosenthal’s front-page story in this morning’s paper, “Europe Stifles Drivers in Favor of Alternatives“: GLEE. Our dislike of private cars on Manhattan streets is becoming, we confess, pathological. In particular, we bitterly resent the expropriation of sidewalks by parking spaces. It’s nice to see that European civic leaders are on the right track on this issue (as is, to some extent at least, our own mayor, who sought unsuccessfully to impose tolls on the East and Harlem River bridges). We were tickled pink to read that the approaches to Zürich are dotted with gratuitous traffic signals that are set to linger on red. Toll the bridges!

¶ We are, of course, thrilled that same-sex marriages will be permitted in our home state, but we remain sobered by the thought that the victory, like too much political action these days, was to some extent purchased, in this case by wealthy Republican donors who happen to be progressive on this issue. Michael Barbaro’s compelling behind-the-scenes report in yesterday’s Times details, among other things, the persuasion of Rochester senator James Alesi.

¶ It’s an ongoing story, with no clear outcome. Sleepy Bonn, capital of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (known here as “West Germany”), has been growing of late, while Berlin suffers high unemployment and is still inching its way back to its post-unification population peak. What may tip the scales in Berlin’s favor is the end of military conscription in Germany, an operation that was run from the university town on the Rhine that was also the summer retreat of the Electors of Cologne. The sad truth is that Germany’s powerhouse city, Frankfurt, has an aura that makes Chicago look like Paris. Alan Cowell reports.

¶ The effects of what cognitive scientists call time discounting can be felt in  a side-by-side comparison of this morning’s two big crime stories, the capture of Whitey Bulger in Santa Monica and the denial of bail for David Laffer in Central Islip. In a horrific drugstore robbery, Mr Laffer killed four people in cold blood last Sunday in Medford, Long Island. That’s what’s horrific about it: it happened last Sunday. ¶ Whitey Bulger killed quite a few more people that David Laffer, but that was long ago, and the old Boston gang leader has been living quietly in Santa Monica for over fifteen years. Another thing that makes Bulger’s crimes less horrific is what we might call intimacy discounting: Bulger knew some of his victims before he killed them. Laffer’s victims were all strangers — random strangers in two cases.

¶ We’ve just whiled away a few quarter hours staring at the Google Maps images of Rome. Up a certain magnification, the the images are satellite photos as usual, but when you zoom in, the view becomes decidedly more that from an airplane. Or a hot air balloon. You won’t believe it!

Zoom in until you find the Villa Medici, home of the Institut Français until fairly recent times. We were poking around this neighborhood because we thought we’d try to find the grotto that Velásquez painted in 1630. Michael Kimmelman prefers to spend time with this picture when he’s at the Prado, ignoring the vastly more famous Las Meninas around the corner. We think that the smaller picture is pretty neat, too; it would be nice to see it someday. We can’t quite make out the “workman looking down from a rooftop,” even though we’ve checked out several other images of the picture (which is how we learned that the arcade wall belongs to the Pavilion of Ariadne — a fact to which Kimmelman slyly alludes by describing the dangling rope’s glinting “like the silver thread of a spider’s web.” We couldn’t make out the rope, either, until we checked out the Times online. Maybe we were too busy envying Michael Kimmelman his youthful discovery of Italy, a world of “shady churches and neglected museums, cool, silent retreats from the hot days, and it was as if a whole universe opened up just to me.” Since he puts it so well, we’re glad of his good fortune.

¶ We were wondering when the Times would get round to mentioning the little problem that Mahmound Ahmadinejad, one of Iran’s two presidents, is having with his “divine” counterpart, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and the clerical class that actually runs things in Iran. Today must be the day: Neil MacFarquhar writes from Cario. The nub of the problem, as might have been expected, is that Mr Ahmadinejad is trying to build up a power base of his own. Unlike his scholarly predecessors, the secular president is very popular among the large class of poor Iranians. But he is also given to bold, somewhat swashbuckling gestures that don’t always come off as well in political life as they do in the movies.

¶ Never having attended a bookstore event without buying something (usually a second copy of a book that we’ve read and liked), we’re pleased to read that McNally Jackson, our favorite downtown bookshop, is going to charge a fee for events in its new downstairs space. We loathe the idea of something for nothing (which is usually just another way of saying “advertising” — the horror!), and the thought that readers might sashay through a reading and then buy the book from Amazon makes our blood boil. ¶ Sam Sifton tries to make Desmond’s sound tired and boring, but even with the help of a few precious put-downs (“This is pensioner food for those who run pension funds”), he fails.We want to go.

¶ The common-law meaning of the term “waste” has nothing to do with garbage, and everything to do with the failure of stewardship that has allowed politicians to yield to public unions’ pension demands throughout the decades of postwar prosperity. Charles Duhigg examines the situation on the ground in Costa Mesa, California, where a conservative real-estate developer, Jim Righeimer, has been attacked for his fight for fiscal responsibility. There are no heroes in this battle, which, ultimately, pits self-interests against the common weal. ¶ It’s nice to know, though, that California’s legislators won’t be paid until they do their job, and present a balanced budget to Governor Jerry Brown.

¶ It would be uttermost hypocrisy if we tut-tutted the Times for giving ample space to two not unrelated stories today. ¶ The first is a rather incoherent — unavoidably incoherent, perhaps — account of an ABC stunt show, 101 Ways to Leave a Game Show. Watch one of the show’s YouTube clips after a selection from Candid Camera, and you will taste the bitterness of our national decline. I don’t think that the ordinary people in these shows are dumber than they used to be, but the producers are cynical and the audiences debased. Now, if they repackaged it as The Darwin Awards… ¶ The obituary of one Ryan Dunn, whom we’d never heard of, a “Jackass” who lost control of his Porsche 911 in the woods near his Pennsylvania home, killing a passenger as well as himself. Our first tyhought was that fiery automobile crashes are at least less sordid than drug overdoses, but of course this may have been a case of both.

¶ In his column this morning, Joe Nocera writes about capital requirements for banks (the subject of an international convention that will be known as “Basel III”) and how unpopular they are with bankers. “Banks always want capital requirements to be as low as possible, because the less capital they have, the more risk they can take and thus the more money they can make (and the bigger the executives’ bonuses).” Underline that parenthesis — well-compensated executives everywhere identify with their paladin-rentier class far more than they do with any employer/institution — and ask yourself, as we do, if greater risk-taking by (not very bright) bankers leads to an increase in freaked-out panic, as we saw in the credit crunch of 2008. Meanwhile, note that the Rentier Party (a/k/a “Republican”) is obstructing the legislative imposition of higher capital requirements, taking the view, shared by no one who is not a rentier or a rentier’s tool, that capital requirements are unnecessary.

¶ Today’s obituary of Joseph Miller (93) tells a good business story: inheriting a harness-making firm in the 1940s, Miller skirted obsolescence by marketing the high quality of his goods to equestrians, who by definition are people who don’t need horses. Good to know (or maybe not): Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti and Cuba patronized Miller’s for the outfitting of their cavalries. Question: is there a US Cavalry tucked away somewhere that we never hear about? A real one, that is.

¶ Large American corporations claim that they’ll use “repatriated” profits — fund that they’ll shift to their United States balance sheets in the event of a tax holiday — to create jobs. As David Kocieniewski points out, “But that’s not how it worked last time,” in 2005, and there’s no reason to think that a replay would work out any differently. Those repatriated funds would almost certainly be shuttled into the arms of shareholders, and jobs be damned. ¶ David Carr tells a similar story in his unusual advance review of a book that’s going to come out next week, James O’Shea’s The Deal From Hell, a gruesome account of vicissitudes that the once-great Los Angeles Times has experienced since the Chandler family decided to sell it. Similar in that business considerations are grotesquely subordinated to short-term one-time gains.

¶ Amidst the developing, pending, and long-term stories that flood the pages of today’s Times, two columns stand out for offering something to think about. In his About New York space, Jim Dwyer questions the logic of reducing crime by arresting blacks and Latinos for possessing small amounts of marijuana (and then dismissing the charges), while affluent whites, among whom marijuana use is “rampant,” are spared the inconvenience. Dwyer assails, quite rightly in our view, the spurious notion that a correlation between pot and crime is any more meaningful than the correlation between pot and banking or academia that equal prosecution of white New Yorkers would undoubtedly reveal. ¶ Looking to history, Sara Lipton finds that, in at least one regard, the pop psychology of the Middle Ages was the opposite of our own: manly men “ruled themselves,” controlling their libidinous urges. Shameless sexual voracity was thought to be characteristic of women. Medieval men were expected to outgrow adolescence — reading about the hockey riot in Vancouver, by the way, lighted a light bulb in our little brain: sports is cosmetic surgery for men — and that was a good thing; the bad thing was that men ruled their households as well as themselves. The point isn’t that they understood things bettter in the so-called Age of Faith, but rather it’s a reminder that pop psychology is pop psychology: the reflection of shifting, unvoiced concerns about life.

¶ Our conviction that the Democratic Party is no more than the useless rump of a once-farseeing political organization has been unpleasantly strengthened by its now-successful pursuit of Anthony Weiner’s resignation from Congress. This ought to have been a “teaching opportunity” for Party leaders, given the utterly tendentious and/or hypocritical nature of the revelations in the case; but, no. There are no teachers among the Democrats (except maybe Barney Frank). That anyone would pay attention to discredited political hack Nancy Pelosi makes the whole business doubly depressing.

¶ On the very off chance that you are an elementary-school pupil who might find yourself in Manhattan, be advised that aunts and uncles who offer to treat you to Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark either aren’t very bright or don’t think you’re very bright. Having pronounced the reconstituted show “a bore,” Ben Brantley compares it to its troubled predecessor thus:

So is this ascent from jaw-dropping badness to mere mediocrity a step upward? Well, until last weekend, when I caught a performance of this show’s latest incarnation, I would have recommended “Spider-Man” only to carrion-feasting theater vultures. Now, if I knew a less-than-precocious child of 10 or so, and had several hundred dollars to throw away, I would consider taking him or her to the new and improved “Spider-Man.”

¶ Sam Sifton demotes Masa, the sushi temple at TimeWarner Center, from four stars to three. The food is extraordinary, but the overall experience, in the dining room at least, is not. (Perhaps Masa ought to abandon the pretense of a Western-style restaurant and just expand its bar.)

Bruised by recession, wizened by experience, gun-shy about the future, New York City now demands of its four-star restaurants an understanding that culture at its highest must never feel transactional, whatever its cost. We ascend to these heavens for total respite from the world below, for extraordinary service and luxuriant atmosphere as much as for the quality of the food prepared.

¶ The Chinese Navy is rattling sabers, or whatever it is that gunboats do, in the surrounding seas, irritating Japanese, Vietnamese, and Philippine neighbors. This quasi-belligerent activity is one thing that is truly new about China, which has not been much of a maritime presence since the Ming emperors scuttled Zheng He’s flotilla in the Fifteenth Century. With no traditions to guide the captains of its expanding, up-to-date fleet, this land of venerable traditions is bound to behave with adolescent rashness. ¶ Which isn’t to say that traditions are necessarily a good thing. China’s lead-poisoning nightmare couldn’t have a more familiar ring. Sharon LaFraniere writes,

Such scenes of heartbreak and anger have been repeated across China in recent months with the discovery of case after case of mass lead poisoning — together with instances in which local governments tried to cover them up.

¶ Norimitsu Onishi and Martin Fackler have a story, certainly, but is “In Nuclear Crisis, Crippling Mistrust” the best title? Nowhere do the reporters demonstrate that the response of Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan to the Fukushima disaster was actually crippled by his decision to bypass a bureaucratic apparatus that he had good reason to mistrust. The closest argument for hampered effectiveness concerns the use of an Education Ministry weather-analysis system that would have advised civilians not to take refuge in an area covered by the reactors’ radioactive plume.

Mr. Kawauchi said that when he asked officials at the Ministry of Education, which administers Speedi, why they did not make the information available to the prime minister in those first crucial days, they replied that the prime minister’s office had not asked them for it.

This makes us even more sympathetic to Mr Kan’s misgivings. The reporters seem to be under the impression that speed and “decisiveness” are invariably good things in a crisis. This leads them to step over the real story, which concerns plant manager Masao Yoshida’s heroic insubordination.

¶ Come, peer into our crystal ball for a glimpse — more than a glimpse — of the future of manufacturing. Chances are, if you’ve half a brain, what you see won’t surprise you. “Companies Spend on Equipment, Not Workers” — sorry, the crystal ball belongs to reporter Catherine Rampell — suggest that we ponder whether largely inevitable trends require tax incentives. Companies like Vista Technologies will do well no matter what. We need to give their accounting advantages to firms that rely on people, not machinery, to get the job done.

¶ When Sanjay Kaul jokes that the sprawling development south of New Delhi is like the United States, he means that there isn’t much in the way of res publica on offer. “You’re on your own.” It is hard to read about the political dysfunction that has prevented the construction of water supplies, sewage systems, and public transport in Gurgaon, a town that’s run directly by its state (or not), without any municipal government, without seeing the realization of a right-wing and libertarian dream for the American future.

¶ Jenny Anderson’s front-page article about parents who supplement their children’s already expensive private schooling with private tutoring has rocketed our temper into Fulmination Mode, but we shall try for self-restraint. What’s wrong with private tutoring? It’s an absolute insult to the private school. A child in need of remedial education is probably at the wrong school. A child honing marginal advantages over fellow-students is a sociopath. A private school charging fees of upwards of $50,000 per year ought to be expected to provide everything needed. It ought to expel students whose parents doubt its ability in this regard; and it ought to create an atmosphere in which mechanical overachievement is manifestly objectionable. Private tutoring in private schools is the sort of thing that leads a friend of ours to shrug off the brouhaha by dismissing the schools themselves: “I thought probably they were just breeding pens for the type of human who eventually goes to Yale on the suspect credentials that they provide.”