Here are a couple of interesting segments from the NPR’s Fresh Air that are well worth hearing. First, Tim Dickinson is interviewed by Terry Gross about his must-read article in Rolling Stone on the history and effect of tax cuts for the rich.
And this puts the musical genre called ‘Hillbilly Boogie’ into historical perspective.
The Economist, published in England, is supposedly one of the few weekly print magazines that’s making money. I’ve thought about subscribing to it, but I don’t care for its editorial slant. Here’s an example from the October 28 issue.
“Thousands of anti-capitalist protesters” it says. I grant you that some in the Occupy Wall Street crowd are nascent Socialists who feel they have found an outlet, but a blanket statement that they’re all anti-capitalist is an inaccurate and slanted assertion, and that’s why I don’t buy The Economist. I subscribed to Business Week for years, until I got fed up with the puff pieces that offered uncritical praise of sham “job creator” corporations like Enron and Worldcom.
Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party both believe the big banks should be held accountable for what they did to trash the economy. This is where left and right meet, and I think politicians should take the hint and realize they’re going to get squeezed if they don’t start representing the voters instead of vested financial interests.
Despite Jon Stewart’s typically excellent job of deftly standing up to inanity, I muted the TV in disgust last night and read the paper while Andrew Napolitano spouted his extreme ideological nonsense on The Daily Show. Later, I watched it online.
Napolitano repeats the Ayn Rand assertion that selfishness is a virtue. Well, that depends on the definition of selfishness. Wall Street executives and brokers were absolutely acting in their own self-interest in their quest for fat bonuses, which led to reckless and risky financial speculation. Their selfishness, often fueled by drugs, was limited solely to their individual, immediate financial gain, and look at the outcome.
Napolitano says he agrees with the Occupy Wall Street protesters that the government shouldn’t have bailed out the big banks. What he fails to acknowledge is that it was the lack of government regulation that allowed the banking crisis to happen. The successful repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a dream of Napolitano’s fellow libertarian Alan Greenspan, was a monumental mistake that must be undone.
Napolitano also says that public schools “stink” because they have no competition. Of course there’s competition, and I don’t mean private schools. Towns compete with one other, and some towns have better schools than others. By the very definition of competitive behavior there will always be losers, so the correct argument for a libertarian like Napolitano is that of course some of the public schools are better than others. That’s the way it is, and the losers just have to keep trying. Or maybe the students who are losers should just give up on school and turn to dealing drugs to stock brokers.
After such a fuss and bother over gays serving in the military, it seems the armed forces must now deal with a real threat — gang members in their ranks. (A tip o’ the Dog Rat toupee to Denro for the link.)
Poor Stephen Colbert, reliving the trauma of a childhood humiliation.
The Colbert Report
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Physicist Richard Feynman’s last hurrah was explaining to the American public, simply and directly, in 30 seconds, why the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up. Doing that opened up the question of why, if Morton Thiokol knew the O-ring material would be affected by the cold of that January 28 morning, did NASA decide to proceed with the launch?
http://youtu.be/UCLgRyKvfp0
