I know a lot of people will be outraged by The New York Times' revelation today that the United States is expanding its clandestine military activity to disrupt militant groups in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia. But I say all the outrage is misplaced. If you read the article closely, you'll see that they've revealed nothing that isn't absolutely obvious. I mean, if we're not doing that, someone should be fired, yesterday. In fact, that has to be one of the top-ten most boring leaks of secret military information I've ever read.

I was a lot more surprised by the Souping up Spring Vegetables article. Did you all know that soup's not just a winter food? Bravo to the Times for publishing that weird recipe involving asparagus, green garlic and eggs. All too easy to dismiss the sound of that one as simultaneously effete and nasty, so give them credit for bravery. It can't have been an easy call in the newsroom.

I must admit, that article really challenged a lot of my assumptions about soup.

Okay. Let's discuss the devastation of an eco-system, an economy and a damn pretty place. Why is Obama hanging all his hopes on BP and not turning to every oil company who has had experience in capping and containing oil spills? There's certainly enough of them. This could turn from catastrophe to triumph for him. Even the liberal blogs are asking these questions. He's acting more like an "oil man" than that "oil man" who last resided in the White House. Someone illuminate me.

What? Oh. Wait, wrong tweetering....

Interesting, and troubling, that something seems to be up in North Korea. First they torpedo a patrol boat -- now confirmed by South Korean MOD -- now talk of Nork military alerts. Seoul remains under the gun of a lot of NKorean artillery. One itchy trigger... This could be POTUS' next foreign policy headache. As usual the PRC is being less than helpful. After all, a crisis on the Korean pennisula might interfere with iPod production...

Remember this?

Things being as they are, and people as they are, there is no way to prevent somebody, somewhere, from concluding that "NATIONAL REVIEW favors drugs.'' We don't; we deplore their use; we urge the stiffest feasible sentences against anyone convicted of selling a drug to a minor. But that said, it is our judgment that the war on drugs has failed, that it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources, and that it is encouraging civil, judicial, and penal procedures associated with police states. We all agree on movement toward legalization, even though we may differ on just how far.

It was WFB himself who opined, in the symposium that followed the above announcement,

that it is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana. I would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal equivalent of a My Lai massacre. And perhaps proceed to recommend the legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors.

In a tart, potent update of his long attack on the drug war, Radley Balko brought it all rushing back to me with a grim bottom line:

As I explained in a column a couple weeks ago, this wasn't a "botched raid." It was a routine raid. The police got the correct house. They found the guy they were after. They arrested him. No one was killed. Most of these raids don't turn up huge stashes of drugs or weapons. Most result in misdemeanor charges. If Krauthammer finds the Missouri SWAT raid video "harrowing and horrible," he ought to find the drug war "harrowing and horrible." Because the images in that video are typical of how we're fighting it.

I'm in favor of the rule of law. But the way we're struggling to enforce our present drug laws has begun to work against the purposes of the rule of law itself. If National Review could point to a way beyond this dilemma in 1996, couldn't -- and shouldn't -- we make the effort to do so again today?

Yes: the new New Pornographers single "Crash Years." Dreary band name, but there's a sweet and subtle hook in the chorus, an Americana twist on the Wilco-ish alt-pop of Belgian band dEUS at its best (1999's The Ideal Crash). Quite a step away from the jittery, yippy clip of earlier songs like "Twin Cinema," but this soft parade ain't no soft rock.

No: the Great New Sound of '10, Treats by Sleigh Bells. Cute voice? Check. Advanced minimalist guitar heroics? Check. Trendiest hip hop beats, seemingly effortlessly appropriated and repackaged for ultra-indie eardrums? Check. So what's the problem? There's everything to like, but nothing to love. Like certain pieces of conceptual art, one glance is all it takes to 'get it'. After that, there's nothing to get.

Sitting in a quaint mom and pop truck stop in I-dunno-the-name-of-this-town, IL, I felt bad about not eating well last night and so assuaged my guilt tonight with hot apple pie and ice cream. After some thought, I remembered which state I slept in last night, but I couldn't tell you about the previous nights. That's one of oddities of this line of work; the days become a blur of activity where places and faces merge together in a constant stream. Averaging around 2,700 miles per week, certain events are etched in my memory, but I can't always tell you where they happened. I've awakened in the morning and been unsure of which state I'm in, other than the state of confusion, I mean.

But even in that fog of highways, cities, country side, I know one thing for certain. I know that I did not serve in Vietnam, which sends any political aspirations I might have had in Connecticut down in flames. In fact, looking at the headlines today (the President's approval numbers tanking even as Gov Deval Patrick says that those who disagree with Obama are coming close to sedition, while Patrick Kennedy says that Arizona's attempt to secure its own border violates the spirit of the Constitution), suddenly my own confusion seems minor. In fact, compared with the general confusion many of our politicians display, even Chicago traffic makes sense! Back to the apple pie...

OMG as they say in LA. I am being HOUNDED by a census taker! I mailed in my forms late, and so they decided someone had to come to my door and count me. Well, it wasn't a convenient time since I was on the phone with some VITAL Terrell Owens bizniz, so I made an appt for Saturday at 1pm. They showed up at 6pm and I thought - you know what? (curse words here YOU). I mailed in my forms. I did my duty albeit late. Now they have Dog The Census Hunter on my case! He comes 3 and 4 times a day. I refuse to answer my door and answer his stupid questions. Sunday, I locked my gate and he climbed over it!!! And just now he tried to TRICK me! He rang the doorbell, the dogs barked. Oh.... it seems he left. But no! He was still there! He rang again and then KICKED MY DOOR! BOOM! Hahahaha. I am probably going to be arrested before this whole thing is over. But I have enjoyed writing here, I love you all. And I will be posting from the Gray Bar Hotel next!

Hi All, let's get down to business. We had Carly Fiorina over to our house the other day. We spoke for over an hour. She seems like a reasonable choice for Ca. Senator. We have to get rid of Barbara Boxer. Carly took the lead in the polls recently, what do you think?

I've spent the entire morning congratulating myself on not having watched Lost. Does that make me shallow? (If not, how can I become shallow?) I stopped watching after the first six episodes when it became clear to me (as a certified professional maker-up of things) that the conclusion could only be 1) it was all a dream or 2) everyone was dead. The only thing that would have redeemed it is if the entire cast had awakened in bed with Bob Newhart.

Ah, heaven for New York Post readers like myself: a budding Kennedy scandal, a true-blue royal one, and the French Open.

Not just yet. But North Korea's sinking of a South Korean vessel raises yet another round of grim questions about how long Pyongyang can perpetuate its national hell without lurching into open, general hostilities. What to do? Read Michael Magan at Foreign Policy's outstanding Shadow Government blog.

Update: Outside the Beltway's Doug Mataconis gives pause.

By way of an introduction to the rest of Ricochet's intrepid contributors, I'd like to share my delight with the LA Times. It always lightens my day. It took but three short minutes to get a couple of laughs on this dreary Monday morn.

I hooted with when I saw a below-the-fold 10 paragraph story that "Survivor" producer and chief suspect in his wife's murder, Bruce Beresford-Redman, has just waltzed right back into his comfy LA lifestyle. No problems at the border for him....even after they took his passport. See, we don't stop anyone illegally leaving Mexico, even those polluting our society with reality TV. And how about that pathetically incompetetent Mexican justice system? All this after the Times lauded Mexican President Felipe Calderon for lambasting the U.S. to the standing ovation of congressional Dems.

But the big laugh of the morning was the photo next to it...a protest in Santa Monica against lifting a whaling ban. I'm not necessarily supporting ending the ban if these species of whales are endangered...but what made me chuckle was in the background is a "whale hugger" holding a sign: "Obama Save the Whales." Heal me Jesus.

 According to the Jerusalem Post, a member of the Saudi religious police found himself on the receiving end of a righteous pounding from a lady who is evidently fed up with this whole repression bit. A member of the euphemistically-titled Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice approached the lady and a man not related to her, as the two were seen together at an amusement park in violation of the law. The Saudi daily Okaz reports that when the religious policeman asked the couple for some identification, the young man promptly collapsed, at which point our heroine began punching the absolute sharia out of the religious cop, necessitating his trip to the hospital.

I saw an interesting indicator of growing weariness with this religious police business years ago when I was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. A religious cop evidently thought a woman was showing a bit too much wrist from beneath her cover and thwacked her hand with a stick. She dutifully pulled her sleeve lower and waited until he turned his back to her before displaying the single-fingered universal sign of defiance. While it elicited an appreciative chuckle from my colleagues and me, it was a very risky gesture for a woman in such a society.

My hat is off to the lady for standing up to these thugs. She has done more to advance the cause of human rights in that wretched area than the NOW gang, the ACLU, or our Apologists in Chief combined.

Okay, so I did that thing where I forwarded an email and the chain went with it. I had written something dopey -- and a little snotty -- early in the chain. I feel pretty bad about it. Do I try to apologize? Ignore it and hope no one bothered to scroll down through boring emails to see the one incriminating one? No state secrets involved. Just might make my child's teacher think I'm a little selfish. *Sigh* Not the best Monday morning.

I know you're all wondering what's new in Turkey. This is the big news. I also know it makes little sense to anyone outside of Turkey, so let me explain the two key points. If you remember these, you'll be able to fake your way through any dinner party. Or Senate hearing, for that matter.

1) The AKP has been able to dominate Turkish politics since 2002 not because everyone here loves them so much, but because there's been no credible opposition. The reason there's been no credible opposition is that the main opposition party, the CHP, has been under the control of the elderly, authoritarian, singularly uninspiring Deniz Baykal. Think John Kerry's populist touch mixed with John Edwards' feel for fine ethical judgments. The big news -- huge, from the Turkish perspective, although I'm aware it barely registered outside of Turkey -- is that somehow, by means of a devilishly ingenious and typically Turkish conspiracy, Baykal's enemies have finally forced him out. They caught him on tape with his mistress. Who caught him? Beats me. It's not the kind of thing anyone claims credit for, really. But they got him. And he's out. No, I haven't seen the tape: The man is 71 years old, for God's sake, that's the last thing I want to watch.

So this completely changes the landscape. They're calling the new CHP leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, a Turkish Gandhi who is going to revitalize the CHP and save Turkey. I wouldn't take that all too seriously: The whole thing has a bit of an Obamamania feel. But definitely, for the first time there's some sense that there's an opposition party that means to win here.

Main point: The name you need to remember is Kılıçdaroğlu, and you pronounce it Kuh-luch-dar-o-loo, mild stress on "dar." If you call him "Kemal Gandhi," and say it with mild irony, you'll sound particularly well-informed.

2) In fact, of all the policy proposals Kılıçdaroğlu's come up with so far, only one counts: lifting parliamentary immunities. Everything else is hand-waving.

I've managed to watch exactly zero minutes and zero seconds of LOST, the supposedly gripping series which has, apparently, now come to an end. Lest I seem anti-TV, let me emphasize that I've made time in my life for The X-Files, Deadwood, Project Runway, and many other shows great and small. I'm susceptible to hype. I'm inclined to trust my friends' judgments. But I never felt even a shiver of longing to dip into Lost. And with reactions like this coming in from trusted sources, I'm feeling certain of my final verdict on the end of Lost: no big loss.

So I spent most of the day at the Maker Faire in San Mateo. Sort of one part geek convention, one part Burning Man, one part Renaissance Faire. But it's sort of a cool new movement in the culture, the Do It Yourself (DIY) movement.

What I liked the most about it was the sheer joy the exhibitors had in busting open stuff that you're really not supposed to bust open -- a propane tank, a computer, an iPod, a barbeque grill, a bike -- and "fixing" it, modifying, making it cooler, or better, or just more fun.

The ifixit.com booth was interesting -- their motto: "If you can't open it up, it isn't yours."

Above, a dissected iPhone. I love it when people split something open like this. Is it just me, or does it feel vaguely Tea Party-ish?

And then there's the obligatory Mentos + Coke Zero demonstration:

We've got to get Ricochet contributor John Ratzenberger, my old friend from Cheers, to comment on this. He's a passionate advocate of tinkering and making stuff and building stuff. I've heard him speak really movingly about what's happening to our culture -- and our kids -- now that we don't teach ourselves how to fix and build and fool around with stuff anymore.

When I was a kid, I used to love to shoot up Estes model rockets. They still make them. Here, a guy let a bunch of kids build rockets out of masking tape and paper, and then he fired them up in the air with a (jerry-rigged, of course) air compressor.

What I loved about the Maker Faire was how dangerous it was. Seriously. There was a lot of fire blasting outside, and a lot of duct-tape modifications made to things that probably shouldn't have been modified at all, especially when it's just duct-tape and prayer between you and a flying piece of molten metal. Such a great spirit.

There's a whole new hipster movement, called Steampunk, in which hipsters (and people a little too chubby to be hipsters, if the crowd at Maker Faire was anything to go by) get all dressed up in late 19th century clothes -- I mean, I'm sure there's a lot more to it (well, I'm not sure sure, but I'm trying not to judge) -- but I can't help thinking that this is what happens when a generation grows up without the Boy Scouts, which was, basically, a 19th century movement designed to take soft, pampered boys of the time, who didn't know about Napolean-era privations, or pre-railway travel, or Chinese Gordon holding Khartoum against the Mahdi, and teaching them how to do stuff. How to build a trap. How to tie a taut-line hitch. How to make do. I have to say, pretty much everything useful I ever learned -- how to cook an egg; how to make sure your tent stays dry in the rain; why it's important to wash your dishes in hot water; that sort of thing -- I learned as a Boy Scout. School and college educated me. But they didn't teach me much. If you know what I mean.

And now we're left with this:

"Learn to solder." Because they don't teach you how to solder anywhere, anymore.

Dinner at our place. Kinda blah. Kinda nutritious. I wish I was the type to whip up Sunday roasts, but, alas.

... I'm supposed to open a conversation about something conservative here, then wait for our hungry acolytes to reply. Is that right?

...in this case, it's on to something. Sort of, but worth thinking about. Virginia Heffernan, who it's been scientifically proven is wrong about everything, is wrong about what she frets about in the Times today, in her article "The Death of the Open Web," which is a typical piece of NYT silliness.

She's worried that with more stuff going behind a paywall -- a lot of News Corp's titles, for instance -- and she frets about the app universe, especially Apple's, for its restrictions and censorship and general all-around supervised play.

Neglecting, naturally for a New York Times writer, the giant, floating, pulsating reality in front of her. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter -- all open, WIDE open, all growing at an amazing clip. YouTube, for those who don't know, is the second-largest search engine in the world. In addition to being a wide-open platform for video. In addition to changing the entire media landscape for ever -- by creating an open, democratic, chaotic video marketplace.

How's that for open? Yes, Virginia, there are apps. And news sites behind a paywall. But that's hardly the trend.

On the other hand, she's right that the chaos and craziness of the web has encouraged people to think about ways to tame it, a bit. To create great experiences for people who want them.

I think what we're doing at Ricochet is sort of an interesting blend -- we want everyone, anyone, to be able to read our content. But in order to create a more civilized, readable, less-swampy and more enjoyable conversational experience, we're asking people who want to participate to become members, to pay a (small) monthly fee.

Which I'm sure is something Virginia Heffernan will worry about.

Yes, says Nick Carr, in a forthcoming book. Russell Arben Fox has deep thoughts:

we become habituated to viewing all information — literature, science, journalism, scholarship, whatever — as something to be "strip-mined [for] relevant content" (p. 164), and rather than thereby supposedly refining our ability to recognize (in classic marketplace of ideas fashion) good information from bad, in fact our capacity to make learned judgments is physically undermined.

From time to time, I too want to throw the book at the internet (so to speak). Yet "strip-mining content" reminds me of nothing so much as the strategy of "gutting books" -- a venerable act of analog violence -- that a graduate student must adopt in order to finish in less than 10 years. Of course, a whole country of people who think and read like graduate students would be a dystopia unlike any other. But when it comes to the uses and abuses of crafted knowledge, some things never change.

Hat tip: the one and only Alan Jacobs.

I had picked up a load in Chicago and was headed south on I-65 between Gary, IN and Indianapolis. The first real winter storm had blasted through the area the previous day, with winds so strong it had knocked over other 18 wheelers. Luckily, I had a heavy load in the trailer and was less vulnerable to the blustery conditions. Driving through a windmill farm just south of Gary, I noticed offhand that the gusts were making the turbines spin at a very rapid clip. At about the same time, another trucker keyed his CB mic and slowly drawled, “I’ll bet that wind would die down if someone would climb up there and turn them fans off.” Such wonderful dry humor! It seems that a frequent problem of listening to CB traffic is trying to keep from shooting coffee out one’s nose at comments like that. But the remark highlighted the fact that different people can look at the same objective data and reach dramatically different conclusions.

Some people look at a staggering debt, a government that displays weakness abroad while wielding a heavy Orwellian hand at home, and their hearts go aflutter with the fulfillment of a progressive utopia. To other people, in the circles I frequent, an alarm has sounded. Oddly enough, many people in that great swath of territory known derisively as “fly-over country” are not terribly well disposed to having their lives, health care, light bulbs, toilets, houses, vehicles, energy, food, firearms, religious freedom, earnings, news sources and more, taxed, regulated, prohibited, curtailed and otherwise micromanaged. They are not citizens of the world. They are Americans, free people with an indomitable spirit. Sporting a large “Don’t Tread On Me” flag in my truck, and a POW/MIA license plate on the bumper, I’m honored to count myself in their number.

After 20 years in uniform, it is now my privilege to travel this great country for a living. My office literally gives me a window from which to view America, and from where I sit, it seems that the people who were once known as the “Silent Majority” are silent no longer. Call them Tea Partiers, call them activists, call them your next door neighbor, they can no longer be ignored. Risking the condescension of the major media and even their elected officials, these people know the stakes and are acting to preserve liberty and our Constitution. Our country is at a crossroads, and for my money, it’s a great time to be an American.

Judging by the careful and qualified reactions of the left-friendly Julian Sanchez and Dave Weigel, the answer might just be yes. It's a truism nowadays that everything wrong with American culture is driving us deeper and deeper into narrow, self-selecting, self-congratulatory cubbyholes. There's no doubt that the distinctions among our political alternatives are, like our tongues, getting sharper and sharper. But at the same time, the old battle lines are shifting as circumstances change and fertile new ideas spread and interact. Our national arguments are becoming less productive in some ways and more productive in others. And that's not a wash; the phenomenon points toward some of the productive political ground of the next several years -- if not beyond.

"This book," Mark Steyn writes in America Alone, "is about...the larger forces...that have left Europe...enfeebled....The key factors are: 1. Demographic decline; 2. The unsustainability of the advanced Western social-democratic state; 3. Civilizational exhaustion." Today, four years after the publication of America Alone, the New York Times confirms the enfeeblement of Europe in every particular. Excerpts:

In Athens, Aris Iordanidis, 25, an economics graduate working in a bookstore, resents paying high taxes to finance Greece’s bloated state sector and its employees. “They sit there for years drinking coffee and chatting on the telephone and then retire at 50 with nice fat pensions,” he said. “As for us, the way things are going we’ll have to work until we’re 70....”

According to the European Commission, by 2050 the percentage of Europeans older than 65 will nearly double. In the 1950s there were seven workers for every retiree in advanced economies. By 2050, the ratio in the European Union will drop to 1.3 to 1.

“The easy days are over for countries like Greece, Portugal and Spain, but for us, too,” said Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, a French lawyer....

The news here isn't real news--Mark's readers will have learned all this four years ago. The news is that the European collapse has finally become so obvious that even the grey lady can no longer ignore it. You'll find the article, "Crisis Imperils Liberal Benefits Long Expected by Europeans"--a title that Mark could almost have used as a chapter heading, if, that is, it weren't so boring--here.

We're all familiar with the decline in quality, relative to market choices, associated with government-supplied goods and services. But who could have predicted this?

High school students and college-age adults have been complaining to District officials that the free condoms the city has been offering are not of good enough quality and are too small and that getting them from school nurses is "just like asking grandma or auntie."

So D.C. officials have decided to stock up on Trojan condoms, including the company's super-size Magnum variety, and they have begun to authorize teachers or counselors, preferably male, to distribute condoms to students if the teachers complete a 30-minute online training course called "WrapMC" -- for Master of Condoms. [...]

"We thought making condoms available was a good thing, but we never asked the kids what they wanted," said D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the health committee.

Well, I could have predicted it. And nearly did! "Statism, yes, but with the state as cool parent."

That's what Simon Schama sees coming:

Objectively, economic conditions might be improving, but perceptions are everything and a breathing space gives room for a dangerously alienated public to take stock of the brutal interruption of their rising expectations. What happened to the march of income, the acquisition of property, the truism that the next generation will live better than the last? The full impact of the overthrow of these assumptions sinks in and engenders a sense of grievance that “Someone Else” must have engineered the common misfortune.

Yes, sometimes it's what Schama says it is -- a mere sense of grievance, as opposed to the real thing. But America's tea-party uptick in popular politics can't be explained away by reference to our grievance culture. Schama implies what Mark Lilla just made explicit in the New York Review of Books -- that populist activism today is neo-Jacobin. Pre-revolutionary France simmered in a toxic mix of real tyranny and what Tocqueville called 'literary politics' -- an approach so unreal in its unreason, abstraction, and utopianism that all attempts to realize it in the flesh and blood world of human affairs issued forth merely in the blood of the Terror. Despite the impact of 'literary politics' on the tenor of today's public life, our "common misfortune" is hardly a fever dream. Christopher Lasch rightly warned that upward mobility can grow cultish. But it's hardly a doctrine dissevered from reality.

Rather than a fever dream, it's the American Dream that's reorienting people to the possibilities of active citizenship (That's something a fairminded fan of Lasch ought to commend; the American Dream isn't simply the marketing campaign for the cult of upward mobility.) Hunter S. Thompson pronounced the American Dream dead two whole election cycles before Lasch became the inspiration for Carter's 'malaise' speech. But as wrong a track as we're on today, 2009 is no 1979. That doesn't mean the populist dyspepsia of today is a self-indulgent fantasy. It means many of us want to change course now before we sail into a new malaise. No matter how heated or attenuated the rhetoric can get in democratic life, the peril and the promise powering tea party populism are rooted in reality. Downplaying that fact can lead to other fever dreams -- like Schama's strange vision of "head tutor" Barack Obama, "a warrior of the word every bit as combative as the army of the righteous that believes it has the constitution on its side[.]" One gets the feeling Schama is against all literary politics except his own.

Whatever happened to Reddy Kilowatt? I have indelible childhood memories of the friendly power company mascot extolling the virtues of electric power on radio and television. Reddy’s purpose was to encourage all and sundry to purchase more of the reliable, inexpensive electricity being produced down at the power plant: Capitalism 101.

That was before green regulatory agencies inverted the incentives for success. In 2007, Pacific Gas & Electric began saturating the Northern California airwaves with “Flex Your Power” ads featuring recycled Gore-isms such as “Global warming is a choice,” and concluding with a plea for listeners to save the earth by refraining from buying anything sold by PG&E.

Incidentally, PG&E’s marginal price for residential electricity, at 49.78 cents per kilowatt-hour, is nearly five times the national average of 10.54 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Why would a private business mount a publicity campaign saying, essentially, “If you care about humanity, if you value the planet, if you want your children to thrive, please stop using our products”? A glance at the PG&E web site provides the answer:

Does PG&E earn more money by selling more electricity?

No. PG&E collects a fixed level of revenue, determined by independent regulators, regardless of actual energy sales. If energy sales are higher than the approved level, the excess revenues go back to customers. If sales are lower than the approved level, the shortfall is recovered the next year through a rate adjustment. PG&E actually earns incentives by achieving energy efficiency targets that may reduce sales. This system has helped California keep per capita energy use flat over the past 30 years, while the rest of the nation has seen a 50 percent increase.

Under the “fixed level of revenue” regulatory scheme, the only way for PG&E to get ahead is to do less: less output, less customer service, less of everything at ever-higher prices: Socialism 101.

It’s hardly a surprise that California’s manufacturing businesses, which disproportionately depend on affordable electricity, are relocating elsewhere. As for Reddy Kilowatt, all I have is a forwarding address -- in Shanghai.

Some of the customers in truck stops are a bit more surly than others. This one was next to my table in Missouri.

An interesting graph, presented today at Google's I/O conference. Sure it's a little vague, but it's pretty clear what direction media are going in.

On the far left (and yes, I get the irony) radio audiences are eroding. On the far right, internet use is exploding. In the middle, everything else.