Bruce W. Sanford and Bruce D. Brown argue in the WashPost that “It is unrealistic to demand new business models from the press without giving it the legal tools to succeed,“ so Congress should pass new laws that that make it impossible for the press to fail, be beat, etc: “bring copyright laws into the age of the search engine,” “federalize the ‘hot news’ doctrine,” “eliminate ownership restrictions,” “use tax policy to promote the press,” and “grant an antitrust exemption,” and a pony. But the two Bruces miss the point entirely: what Congress should really do is pass a law requiring the press to be adaptable, relevant, creative, fresh, fearless, progressive, and unstintingly fair. Nah—wouldn’t work...
Daily Archives: 09-05-19
American decline
under media
BHO sits down to negotiate with a pirate—without preconditions:
No options are on the table because there is no table.
Lynx to the past
under agriculture, environment, food, law, rural, science
“Lynx and logging share interests,” (Carpenter, Boston Globe, 27 Apr ’09):
Strangely, it’s not an excess of clear-cutting that is the problem; this time, it’s a lack of clear-cutting that is creating environmental worries. Environmentalists may hate clear-cutting, but lynx love it—because when trees are cleared away, a dense spruce-fir thicket often crops up in their place, and those thickets attract snowshoe hares, the lynx’s primary prey. Biologists say lynx are thriving in Maine because massive industrial clear-cuts following a spruce budworm epidemic 30 years ago have grown into hare-rich thickets. But regulations reducing the size of clear-cuts in the Maine woods—products of state legislation passed in 1989 and amended after a divisive environmental campaign in the late 1990s—are now eliminating those thickets, and eventually, the hares that live in them. Over the next decade, the unintended chain reaction is expected to dramatically reduce the number of Maine lynx—the only lynx in the Eastern states, and listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
The sooner we do away with the idea of nature, the better it will do.