18 September 2001
No Terrorist Recession
I did my part yesterday (Monday) to help prop up the economy.
A minor stock buy that had been scheduled via Sharebuilder for last Tuesday -- but obviously not executed -- went through for two funds, an S&P 500 index fund and a Nasdaq 100 index fund. I wish I could claim that the motivation was entirely patriotic, but as I noted, the buy had already been scheduled, and the stocks were honestly a bargain. If you have a spare 100 bucks sitting around and no regular investment program, give the market some thought. Many stocks are a bargain right now, services like Sharebuilder make it easy, and many of you reading this website are smart enough to know that social security is not financial security at all.
Indeed, I thought about a slightly larger buy, but wound up instead ordering a bunch of books online (because of course the mass booksellers in Houston don't carry serious books that might require some effort). This purchase was slightly more patriotic. I've been meaning to add all of the books to my library for some time now, and decided Monday was a good time in light of recent events. The books are:
Chris Harmon, Terrorism Today
Steve Hayward, The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order
Robert Kaplan, Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus
Ted McAllister, Revolt Against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Postliberal Order
And to supplement the one book I actually own by Bernard Lewis (Islam and the West), the following works, many of which I've used in the past for various research:
The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years
The Political Language of Islam
The Shaping of the Modern Middle East
Anyone remotely interested in these topics would be well advised to consult any of these fine works.
[Posted @ 11:10 PM CST]
