October 31

The Battle Of Britain ended on this day in 1940.

After the Battle, there was no longer any fear of a German invasion of Britain.

Buying

We are in the process of buying a house, buying a second car, buying furniture.

The buying never seems to stop.

It is exhausting.

The Candy Man On Leno: Cartoon Of The Day

Thank God we don't watch television.

I don't see how anyone can stand it.

Hamburg 1943

Hamburg after the 1943 air raid and firestorm.

I do not know where in Hamburg the above photograph was taken. The devastation displayed in the photograph is on an unimaginable scale—the destruction is so complete there are no surviving landmarks that allow the viewer to identify the area of Hamburg depicted in the photograph.

The photograph below was taken near Saint-Michealis-Kirche, because the church itself may be seen in the background, still standing. Saint Michaelis was nowhere near the firestorm—the firestorm was at least five miles away from Saint Michaelis—and yet the destruction near Saint Michaelis was also on a shocking scale.


Although its walls and tower did not collapse, Saint Michealis was burnt out in 1943 (in the photograph, one may see that the church roof is no longer in place).

Saint Michaelis was to be bombed again in 1944 and 1945, suffering direct hits in both latter years. The church had to be completely rebuilt after the war.

Cartoon Of The Week

Furtwangler In Wartime

Wilhelm Furtwangler conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in May 1943 at an armaments factory in Berlin.

Another photograph of Furtwangler conducting a wartime concert for armaments workers may be found here.

Kicking The Can, Postponing The Reckoning

The various schemes for the European Financial Stability Facility are little more than a shell game to kick the debt can further down the road. How will shuffling the bad debt of broke countries from broke banks into a leveraged “special purpose vehicle” ultimately backed by the taxpayers of broke and nearly broke countries solve anything in the longer term?

All it may do is postpone the reckoning and insure an even bigger bust later.

Charles Biderman

‘Twas Always Thus

And since G.O.P. Front Runner Ronald Reagan relies upon a base of support that is on the far right wing of the Republican Party, some experts have long declared that if he wins the nomination, the G.O.P. would simply be repeating the suicidal Goldwater campaign. Ex-President Gerald Ford left no doubt about his views when he warned last month: “A very conservative Republican cannot win in a national election.”

National opinion polls continue to show Carter leading Reagan by an apparently comfortable margin of about 25%. They also show that more moderate Republicans like Ford would run better against the President.

Reagan cannot hope to win, however, unless he moves beyond the hard-line conservative base that has sustained him since he first appeared on the national political scene as a spokesman for Goldwater himself.

TIME, 31 March 1980