I don't think all, or even most, of the recommended diaries on Daily Kos should take positions I agree with.
But I do think none should promote wacky ideas that can only be believed by suspending common sense.
In the past week, two did. One trumpeted a widely repeated myth that was easily disproved by a reporter who took a little time to examine it. The other repeated a conspiracy theory involving the Fed and commodity prices that's an economic version of Birtherism.
This site's members consistently rake conservatives over the coals for their willingness to believe premises that support their prejudices, even if the premises are obviously false.
These diaries indicate that an uncomfortably large portion of them are beginning to display that trait themselves.
The recommended diary that promoted the widely repeated myth was Slinkerwink's "The Hidden Ugliness to the Super Bowl." The diary linked to a Huffington Post column that repeated the claim that 50,000 to 100,000 young women and underage girls would be transported to Dallas by their enslavers to be forced to have sex with the rich corporate fat cats taking time off from deforesting, warming and defrauding the globe to participate in a week-long, 21st-century, American bacchanalia.
The number should have been a clue that the column was of dubious merit. Finding enough hotel rooms to house 50,000 to 100,000 people, regardless of their profession, in Dallas the week of the Super Bowl would be a difficult task. And given the cost of the hotel rooms, the enslaved females being brought to Dallas against their will would have to be among the highest-priced call girls on the planet for it to be worthwhile for their enslavers to bring them there in the first place.
When the second commenter to the diary pointed out that the numbers seemed a tad high, Slinkerwink responded that not all forced sex happens in hotel rooms.
That's true. However, unless these are young women and underage girls from another dimension, they do take up physical space, as do their enslavers. Both have to stay some place. Unless thousands of homeowners in the Dallas region are leaving town during Super Bowl week and renting out their abodes to sex traffickers, there is no way they could find lodging — and staying on the streets or in homeless shelters would make it quite difficult for them to have trysts without getting arrested.
On top of all that, the cost of getting to Dallas during Super Bowl week would be almost as prohibitive as the cost of finding someplace to stay once there.
These and other facts arguing against the story's credibility caused Pete Kotz, a reporter for the Dallas Observer to look into it. He did some investigating, which involved calling police departments of cities that had recently hosted Super Bowls, and found out, not surprisingly, that the claim that massive underage sex trafficking is happening at Super Bowls or other very popular sporting events is full of shit.
A comment posted by nyceve, "This is unbelievable, Noelle!" proved to be unintentionally spot on. The story was unbelievable. But Slinkerwink and nyceve believed it anyway. Since the diary made the recommended list, a lot of other Kossacks must have, too.
"Economics for Tinfoil-Hat Wearers" should have been the title of wannabe hermit's recent diary, "WTF is wrong with Americans?" which is where I got the title for this diary from.
W.h. got to the good stuff early.
The Fed is funnelling cash to the banks through zero percent interest rates and the scam that is quantitative easing. Quantitative easing involves the Federal Reserve buying Treasuries, essentially monetizing U.S. sovereign debt. The Fed, however, doesn't actually buy any notes from the Treasury. Instead, it buys them from banks like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan at a mark-up. So, when the Fed monetizes a trillion dollars of debt, the banks get to skim about $20 billion or so off the top. They then get to leverage that $20 billion back into trillion dollars or more.
All of this free money that our government and the Fed are bestowing upon the big banks has to go somewhere. Right now, a lot of it is being used by speculators to drive up the price of commodities. This is why oil is back over $90 a barrel and gold is over $1300 an ounce.
Speculation made possible by the Fed's generosity to the big banks is also the driving force behind skyrocketing food prices. Global grain prices rose 30% in the last half of 2010 despite no change is supply or demand. The rising price of food, along with a lack of decent jobs, has propelled the people of Tunisia and Egypt to revolution.
I'm not a fan of the Federal Reserve and I think Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and the other firms that helped crash the global economy should have been seized and liquidated and their leaders arrested and prosecuted.
But the idea that the Fed's actions are responsible for a worldwide surge in commodity prices is idiotic. The money the Fed has put into the U.S. economy has barely been enough to reinflate it, let alone inflate commodity prices across the globe.
Paul Krugman debunked w.h.'s theory in this late December column.
A website on oil prices, which you might not expect to be sympathetic to Krugman, took a look at the column shortly after he wrote it and found it held up, although the site also gave the somewhat improving U.S. economy some credit for the rise in oil prices, too. And now the populist uprisings in the Middle East are playing a part.
Krugman has blogged on commodities prices a few times since that column, including yesterday, when he showed how bad harvests are responsible for the rise in food prices. Unless you believe that the Fed and its evil banker minions possess a secret machine that controls weather and are using it to cause events that enable their bets on commodities to pay off, that makes w.h.'s theory highly implausible, to say the least.
Seeing his and Slinkerwink's diaries on the recommended list has made me wonder if Markos is holding off rolling out the next version of Daily Kos to enable it to have virtual blackboards for its diarists.
Because it's starting to look like a disquietingly large number of Daily Kos members are entering Glenn Beck territory.