So What is This?
If only blogs had come along before I had a life, I'm sure I could have been a heck of a blogger. But there's no way I'm doing that now, much as I enjoy reading them. So this site is a more slo-mo affair, in which I try to comment not on current events, but on more persistent interests, amusements, and outrages.
Fun links du jour:
Harry The Hipster Gibson - 4-F Ferdinand
Ukulele Ike “I Feel Pessimistic”
Cab Calloway - Reefer Man
Skip James “Crow Jane”
Interesting Stuff on the Economy
Like a number of people, I'm a little dubious about the idea that giving trillions of dollars to the people who caused the problem is the way to go. But don't take my word for it!
Simon Johnson
Simon Johnson's website on the global financial crisis is called “The Baseline Scenario”
Johnson is a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and was a former chief economist at the IMF. The website includes links to a number of interviews Johnson
has given.
Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman, a Nobel-prize winning ecxonomist, has written lost of great stuff on the crisis, but I think this one is best at summing up the pure idiocy of the bailout: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27krugman.html
James K. Galbraith
Economist James K. Galbraith wrote a great article for Washington Monthly magazine called No Return to Normal: Why the economic crisis, and its solution, are bigger than you think.
William K. Black
Economics Professor and former bank regulator William K. Black does a very nice job of summing things up in this Bill Moyers interview.
Joseph Stiglitz
The Obama administration’s bank- rescue efforts will probably fail because the programs have been designed to help Wall Street rather than create a viable financial system, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said in an April 17 interview with Bloomberg News. The people who designed the plans, he says, are “either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent.” Read the story
Peter Schiff
Peter Schiff became retroactively famous for various appearances he made pre-crash on various financial shows claiming that the financial and real estate markets were going to crash. He now says the value of the U.S. dollar will be the next big crash.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Peter Schiff | ||||
| ||||
Peter Schiff interview on the Daily Show. Runs about 7 minutes.
Or if You Just Want to Make Your Blood Boil
Here’s a picture gallery of failed CEOs and what they got away with: http://www.newsweek.com/id/159439
Extreme Inequality
And finally, on a closely related subject, there's http://extremeinequality.org/.
Stuff I Particularly Like
Joe Bageant: Another Educated Redneck
A friend of mine was once accused, by someone meaning to insult him, of being "just an educated redneck." My friend took it as a high compliment.
Joe Bageant is somewhere between a journalist, a popular philosopher, and a political pundit. He lives in Winchester, VA and knows red states and rednecks up close and personal. One of the most interesting thinkers and writers on what passes for American culture at the beginning of the 21st century. Here is a typically wonderful piece. And what the heck here's another one.
James Howard Kunstler: An Extremely Annoying Person
James Howard Kunstler sometimes annoys even those who generally agree with him (about modern architecture, about the fact that we're running out of cheap oil). He's a wise ass, like the kid in 8th grade who would always find a flaw in the teacher's logic and then rub everyone's nose in it. That's one of the things I like about him. I was one of those kids too.
His book "The Long Emergency" is a great and (these days) rare thing — an attempt by a generalist to take on a really big topic. To me, it paints a very convincing picture of what might happen as we pass "Peak Oil" and head down the other side of the slope, and it's not pretty. His website has a lot of fun essays and the ever-amusing "eyesore of the month." When it comes to modern architecture, Kunstler and I see eye to eye: we came, we saw, we did not drink the Kool Aid.
Robert Altemeyer: Read up on Authoritarians
The Authoritarians is a web-only (PDF) book on authoritarian personalities by Robert Altemeyer, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Manitoba.
I know. Sounds like one of those worthy but hideously boring things that you "really ought to read someday." But nope! Altemeyer writes in a clear, friendly, humorous manner and the book is intended for a general audience — no charts or statistics, since if you're so inclined, you can read those in his academic work. Truly full of fascinating and thought-provoking stuff, even if you've read and thought quite a bit about the general subject.
Alternet
I really don't know much about these guys, which I guess makes me an objective observer. They pull together stuff from a variety of sources, write some of their own, and always have something interesting up there, every day. The stories focus on issues of substance, not on the strident bullshit of day-to-day partisan infighting. Plus the layout is easy on the eye.