Septermber 3, 2009: Hoffer Quote, DeepWater Horizon, Freedom Communications

I finally got around to reading the September 3, 2009 edition of the New York Times.  It had been yellowing in the back seat of my car.  I figured it was mellowed enough.

It was an interesting read: SEC investigation of its own failures to find Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, an overview of Ted  Kennedy's posthumously published autobiography, the murderous bank robbery in Iraq by security forces, and two bits that caught my eye:

1) An announcement of BP's discovery of huge oil deposits in the Gulf of Mexico with the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.   Seven months later BP, the rig, and teh word "disaster" would be linked in the news.

2) This quote from Eric Hoffer, the self-taught "stevedore philosopher": "Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves."  It is in much the same vein as the atheist claim that atheists are acting on a higher moral level because they are doing good by choice and not be fear of divine retribution.

3) Although not as memorable as the Hoffer quote, there was a note in the financial section that Freedom Communications, founded by the staunch Libertarian, R. C. Hoiles, was filing for bankruptcy.  For a firm which had as its founding principle the sanctity of private contracts, bankruptcy protection should have been an anathema.  The article points out that debtors who charged a higher rate for understood that their higher rate was predicted on greater risk and a place further back in the repayment queue.