Revolutionary

Old media is in danger of finding itself in the buggy whip business. I notice that virtually everything on the evening news broadcasts is already old news, and on the odd occasion when I pick up a newspaper, it's only a compilation of stale news and opinion columns that were on the web early that morning or the day before. Older people still read newspapers, but young people don't. Newspaper circulation figures are tanking, and so are revenues; one reason for the latter is that the classified ad business is rapidly disappearing to the Internet, especially the lucrative employment ads and real estate advertising. The revolutionary decentralization of information is for real, and it's accelerating. Old media has to figure out what its product is going to be in the future -- what, if anything, it can offer that people will be willing to pay for. Ten years from now, for example, it's hard to imagine that the networks will still be in the hard news business in any serious way (as opposed to feature story magazine shows like '60 Minutes'). This past year, it was somewhat shocking to see the networks cut back dramatically on one of their traditional mainstays, their coverage of the political conventions. Below from Wretchard at http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/ :

"People who had designed Adobe fonts and written desktop publishing programs knew the memos were computer generated and were not going to be overawed by Dan Rather's experts asserting the contrary. They were the real experts and to make an impact they did not have to be correct across a large range of issues. They only had to be right in the one thing they knew best and from that vantage could hammer a mainstream pundit into the dust. Rather's defeat at the hands of Buckhead was not accidental. It was inevitable.

"But the mainstream media could console itself in one thing. It still controlled the primary newsgathering apparatus. Yet even here the rulebook was changing. The advent of cheap consumer digital cameras capable of recording sound coupled to the proliferation of internet connections meant that in addition to the analysis cells which manifested themselves in 'instant punditry', the Internet was developing a sensory apparatus to match. To the 'instant pundit' was added the 'instant reporter' -- the man already on the spot, often possessed of local knowledge and language skills. These came suddenly of age with the December 2004 tsunami story. Survivors with a videocamera or even just an email or web browser connection 'filed stories' which were vacuumed up by the instant pundits hovering over their RSS subscriptions and launched into the global information pool...

"The real challenge facing traditional media is how to graft themselves onto this burgeoning evolutionary system by providing services to it. Google is possibly the best known example of a company which understood this trend perfectly, providing services to this growing organism and profiting from its expansion... Lastly, this emerging neural network of analysis cells and sensory apparatus is largely self-aware. It has developed meta-ideas about itself and can actually guide its own development..."

UN and Sudan

DARFUR UPDATE:
"UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan says current attempts to end the conflict in
Sudan's Darfur region are not working."

Pretty sharp guy, this Kofi. After all, he managed to get promoted to King of the World after overseeing the slaughter of 800,000 people in Rwanda. That wouldn't seem like a plus on the old resume, but this is the UN we're talking about here. Kofi is a survivor, even if those people weren't. My guess is that he's getting ready to announce a Sand-For-Food program...

Byron

Ramsey Clark

http://www.airforcetimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-2500437.php

"Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said... that he would represent Saddam, but added it was unlikely an international court would let a foreigner who didn't speak Arabic and wasn't trained in the Arabic legal tradition to appear in an Iraqi court."

Ramsey "Moonbat" Clark is going to be cheated out of an opportunity to defend an enemy of America and to slander the U.S. before the world media? Color me skeptical. Only when Saddam's trial actually begins, and we find that Ramsey is not there at the defense table will I accept this as a fact.

Prediction: Even if he is not formally a member of Saddam's defense team, when the microphones are arrayed outside that Iraqi courtroom, Ramsey Clark will be there, with bells on, to spew his venom against his own country. He has lately come to the defense of Slobodan Milosevic at the ICC and Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a leader of the Rwandan genocide. He pleaded on behalf of Saddam Hussein at the UN, against any resolution authorizing an invasion. He also defended PLO leaders in a lawsuit brought by the family of Leon Klinghoffer, the elderly Jewish American who was murdered by being pushed overboard from the Achille Lauro cruise ship in his wheelchair, in front of his wife. There is much more, but you get the idea:

If you are an enemy of America, you have a firm friend in Ramsey Clark.

Byron

Kyoto Krusade

Kyoto, a political football from the beginning, has devolved into a modern day Children's Crusade, with some opportunist hangers-on. It's entered the catechism of environmentalist romantics on their holy mission to save Mother Earth from satanic humanity, and of the international Hard Left as a wonderfully convenient weapon against capitalism generally, and against the U.S. specifically.

This is just what the world needs, yet another coalition of mindless innocents and cynical manipulators marching forth under the banner of yet another Morally Good Idea. Bjorn Lomborg has had the bad taste to actually analyze the data and policy implications, and he's paid the price, professionally and personally, for arguing that the Idea here is neither good nor moral. Below is an excerpt from Bjorn Lomborg's article in today's Telegraph, Save the world, ignore global warming.

Byron

Even if everyone (including the United States) did Kyoto and stuck to it throughout the century, the change would be almost immeasurable, postponing warming by just six years in 2100.

Likewise, the economic models tell us that the cost is substantial. The cost of Kyoto compliance is at least $150billion a year. For comparison, the UN estimates that half that amount could permanently solve the most pressing humanitarian problems in the world: it could buy clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care and education to every single person in the world.

Some of the world's top economists – including three Nobel Laureates – answered this question at the Copenhagen Consensus last May, prioritising all the major requirements for improving the world. They found that dealing with HIV/Aids, hunger, free trade and malaria were the world's top priorities. This was where we could do the most good for our dollar. Equally, the experts rated urgent responses to climate change at the bottom.