Want to understand the financial meltdown?

Here’s a terrific podcast from NPR’s Ira Glass explaining how greed, conformity and lack-of-oversight made all that money go away. If you prefer a visual presentation, you can’t do much better than this from graphic designer Jonathan Jarvis.

Here’s a fun blog (Warning: satire alert!)

A blogger calling himself Jon Swift has created a twisted view on the world, obviously aspiring to live up to the master satirist Jon Swift who wrote Gulliver’s Travels, and largely succeeding. He spouts intentionally bizarre, sometimes quite off-putting opinions along the lines of Stephen Colbert, or a more-intellectually-inclined Borat. Included here are his contributions to Amazon.com’s Customer Reviews, all of which start out with the phrase “I have not actually read this book but…”

Book Excerpts

Here is a link to a page from a site called ThinkingPeace.com. It led me to this particular book, World on Fire by Amy Chua, which is an eye-opening look at how emerging globalization and emerging democracy around the world can and has led to violence and xenophobia as ethnic minorities that control economies of many nations, such as the Chinese in Indonesia, or whites in Zimbabwe, become scapegoats for the problems of the nations’ majority populations.