"the lingua franca that works best is: - one that is easy to learn - one in which the speakers tolerate and can understand imperfect speaking" There are folks who claim that such a lingua franca has already evolved within the community of people working for multinational corporations and doing business internationally, in the form of English with a restricted vocabulary and simplified syntax ("Globish"). There's a book, web site, etc.

Uh, haven't we seen at least one trans-national demagogue already who's been enabled by linguistic uniformity and modern communication technology, namely Osama bin Laden?

I read the "Newspaper Economic Action Plan" you referenced, and was struck by this quote: "While a few publications have had success with paid subscriptions, none has tried to charge for its articles in a competitive environment through an industry aggregator. Success would require a critical mass of publishers to agree to collaborate openly and broadly." 
 
So, in other words, newspapers have to solve a collective action problem in which there are potential rewards for defectors, i.e., those online news outlets who think they could increase readership by offering news at no cost while everyone else can charge for it, and whose cost structures are low enough to make them hopeful they could be profitable doing it.

OK, back again with more comments and less snark. 
 
First, whether Facebook et.al. are or can be profitable providing a free service is beside the point. The fact that the "free to readers" business model for online news may not work does not in any way imply that the "charge readers" business model is a viable alternative. It could simply be the case that no business model for online news (or at least, none as now conceived) is viable, and thus the market for online news will be go unserved or be under-served. 
 
I'd also add that the Journalism Online page Why Readers Will Pay For Online News doesn't offer any actual reasons why readers will pay for online news. It's basically a bunch of quotes about why papers should charge for news, which doesn't answer the question.

I suggest googling "New Century Network".

Opera stands out as a genre where there may be few recordings relative to sales, due to the costs of mounting a production. 
 
Which makes it interesting that several of the "over-hyped" composers (e.g., Puccini) are primarily known for operas. 
 
In any case, it's true that number of recordings offered for sale is only an indirect measure for the interest in a particular composer's works. I think there is muc more direct way to obtain a measure of current popularity of composers: Measure the amount of time people spend listening their works, as measured by the service like Last.fm, which records the number of times a particular track on a particular recording is listened to either online (via streaming from Last.fm) or on iPod or similar device. (For example, one particular recording of Puccini's "Nessun Dorma" has been listened to in its entirety more than 39,000 times in the last week.) 
 
You could then take the number of times a track is listened to by all Last.fm subscribers, multiply by the duration of the track (to get the total time spent listening to the track by all listeners), sum across all tracks attributed to that composer (to get the total amount of time spent listening to that composer's works), and then divide by the total time spent listening to works by all composers (to get the relative time spent listening to this particular composer's works). 
 
The Last.fm data are a bit messy in places, and I don't know how difficult they would be to get in an easy-to-use form, but the project is doable at least in theory. (There are other services like Pandora that could provide similar data.) It could also give a pretty current measure of popularity (at least week-by-week based on the public data) to determine changes in relative popularity of composers over time.

I'm glad I actually read some of the posts on secularright.org; if my only acquaintance with "secular conservatives" were reading these comments, I'd think that their predominant characteristic was an obsession with homosexuality and gay marriage -- which hardly distinguishes them from religious conservatives. 
 
More seriously, I like Razib's definition of "secular" as focusing on the use of public reason (rather than on the religious beliefs of those offering reasons), and I agree that any serious political philosophy (of the left or right) has to take into account what we know about how the world works, with science the most reliable guide to that. The tension is clearly apparent in the comments between conservatism grounded in such knowledge and conservatism that privileges tradition as such regardless of its origins. It will be interesting to see how that battle plays out.

Speaking of county maps, here are two I found particularly interesting: county-by-county results for Appalachia for the 2008 presidential elections (from the New York Times) and minority populations in Appalachian counties (figure 4 in an Appalachian Regional Commission report). To quote from the ARC report: "Despite the growth in the minority population throughout Appalachia, minorities still make up a tiny share of the population in many areas of the region. ... In 2000, minorities were less than 10 percent of the total population in 310 of the region's 410 counties, and less than 5 percent in 215 of the counties." 
 
In a cursory search I couldn't find comparable minority population figures from earlier in history, but if this is what Appalachia looks like now then I'm guessing that 150, 100, or even 50 years ago the region was likely extremely ethnically homogeneous, especially in central and northern Appalachia -- which I think makes Razib's "otherness index" counter-hypothesis at least plausible.

A more substantive question: I haven't (yet) read Albion's Seed, but the basic thesis sounds plausible based on my personal experiences living in various parts of the eastern US. However I'm curious as to the exact explanation(s) Fisher advances for why these patterns persisted in the face of later immigration and internal migration.  
 
For example, does Fisher see cultural patterns "imprinting" themselves on newly arrived populations via children (e.g., from school and peer group experiences), as being perpetuated by local social/political/economic elites (with others modeling their behavior), or what?

If the feminization goes back to the early modern period in England, maybe it's part of the larger feminization of industrial cultures. 
 
I think this is a reasonable supposition. An interesting book on this trend in England is G.J. Barker-Benfield's "The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain". It appproaches the question from the cultural side of things, but is pretty wide-ranging in its discussion, going well beyond literature to address scientific and economic trends. 
 
Greg Clark shows that the middle or merchant classes outreproduced the other classes, and this genetic and cultural change resulted in a much less bloodthirsty and cruel culture. 
 
It's interesting to note in this regard that genetic flow between classes is *the* key theme of Richardson's "Pamela", whose eponymous heroine is a servant girl who manages to win the heart and (more important) the hand of the local squire. "Pamela" originated in Richardson's commercial project to write a book of sample letters for use by the newly literate in various life situations. So in a sense "Pamela" can be viewed as an advice manual for lower-class women who want to get some of those higher-class genes, not through rape/seduction followed by abandonment, but through legitimate social arrangements that maximize reproductive fitness.  
 
This was apparently a major preoccupation in 18th century England, because "Pamela" was a cultural sensation on the order of "Star Wars" or "Harry Potter".

"It's not clear to me why you're focusing on modern fiction (by which I presume you mean fiction of the 20th century)." Ah, I think I do yo a disservice. While some of the other commenters seem to be simply decrying the state of affairs post-1900 (or post-December 1910, if we follow Virginia Woolf), upon re-reading your original post you really seem to be contrasting fiction in the post-Gutenberg era of mass literacy with literature of the classical period and before. 
 
Given that, I'd agreed that the differing character of "contemporary" fiction (where we consider "contemporary" to encompass anything from the 18th century on) is due primarily to the presence of a critical mass of female readers with both the education and leisure time to appreciate fiction. Such a critical mass did not exist earlier, except in isolated cases like Heian Japan (which is why that era saw the creation of Genji and other works of feminine appeal, e.g., the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon).

It's not clear to me why you're focusing on modern fiction (by which I presume you mean fiction of the 20th century). Even ignoring Genji and other outliers, an emphasis on characterization, psychological complexity, and other "feminine" aspects in fiction date back to the very beginning of the modern English novel in the 18th century; see for example Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa. The former of these is the ancestor of every Harlequin romance ever written. The latter is hailed as a literary classic, and having read a good bit of it I agree, but at times it's also like reading hundreds of email messages written by teenage girls and their sleazy twenty-something boyfriends (or, to be precise, would-be boyfriends). 
 
In fact, the 18th century featured prototypes of nearly every modern genre of novel, a lot of them classics of their type and still quite readable today: You've got chick-lit (Pamela), adventure stories (Defoe's Robinson Crusoe), bawdy comedies (Fielding's Tom Jones), horror and mystery novels (Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho), cynical satires (Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses), coming of age novels (Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther), and even post-modern metafiction (Sterne's Tristram Shandy). (And a bit of science fiction as well, although that mostly had to wait until 1818 and Shelley's Frankenstein.) 
 
So the divisions among genres and their respective audiences (including the male/female split) are not recent but date back a long way; I doubt the young women who devoured Clarissa could be counted among the fans of Robinson Crusoe, and vice versa.