[Note: This content is for entertainment purposes only] I WAS FIRST introduced to the concept of cycles through my career in financial services. The idea was that the natural world operates in waves, recurring patterns or “cycles” of varying lengths of time. The general premise is that people are part of nature and thus generate predictable patterns–and anything of predictive value was, of course, deemed useful to investors. One longer-term social cycle that is starting to get attention is the eighty-year cycle; history has produced some evidence that a serious calamity occurs roughly every eighty years. The most recent “serious” calamity was World War Two–which started eighty years ago in 1939 (we didn’t enter until 1941). Eighty years before that it was the Civil War,

WHILE THE SPECTACLES of impeachment, daily scandal, and the democratic primary distracted voters from almost everything else, the 2019 Federal deficit accelerated to nearly a trillion. The interest alone  got to 380 billion per year.  In 2015, Obama only needed 485 billion for the whole year. Let me see…1) stock market is right on top of a new high, 2) unemployment is extremely low, 3) countries are supposed to use extended booms (ten years now) to pay down debt, and 4) the GOP—especially the “tea partiers”—have, prior to Trump, represented themselves as deficit/budget hawks. What’s wrong with this picture? There’s no mystery; it’s what Trump has always done: borrow big, promote shamelessly, get paid no matter what, and never use much of your own money.

At an turning point in the film Joker, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), is assaulted on the subway.  Due to a disability that causes him to laugh randomly, some fellow riders described as “Wall Street types” decide to rough him up. Because Arthur still wore the clown outfit he used as part of his work, one of the assailants tried to sing “Send in the Clowns” as a prelude to the onslaught. That scene propels the action to the next level. Arthur Fleck, The Joker, in the corrupt and failing city of Gotham and with no intention of doing so, becomes the name and face of  what is best described as an anarchist movement [Note: The Joker, in his madness, may incline toward nihilism or absurdism

[This post is for entertainment or educational purposes only and does not offer investment advice of any kind. Investments decisions should be made with careful consideration on an individual basis along with a professional.] PUNDITS AND POLLSTERS will soon begin to argue passionately over their predictions for president in 2020. They usually make emotional cases and use tired, second-hand reasoning on either side–sounding much like sports bums at the beginning of a new season. Everybody loves a fortune teller. But despite the minor blips in the polls, the outrage du jour, and the talk of impeachment (and the expanding list of reasons for it), the best predictor of the election–assuming it’s held on schedule–will be the performance of the stock market over the next year.

  WHAT HAVE YOU done for me lately? I find tremendous irony in the fact that the US president was the star of a reality show where he was surrounded by less-than-brilliant sycophants and presented as the epitome of  business success in charge of a thriving empire (though it turns out his decision-making often led to bankruptcy). The  climax of each episode was when he got to pronounce to a hapless contestant “You’re fired!”  The irony makes an entrance in that he is now at a point in his tenure where the party that embraced him (only after they realized that he could get them power) may soon make a similar pronouncement to him.   Almost two years ago on this blogsite, I posted that

Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” in the early ‘sixties when she covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker.  The phrase was in response to how Eichmann had matter-of-factly claimed to have only been “doing his duty.” The phrase applies  in many countries today, but each in a unique context.  As for the United States, with the 2016 election, our country managed to elect as president an individual who personifies much of our culture–its superficiality and the worship of wealth, power, and privilege. During the first two years of his tenure, the former reality TV star and red-toothed capitalist has shown us ourselves (not all of us, but enough of us) and the result is so lacking in virtue

          Two of these books will guide you for change that will occur.  The other one is to inspire you to action and help prevent events that could occur. All three books were written in the middle of the last century. The world war was over, but the Cold War had begun. One could argue that the events of the first half of the twentieth century made it clear that human race faced two formidable enemies: the innate human lust for power, and the curse of the tree of knowledge in the form of quantum leaps in technology. The first two books explore the conflicts with these enemies. The last book faces the prospect of defeat – by both. I have

When I hear the Star Wars theme and see the text scrolling up and away from me into the stars, it arouses the wonder in me. And because for over three decades I have been rewarded for accepting the reality projected in these stories, I suspend whatever disbelief I encounter. This episode (VIII) has its share of potential distractions in the form of questionable plot points, but if you can silence those interruptions of reason, the film and the story take you –as all worthy stories do–full circle: from your own human experience to an imagined one and back again. The point, of course, is to see what changed in the process. I hope that enough of the other hundreds of millions of viewers changed as

  THERE ARE several reasons to believe that the current president just served his first and last full year in office. Here are some of them: He just delivered the Republican party – or you could say he delivered to its benefactors—the biggest thing he could have given them: a multi-trillion-dollar handout in the form of a tax cut.  In other words, his usefulness just became greatly diminished His unpopularity is eroding the Republican brand terribly: They just lost a “red” Senate seat in one of the reddest states in the union – Alabama His absence would not disrupt much: Pence would do the party’s bidding with all the alacrity of a Boy Scout helping an old lady across the street, but without all the drama

Much as with the Star Trek TV series, the first BladeRunner was not immediately appreciated. Sometimes, society does not immediately recognize itself in the mirror that Art holds up to it. The fact that as time went on, both efforts became epic and sacred for TV and film implies that they had tried to share a vital human experience that we didn’t recognize yet. But after another decade and the emergence of the Digital Age, it grew clear that within a generation we would be presented with choices and changes to our existence that would redefine what it meant to be human. Then, when these prescient films held up the mirror a second time, we recognized ourselves. The first thing to say about the sequel