Some light reading

[flexibeast]

Some articles i've come across recently which i think should be widely read:

• An excerpt from They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, by Milton Mayer:

  What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. . . . Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?



• What the 'Left Behind' series really means:

  If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of the last book in the Left Behind series, Glorious Appearing, and publish it across the Middle East, Americans would go berserk.
  
  Yet tens of millions of Christians eagerly await and celebrate an End Time when everyone who disagrees with them will be murdered in ways that make Islamic beheading look like a bridal shower. Jesus -- who apparently has a much nastier streak than we have been led to believe -- merely speaks and "the bodies of the enemy are ripped wide open down the middle." In the book Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted corpses of men and women and horses," even as the riders' tongues are melting in their mouths and they are being wide-open gutted by God's own hand, the poor damned horses are getting the same treatment. Sort of a divinely inspired version of "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."



• How can a government that proclaims itself to be a defender of "family values" allow this trend?

  The percentage of US households classified as [food] insecure [i.e. "whose family can't count on having enough food throughout the year"] rose from 11.2 percent in 2003 to 11.9 percent in 2004. While this one-year increase might not seem like a lot, it represents the fifth straight year of worsening food insecurity. Barely 10 percent of US households were food insecure in 1999.



• "Most of Arctic's Near-Surface Permafrost May Thaw by 2100":

  Global warming may decimate the top 10 feet (3 meters) or more of perennially frozen soil across the Northern Hemisphere, altering ecosystems as well as damaging buildings and roads across Canada, Alaska, and Russia. New simulations from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) show that over half of the area covered by this topmost layer of permafrost could thaw by 2050 and as much as 90 percent by 2100. Scientists expect the thawing to increase runoff to the Arctic Ocean and release vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Comments

[maddr.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the links; enjoyed the Left Behind article (argh, what crap - and it's written badly, too) and couldn't bring myself to read about the thaw...

[flexibeast.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. :-) And of course, the article about the Thaw is pure speculation on the part of liberals enamoured of junk science . . . . ;-)