Churchill

[Post updated by JR, adding D'Este quote. Some kind of a winstonwiki we have going here, I guess.]

I feel like talking about Winston Churchill. So let’s kick things off with a link from The Churchill Centre.

http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=112

“The only traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy and the lash.” — Churchill’s assistant, Anthony Montague-Browne said that although Churchill had not uttered these words, he wished he had.

JR, it would be great if you can find the time to put together a review of “Warlord – A Life of Winston Churchill at War” by Carlo D’Este. I know you just read it, or at least are well into it by now.

I made it about one third through “The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Visions of Glory” by William Manchester. Wonderful book. I’d love to pick it up again some day (probably start over again from the beginning, actually), but in the short term that would constitute a breach of certain key provisions of my idling protocol, so there you have it. And a lazy lop is what it is.

~zk~

Churchill’s romanticism was dangerously unabated despite the harsh examples of war he had personally experienced. More troubling, however, was his misguided confidence that he, unlike his comrades in arms, was somehow exempt from death before achieving great destiny.
      -D’Este, pg. 71

Market Stuff

Buffett Calls The Market Again…And He’s Never Been Wrong

[there's four long excerpts from articles written each time on this link, Blodget recommends the third if you read one]

…and an excellent piece in the latest Atlantic Monthly -

Why Wall Street Always Blows It
And why we never learn from the last bubble
by Henry Blodget

The magnitude of the current bust seems almost unfathomable—and it was unfathomable, to even the most sophisticated financial professionals, until the moment the bubble popped. How could this happen? And what’s to stop it from happening again? A former Wall Street insider explains how the financial industry got it so badly wrong, why it always will—and why all of us are to blame.