David > Recent Status Updates

"We have no horns, sharp teeth, or even hair to impede digestion. We are nearly as well packaged for consumption as a hot dog."

The appendix is not a useless, vestigial organ: it's a storehouse of bacteria to replenish the flora and fauna of our tummies. How about that?

What a breakthrough! Introducing a parasite into patients with sever Crohn's cured the disease! Killing "germs" improved human health but we've been killing everything instead of carefully tending our personal gardens of flora and fauna. We're going to have to get comfortable with the idea of things living in and on us.

Even if you followed the news closely during the Bush II presidency you'll find so much here to provoke your outrage. Rich, being the NY Times' former theater critic, is especially astute in identifying and breaking down the fraudulent stagecraft of the Bush administration. Everything was even worse than I thought. Cynical con artists all of them.

The Bush administration spent $124 million on fake "news" reports in a PR campaign for the Medicare Rx benefit program.

The Bush administration: Incompetent in governance, masterful and relentless in stagecraft.

The Bush administration practiced "faith-based intelligence" to suit its case for the Iraq war.

After Powell's speech to the UN half of all Americans believed Iraqis had been among the 9/11 hijackers. I wonder whether they still do.

If only I'd read this book when I was younger and more of the world had lain before me....

Long before Wikileaks, in 1971, there was the Media (Pennsylvania) break in: FBI files stolen and gradually released over a long period.

This is amazing. There was no limit to the FBI's methods, including provoking a deadly clash between two black power groups. Forget about crazy conspiracy theories: there's plenty of REAL conspiracies to justify skepticism (at best) toward law enforcement at all levels.

The mysterious paradox of J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI: an "obsession with the unimportant" (e.g., a scoutmaster whose wife belonged to the Socialist Workers Party) while city crime rates rose, organized crime expanded and a few actual, real spies flourished (spies in the FBI itself!).

In 1956, there were fewer than 5,000 members of the American Communist Party -- 1,500 of them FBI agents and informers!

"It was those ideas -- that is, a powerful critique of the social inequities of the capitalist system -- rather than any tangible political power, that made the Communist Party so threatening to the established order."

Wow. Eisenhower instituted a program called "Operation Wetback" that deported more than half a million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in less than SIX months. That's even more than Obama!

You know hysteria is at work when a political, economic philosophy (communism) can be vilified interchangeably with sexuality (homosexuality). In such cases, words and concepts are just being thrown around bearing a frightful affect.

The real conspiracies (revealed eventually by history) are much more predictable than the "conspiracy theories." One bad thing about the paranoid, implausible conspiracies is that they distract attention from the actual behind-the-scenes machinations of government, business, etc. One lesson: always be skeptical when someone tries to make you afraid or angry.

The very fact that there is no evidence of sabotage or conspiracy yet proves that it will happen eventually.

As prejudicial as were the US government's actions toward Muslims and people from the middle east after 9/11, they were more restrained than what happened around WWI and WWII. It's _some_ comfort to know that at least we didn't have widespread vigilantism on the part of the public. Man, you can't look into history without getting dirty.

What an utter fraud the Palmer raids were -- which leaves me always skeptical of war-on-terror "successes."

I already knew about sauerkraut being renamed "liberty cabbage," but hamburger being renamed "liberty steak" is a new one for me.

US states and cities shouldn't have agreed to such high pensions unless taxes were imposed to sustain them. The ballot measures in California could have said, shall a tax of n% be imposed with revenue going to firefighters, police, etc. We acted too much like Greeks (apparently) whacking the government piñata.

I'm learning more about Germans than I ever wanted to know -- but now I understand the origin of Freud's equation of feces and gold (unless Austrians differ from Germans more than I thought).

Greece -- a corruptocracy. One consequence: Greeks don't trust each other, an uncivil society.

"In Greece the banks didn't sink the country. The country sank the banks."

Government debt per capita: Iceland, $330k; Greece, $250k; US, $48k. Huge difference.

Lewis gives a plausible read on the cultural psychology and economics of the Iceland bubble: male, Viking aggression and risk-taking suited for fishing applied to finance -- with little training in banking. Might not be true, though: Lewis is an outsider and novice re Iceland. It _rings_ true, however.

Amazing: a child Michael Moore is rescued by RFK!

Maybe I'm missing something here. Obama's "deal" with McConnell was to exchange extending the Bush tax cuts for an extension of unemployment benefits and a payroll tax cut. Seems like Obama got suckered -- or can someone explain to me how this was a good deal?

"Maybe we did this to ourselves, sure, but we're just responding to the way things are. We've gone 'long' on developing markets around the world, and gone 'short' on America, where the whole game is using debt to give people what they haven't been able to earn, and may never earn, and derivatives is a key way we make that possible." (Wall Street lobbyist)