Reading Material

I spent most of today (9 AM to 6 PM) travelling home... although I thought that I might get some work done, I ended up catching up on several magazines' worth of reading during the trip. First, Perlick left an issue of The Economist when he last visited. I can't imagine subscribing to it--just reading the "Huh... that sounds interesting.." articles took me several hours of flight time. Remember that a new one shows up every week.

One article covered rising food costs due to the ethanol boom (among other factors). An amazing statistic: In other words, the demands of America's ethanol programme alone account for over half the world's unmet need for cereals. Without that programme, food prices would not be rising anything like as quickly as they have been. According to the World Bank, the grain needed to fill up an SUV would feed a person for a year. Yow.... I knew that ethanol was a ridiculous boondoggle, but that's even worse than I thought.

Another article talked about the subprime mortage crisis. I have heard on various Marketplace episodes that the "pig through the python" of ARM resets will be occurring in 2008, but this was the first time I saw the actual data:


Day-umn. So if you thought 2007 was bad, just wait until 2008. I'm definitely planning on sitting back and seeing what happens before considering buying property.

I also recently got a pointed to an Atlantic Monthly article from 1990, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," by Bernard Lewis (a professor and policy advisor for the neocons; "perhaps the most significant intellectual influence behind the invasion of Iraq"). If it's behind a subscriber link, let me know and I'll email it.

The tag line to the article is "Why so many Muslims deeply resent the West, and why their bitterness will not easily be mollified." The following paragraph (specifically the last half) made me wince:

We should not exaggerate the dimensions of the problem. The Muslim world is far from unanimous in its rejection of the West, nor have the Muslim regions of the Third World been the most passionate and the most extreme in their hostility. There are still significant numbers, in some quarters perhaps a majority, of Muslims with whom we share certain basic cultural and moral, social and political, beliefs and aspirations; there is still an imposing Western presence—cultural, economic, diplomatic—in Muslim lands, some of which are Western allies. Certainly nowhere in the Muslim world, in the Middle East or elsewhere, has American policy suffered disasters or encountered problems comparable to those in Southeast Asia or Central America. There is no Cuba, no Vietnam, in the Muslim world, and no place where American forces are involved as combatants or even as "advisers." But there is a Libya, an Iran, and a Lebanon, and a surge of hatred that distresses, alarms, and above all baffles Americans.

Huh. Pity that...