David > Recent Status Updates

"In the bailout deals with the ten biggest banks, every time Treasury spent $100, it received assets worth just $66. By January 2009, that already added up to a $78 billion shortfall."

Now I *really* love Elizabeth Warren. In front of her class she asked a supposed expert on bankruptcy who asserted that mostly day laborers and housemaids (people at the economic margins) declared bankruptcy, "Uh, *how* does everyone know that?"

I normally don't read candidate books (whatever you call a book by someone positioning himself or herself for a presidential run) but I'm on board for Warren 2016.

"Asked about his 'serenity' in a crisis, [FDR] replied, 'If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your big toe, after that anything else would seem easy!'"

Why would printing more money kick off inflation? Why did FDR think the federal budget had to be cut radically and immediately? Alter shouldn't brush over such important points.

On FDR's first election America came closer to becoming a dictatorship than any time before or after -- and most Americans would have welcomed it. Another president might have seized the opportunity.

What I don't understand -- for the '30s or the present -- is why anyone would think that balancing the federal budget would solve economic problems that are so much larger. The numbers didn't make the case then any more than they do now.

This is an excellent history but here's a critical point at which Alter could have paused longer and taken a stand -- or at least have mused longer -- on whether president-elect FDR should have avoided cooperating with Hoover. Short term: cooperation would have avoided more bank collapses. Long term: FDR gained a clear break with the past.

It's stunning: the conservatives of today have exactly the same wrong ideas as the Hoover-FDR transition period, namely reducing federal government spending during an economic depression.

Life before FDIC: between '29 and '33 the supply of printed money fell by 1/3 as people "banked" their money under mattresses and even taped it to their children's chests.

When FDR took office the NYSE had shut itself down -- indefinitely. How's that for an indicator of the severity of the crisis?

It's amazing how obtuse were the contemporary critics of Network. Most of them seemed to take the film too literally as only a parody of television.

"The unseen friends of Heng shifted like rats behind the wall."

"He's a superior sort of journalist -- they call them diplomatic correspondents. He gets hold of an idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea."

"He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance."

"God exists only for leader-writers."

"Innocence always calls mutely for protection, when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it; innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."

The book is well written but the subject is such a bore. I don't know if I'll make it to the end.

So far, Wilson is a bore. He's only 17, though.

Standing up to a thousand angry Klansmen: that takes guts! Truman did it, though, at an outdoor rally when he was running for county judge.

It never occurred to me until reading this that the apricot tree in my backyard when I was a boy might have been a remnant of an orchard given over to a housing tract. It's likely.

Amazing. If this narrative weren't written in the first person and past tense I wouldn't believe they could make it out alive.

What evil book designer sets type in Times italic this small?

Popular culture sometimes romanticizes stardom and a wild life of drugs and drinking. To me it sounds like hell!

The book was written in 1977 -- just before the movie business changed radically (at least from my amateur's perspective).

"With malleus aforethought...": Gould's essay on the evolution of the ear is great -- and nice to be able to refer to when you run into a creationist who trots out the intermediary forms argument.

Amazing: Rossellini literally tied strings to the toes of his amateur actors in Stromboli so that he could pull the strings and signal when one was to start and stop talking.

It's so hard to imagine what it was like for people -- especially Europeans -- at the outset of World War 2. The enormity of the destruction and disruption must have been unimaginable. I doubt that anyone thought the death and damage would be so great.

I thought all medicine of the time did more harm than good but one doctor in the 1600s prescribed a kitten be set to napping for two or three days on the tummy of a patient with an impacted bowel. He also prescribed horseback riding -- for the patient, not the kitten.

You've heard of blood-letting? How about saliva-draining as a treatment? "Doctors" used to do it. If you think we're much more sophisticated now, consider that people still believe in detoxifying, sweating out impurities, cleansing, etc.