Craig's Corner

A 5.8 earthquake hit the East Coast this week. Buildings were evacuated, companies shut down and there was wall-to-wall television coverage. Most Californians don’t get worked up over smaller quakes. Last year a friend was visiting and during lunch by the ocean a 5.3 shaker hit and she was the only one who noticed. No tsunami fears here as there were in Times Square. I suppose if a snowstorm hit LA then we’d have wall-to-wall coverage and people would be marveling at the event while our East Coast brethren would be curious as to what the big deal was. The upside to the shaker? The Stock Market ended the day up 322 points. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is an average of 30 company stock prices on a given day. The companies are all large, multinational corporations in a range of business sectors.  The focus on the daily iteration of whether it’s up or down is a pedestrian way of reporting complex business news. Dow Jones has over 130,000 indexes. There’s also many other...

I’m not a party guy. I like people well enough – just not necessarily in large numbers. There’s the occasional birthday event and of course the requisite holiday things that are fine so long as I know everybody in advance. My ex was the party one. The house would be filled nearly weekly with dozens of people. Early in the relationship there was a confusion about my return from the Cannes Film Festival. After nearly 20-hours of travel I stumbled home to find dozens of people I’d never seen before hanging out. I went to the bedroom, kicked a few people out, closed the blinds and promptly crashed. Our ying-yang approach to socializing was one of the things that actually worked about our relationship. Social organizing has changed in the past few years. Want to have a group over? Send a tweet and within hours the place will be rockin’. Having a more traditional event? Set it up on Facebook or eVite a group over. It’s easier and easier to gather people quickly. The various demonstration...

August 14, 1935 The Social Security Act was signed into law as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. It was highly controversial as the country came out of the first Great Depression with parts of the New Deal being struck down by the Supreme Court. Roosevelt then changed the composition of the court in a bid to change their decision. (Sometimes we forget the ‘good old days’ of gentlemen politicians.) The opposition was passionate, vociferous and ultimately not impactful. The New Deal fundamentally changed the U.S. and quite probably the world.  Legislation prior the New Deal kept the role of government limited. Roosevelt and the Democrats changed the role of government to provide services, funding and care for the elderly, sick and infirm. This rhetorical and philosophical difference in the size and scope of the state must be continuously debated. However, the reality is that Social Security is the #1 most popular government program in existence and it isn’t...

This week is the 66th anniversary of America dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It’s the 37th anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation. It’s also been about six months since the “Arab Spring” and three months since the assassination of Osama bin Laden. The U.S. came close to not paying its bills this week.  These seemingly diverse remembrances are intertwined. They are incident that are at odds with the narrative of American character. At 8:15am on August 6 1945 “Little Boy” bomb was dropped on the Japanese city. Japanese officials determined that 69% of Hiroshima's buildings were destroyed and another 6–7% damaged. Approx. 30% of the population of Hiroshima was killed immediately. Over 90% of the doctors and 93% of the nurses were killed or injured. By 1950 estimates are that 200,000 people had died in Hiroshima from the effects of the bombing.  Three days later, America dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki and Japan surrendered the War. The use of atomic weapons ...