Pressuring China: F*ing Insane

Lately I've been asking myself, why the hell are Bush and Congress pressuring China to float their currency? Aren't these guys financing our budget and trade deficits? Wouldn't this lead to a collapse of the dollar, a huge rise in interest rates, and a deep recession? Not being an economist, I decided I didn't know enough to say, and had to assume Our Leaders knew best. (Yes, I gave them the benefit of the doubt when it came to Iraqi WMD, too.)

Well it looks like a real economist, Nouriel Roubini, is asking the same question. He apparently thinks the administration is just being stupid (or, at best, are just posturing to head off protectionist sentiment). Once again, we're headed into a storm under the command of Captain Queeg.

Throw the Flattening Olive Tree into the Melting Pot

Matt Taibbi reads The World is Flat and and the metaphors drive him mad:

Predictably, Friedman spends the rest of his huge book piling one insane image on top of the other, so that by the end—and I'm not joking here—we are meant to understand that the flat world is a giant ice-cream sundae that is more beef than sizzle, in which everyone can fit his hose into his fire hydrant, and in which most but not all of us are covered with a mostly good special sauce... If you're like me, you're already lost by the time Friedman starts adding to this jumble his very special qualitative descriptive imagery. For instance:

And now the icing on the cake, the ubersteroid that makes it all mobile: wireless. Wireless is what allows you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you a Thomas Friedman metaphor, a set of upside-down antlers with four thousand points: the icing on your uber-steroid-flattener-cake...Flattener #1 is actually two flatteners, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the spread of the Windows operating system. In a Friedman book, the reader naturally seizes up in dread the instant a suggestive word like "Windows" is introduced; you wince, knowing what's coming, the same way you do when Leslie Nielsen orders a Black Russian. And Friedman doesn't disappoint. His description of the early 90s:

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened? Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?