In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

As an Aristotelian, as I've said here, my job is to look for causes. The project I don't seem able to put down for the time being is to look for the causes of 2020, one of the chief features of which was the COVID crisis and what I think is an associated moral panic, which appears to me to far outwigh the actual medical issues of the disease. The last clear moral panic, as far as I can see, was the Day Care Satanism panic of the 1980s, most clearly exemplified by the McMartin Preschool case in the Los Angeles area. I was prompted by an offhand remark in a recent TV special on the case that moral panics reflect underlying social tensions, and in that case, the real issue was changes in family life and child care caused by wives and mothers working outside the home. (Although this had become acceptable following World War II, it wasn't until the stagflation and fuel crises of the 1970s that it became economically much more essential.) Then, for reasons I can'...

Yesterday, I twlked about s really dumb multibillionaire, Jack Dorsey. Today I want to talk about Marty Lagina, who so far doesn't seem to be a multibillionaire, but he's a much smarter rich guy nevertheless. Lagina, who is the senior figure on the Curse of Oak Island show, is in effect a star, but it's pretty well implied that he also approves the project plans and signs the checks. The publicly available estimate of his net worth is $100 million, altough he didn't make this money off TV appearances. It looks like he got rich on fracking in the 1990s, which was smart, . But according to the link, His company Terra Energy was a pioneer in extracting natural gas from shale around the mid-west in the 1990s. Marty eventually sold Terra Energy to a company called CMS Energy for $58 million. He then launched a new company called Heritage Sustainable to focus on wind power. Heritage is currently planning to build 60 wind turbines in Missaukee, Michigan. That will mak...

Ferdinand Lundberg said that industrialist families tend to work in combination, and I would say that's generally true, but Lundberg at the time he published The Rich and the Super-Rich in 1968 was still living in a culture dominated by the post-Civil War robber barons' desendants. The major industries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lumber, mining, steel, railroads, oil, and automobiles were still staples of the economy, with air transport on the rise. Computers still used punch cards. One of Lundberg's main theses, in fact, was that more recent fortunes made from the 1920s onward were mostly hype, and few new industrialists of the 1950s and 60s started from scratch -- their opportunities arose because their families were already wealthy, and a closer look would show that modern fortunes were often smoke and mirrors. This was before the rise of authentic new multibillionaires like Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. While the super-rich do often w...

I've said here before that Ferdinand Lundberg's The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today is one of the most important literary works of the 20th century if considered in the same genre as Milton's prose or Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. (It's available in pdf here. ) Lundberg's thesis was that US politics are dominated by an exclusive combine of wealthy families who manage centers of corporate and social power in the Fortune 500, the Ivy League, foundations, the federal govenment, and other institutions. I think he would have found no surprises in the saga of Parler, the social media upstart, over the past week. According to the Wall Street Journal, In a complaint filed Monday in Seattle federal court, Parler alleged that Amazon Web Services kicked the company off its cloud servers for political and anti-competitive reasons. The conservative social network founded in 2018 exploded in popularity among supporters of Preside...

A news item yesterday was American Thinker's retraction of allegations against Dominion Voting Systems that it acknowledged were "completely false". But this wasn't the end of the story. At the same time, alhough apparently for reasons umrelated to Dominion, the site deleted its comment section . And although there doesn't seem to have been an announcement, the site no longer carries ads. My reaction to this is somewhere between "no great loss" and "good riddance", and I characterize myself as conservative. I used to visit it now and then, but I never did during the 2020 election cycle. The pieces there showed no particular insight and usually amounted to just preaching to the choir. In fact, the site has a lot in commom with the other currently popular sites like Breitbart, Red State, Conservative Treehouse, and so forth -- it runs hysterical headlines about days-old news and reiterates same old-same old viewpoints. What we aren't see...

So we've had two of the most respectable blue politicians, Gov Cuomo and Mayor Lightfoot, announce that lockdowns don't work and economies must reopen. There are headlines of a "narrative shift" with the appearance in Newsweek , which nobody has read for decades, of a respectablke study that says lockdowns don't work . So, where is the groundswell of opinion that says, "What came over us? Of course lockdowns don't work. We're destroying the economy! I hereby decree that schools immediately return to in-person classes, sports resume, restaurants and bars reopn!" Er, no. Not happeing. Gov Cuomo, in whose power it is to say those very words, has been silent. He may as well decree that the rain stop, or start, as the case may be. The lockdown is a force of nature over which he has no control, it would appear. I more or less expected this, though I'm not sure what the reasons for it are. One might be that Cuomo and Lightfoot are holding...

An unintended consequence of the 2020 electoral cycle is that it's put full responsibility for handling the COVID crisis in the hands of Democrats. This is another parallel I see with 1976, where Democrats took over in the face of worsening inflatoin and a fuel crisis and were incapable of handling them, which led to a Reagan landslide in 1980. This morning's headline is that Chicago Mayor Lightfoot is "seeking to reopen Chicago’s bars and restaurants for indoor service as soon as possible". The public rationale is that alllowing indoor drinking and dining will provide a "safer outlet" for people who will otherwise, apparently, make their hookups elsewhere. I assume that's what's meant by "cut down on underground parties where attendees do not social distance or wear masks". I suspect the real reason is that the city can't tax underground parties. I think Gov Cuomo was slightly more ingenuous when he said, “we are looking at mo...