Books, Money, Trippi and Botched "Earthsea"

I had a busy teaching day today and I have a lecture to prepare for tomorrow and will be back with something more original later. For now, news of the day:

I just finished Superpatriotism by Michael Parenti. He does not mince words. It is a very insighful, well-documented, immensely logical, yet angry book. I loved it. It is a cheap small paperback - you'll read it in an hour or two and your view of US foreign policy (as well as everything else, including football) will be forever changed, so it is worth a few bucks. I'd like to read some of his older stuff, too. Check him out at: http://michaelparenti.org/
The whole book is one long flowing energetic argument, removing layers one by one from a Naked King of our Imperialistic ruling class. The last chapter is a 180 degree reversal in tone, though. While the rest of the book discribes "superpatriots", the last chapter describes what real patriot believes and does. In the very end, y'all fellow Edwardsians will be very happy to see a longish quote from the "Two Americas" speech (I bet he was rooting for JRE in the primaries).

I buckled and bought "What's the matter with Kansas" and will hopefully get to reading it, soon.

I also bought three books by David Harvey ("Justice, Nature & the Geography of Time", "The Condition of Postmodernity" and "The New Imperialism") and all three look very promising at first glance.

In other news, Lynn Cheney's racy novel "Sisters" is now online:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/lynnecheney


BTW, they will be issuing a new banknote next year: http://img124.exs.cx/img124/1309/ReaganInflationBuck.jp
At the date of issue, it will be enough to buy you a bar of chocolate. However, after about two months, it will be pulled out of circulation and refashioned with three more zeros.

It will look kinda like this:



At least Yugoslavs had a scientist on the money (that is Nikola Tesla).



Here is an interesting article:
http://www.armageddonbuffet.com/faithvsreality.htm


Related, Trippi has en excellent article (http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1130-23.htm) and An Old Soul provides additional links and commentary:
http://anoldsoul.blogspot.com/2004/11/oooooo-trippi-in-wsj-op-ed-page.html

Publius has a couple of interesting posts:
http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_lawandpolitics_archive.html#110179307698337770
http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_lawandpolitics_archive.html#110170419324710605

...and so does Eric at Total Information Awareness:
http://tianews.blogspot.com/2004/11/conflict-on-drugs.html
http://tianews.blogspot.com/2004/11/two-from-bullpen.html

And don't forget the new edition of Tangled Bank is coming out today:
http://tangledbank.net/


Apparently they botched the TV adaptation of the "Earthsea" trilogy and Ursula LeGuin is livid:
(http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/maybe_it_could_be_fixed_if_they_had_a_giant_snakehead_eat_someone_in_the_fi/)
I loved the trilogy. I've been arguing for a while that it was the real inspiration/model for the Harry Potter books, not Narnia or Tolkien as everyone seems to think.

My sitemeter is going pretty wild again. Shakespeare's Sister (http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/) linked to my "Two Americas" post (thanks). There is also a thread on DailyKos (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/29/22360/921) in which everyone links to their favourite blogs and this little piece of my cyber-real-estate got mentioned, thus eliciting some wild traffic late last night.