Today's Reading List
Jan. 9th, 2008 02:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdCourtesy Brad Setser at RGE Monitor, here's a short and eminently readable paper on the credit crisis (PDF file) by Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart of Harvard University and the University of Maryland, respectively. It does rather persuasively display that the model best describing the current situation is a deflationary model. Brad's excerpts and discussion are also worth reading.
Glenn Greenwald's five or six most recent posts continue his disassembly of the role of the useless fawners otherwise known as a political press corps. Just below those, he's culled out a few examples of the racist language already being bandied about a bit against Senator Obama, in preparation for the possibility that he wins the Democratic nomination.
One of the things that has angered me so much about the GOP's hard swing not just to fundamentalism but authoritarianism of all sorts is that they've made all sorts of paranoid lefty conspiracy no-longer-bullshit theories actually come true - turning the US into a surveillance-and-torture state, just for example. But that apparently wasn't good enough; they've also had to go validate the fucking tinhat crowd. Dear readers, I introduce the Plunge Protection Team, now pretty much official, tho' not by that name. Thanks, guys - now the whole world is your crappy conspiracy thriller novel, and I hate you for it.
Talking of hate, only the serious kind, the group that Holocaust-revisionist Scott Lively and Kirkland fundamentalist leader Ken Hutcherson helped get established in the US from Latvia and Russia, "Watchmen on the Walls," gets a short writeup in the Christian Science Monitor, related to a murder trial in California. They sadly downplay the revisionism, and don't note Mr. Lively's latest book, which accuses queers of being a secret force behind nearly every evil in the history of civilisation - a Protocols of the Elders of Queerdom, more or less.
Meanwhile, on a related topic, dogemperor has some juicy quotes from Faith and Freedom Network's Joe Fuiten, wherein Rev. Fuiten claims that the United States has always been a fundamentalist religious state (tho' not in those exact words, of course), and calls people supporting secular government "illegal aliens." And you know how they feel about those.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dogemperor's post here also has a variety of other material worth reading.
(I suppose those two entries make this as close to a Cultural Warfare Update as I've done in a while, doesn't it? I guess I can throw this entry that tag, too.)
Finally, here's a good bit of rant about the political frustrations felt by many.
Glenn Greenwald's five or six most recent posts continue his disassembly of the role of the useless fawners otherwise known as a political press corps. Just below those, he's culled out a few examples of the racist language already being bandied about a bit against Senator Obama, in preparation for the possibility that he wins the Democratic nomination.
One of the things that has angered me so much about the GOP's hard swing not just to fundamentalism but authoritarianism of all sorts is that they've made all sorts of paranoid lefty conspiracy no-longer-bullshit theories actually come true - turning the US into a surveillance-and-torture state, just for example. But that apparently wasn't good enough; they've also had to go validate the fucking tinhat crowd. Dear readers, I introduce the Plunge Protection Team, now pretty much official, tho' not by that name. Thanks, guys - now the whole world is your crappy conspiracy thriller novel, and I hate you for it.
Talking of hate, only the serious kind, the group that Holocaust-revisionist Scott Lively and Kirkland fundamentalist leader Ken Hutcherson helped get established in the US from Latvia and Russia, "Watchmen on the Walls," gets a short writeup in the Christian Science Monitor, related to a murder trial in California. They sadly downplay the revisionism, and don't note Mr. Lively's latest book, which accuses queers of being a secret force behind nearly every evil in the history of civilisation - a Protocols of the Elders of Queerdom, more or less.
Meanwhile, on a related topic, dogemperor has some juicy quotes from Faith and Freedom Network's Joe Fuiten, wherein Rev. Fuiten claims that the United States has always been a fundamentalist religious state (tho' not in those exact words, of course), and calls people supporting secular government "illegal aliens." And you know how they feel about those.
dogemperor's post here also has a variety of other material worth reading.(I suppose those two entries make this as close to a Cultural Warfare Update as I've done in a while, doesn't it? I guess I can throw this entry that tag, too.)
Finally, here's a good bit of rant about the political frustrations felt by many.
