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Salon Blog watch
0ne of the refreshing things about cruising the Salon blogspace tonight: It's not all about 9/11.
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On Gnosis, Morgan Sandquist says OSX browsers aren't rendering text very well. Do others find this so? I'm likely to take the plunge on a new Mac for home this autumn. Our old hardware won't run OSX of course.
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Stephanie Losi, who worked as Salon's first intern many years ago and who has gone on to other illustrious things, has a new Salon blog: Neurotic Oasis Goes to School. Learn one new thing each day -- today, HTML and Chicken Kiev. (She's also been blogging over at Neurotic Oasis.)
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Toby Sackton is blogging from Lexington, Mass., against war-on-terror hysteria. "What happened last year was real. What is being replayed today is not. When you feel your society being manipulated on a grand scale, a first reaction is to opt out, to withdraw. But if you don't withdraw, you feel you are opposing an almost unbelievable power -- like a storm that you cannot possibly influence or control." He also reports from a "September Eleventh Families for a Peaceful Tomorrow" event in Boston.
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Rob Salkowitz has unearthed a quote from E.B. White from 1949 that's eerily prescient: "The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructable. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions."
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Mark Hoback's "Green -- a 911 Psychodrama" joins the fine "Plan B" in the rarefied realm of Salon blog-novels.
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Child abuse among Jehovah's Witnesses -- Mike Pence reports on Dances with Cactus.
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Susannah Breslin asks a funny "Ten Salon Blog questions." "Who is Scott Rosenberg--really?" I've been wondering that myself.
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Christian Crumlish's Radio Free Blogistan is doing an awfully good job of keeping up with doings in blog-land, Salon's and elsewhere. He beat me to the punch to mention that I will be talking on a panel at the UC Berkeley J-School on Sept. 17, along with a variety of other fine people like J.D. Lasica, Rebecca Blood, Meg Hourihan and Dan Gillmor, about blogging and journalism.
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Rational markets? What rational markets?
Market theory tells us that the stock market is a near-perfect gauge of the collected knowledge of participants. Now, everyone under the sun knows that we are approaching the anniversary of 9/11 and that there's a heightened likelihood of a terrorist attack of some kind. This is not exactly a secret.
The market, you'd think, has taken this information into account, right? Wrong. Stocks, which were showing modest gains this morning, dropped suddenly after the government announced a heightened "orange" alert. Shouldn't this have been a "duh, of course" moment? Are there really hordes of investors sitting there saying, "Ohmigod, I had no idea there was an anniversary of a terrorist attack coming up! Thanks, government, for warning me -- excuse me while I put in my sell order."
Not exactly. Instead, what today's gyration indicates is that markets -- in the sort term, certainly -- are amazingly irrational. People buy and sell based on emotion, hunch, hearsay -- even the color of a government terror warning that tells us what we already know.
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