On the topic of Nobel acceptance speeches, here’s William Faulkner, accepting his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950:

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?

More applicable today than ever. Combined with such a simple reminder that fear has not always been the sole basis for decision-making, it’s just ”so long sustained that we can even bear it”

The more famous excerpts from his three-minute acceptance, which I’d heard before but never read in full:

He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

This Vanity Fair piece explains a lot about AIG, AIG Financial Products and its role in the crisis. The whole thing’s worth a read, but this bit particularly caught my attention:

In June 2004 the Fed began to contract the money supply, and interest rates rose. In a normal economy, when interest rates rise, consumer borrowing falls—and in the normal end of the U.S. economy that happened: from June 2004 to June 2005 prime-mortgage lending fell by half. But in that same period subprime lending doubled—and then doubled again. In 2003 there had been a few tens of billions of dollars of subprime-mortgage loans. From June 2004 until June 2007, Wall Street underwrote $1.6 trillion of new subprime-mortgage loans and another $1.2 trillion of so-called Alt-A loans—loans which for some reason or another can be dicey, usually because the lender did not require the borrower to supply him with the information typically required before making a loan.

The anti-community organizer talking points at tonight’s RNC speeches were striking. Is that the line of attack that leads to the White House?

So open question: Who had more responsibility, the community organizer, or the mayor?

Food for thought: A short list of “Community Organizers”