In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

All the glee over the GameStop short squeeze in the past several days actually reminds me of a very good recent film, The Big Short (2015), We have it on DVD and watch it at least once a year. It's a fictionalized version of a true story about various contrarians and outsiders who foresee the 2008 housing crisis and in effect short the US economy via the housing market. The 2021 short squeeze actually reverses the circumstances of The Big Short, since in the current case, the forces of dark financial consensus are looking to clean up by shorting GameStop, expecting its price to go down, while the contrarians and outsiders see an opportunity to confound the establishment by buying up GameStop stock, forcing the big boys to buy it back at inflated prices. In The Big Short , the outsiders and contrarians realize the housing economy is a bubble and find a way to short the market, expecting it to go down when the establishment expects prices to rise forever. But the message is th...

I've followed Angelo Codevilla for 20 yers, since he outlined the tension between the "ruling class" and the "country class". His most recent piece suggests the lizard people, or whoever it is, have decided to back off the COVID lockdowns. But as much as the oligarchs enjoyed COVID powers and dreamt of segueing them into a “new normal,” they knew that America could not be locked down forever. They especially knew, were they to unseat Trump and become responsible for the country, their charges that he had failed to stop the pandemic would come back to haunt them. “Why can’t you stop it?” would be the natural question they would have to face as the virus did what airborne viruses do: spread. Hence, after January 20, dismounting the COVID tiger, albeit gingerly, became the order of the day. He cites in particular California Gov Newsom's lifting of his regional supplementary lockdown on Monday. After Codevilla wrote, New York Gov Cuomo made a similar move...

Because I'd been thinking about East of Edem lately, my wife and I watched the 1956 Elia Kazan film on DVD over the weekend. It's unquestionably one of the greats, but because Kazan limited its scope to the last third of the novel, there's an enormous gap in the portrayal of Adam Trask, Caleb's father, that leaves an important issue unexplained. As I've said, East of Eden covers a swath of what might be regarded as recent memory as of the early 1950s, much like Middlemarch in the early 1870s. a 65-year period between the Civil War and World War I, three generations of the Trask family. Kazan leaves the patriarch, Cyrus Trask, completely out. The problem is that, like Middlemarch , East of Eden has secrets, and a key one is buried in Cyrus Trask's career as a professional Civil War veteran who becomes some sort of Washington, DC fixer -- exactly what he does isn't specified, except that although Cyrus loses track of his son Adam, he leaves both A...

On December 9, Gov Newsom issued a completely new regional lockdown order based on prospective ICU capacity that covered most of California. This was over and above an existing color-coded lockdown order that was itself draconian, limiting family gatherings and prohibiting indoor restaurant service. The new order went farther, banning haircuts, manicures, facials, outdoor restaurant service, and most travel. This was effectively the same as the lockdown imposed between March and May 2020, with some added permission for limited "non-essential" retail. I've callled this the double secret lockdown. Yesterday, Newsom lifted it, with little notice -- he telegraphed it only the night before, when the California Restaurant Associatioin released a letter from him giving them a heads-up. Newsweek, clearly unhappy he'd done this, nevertheless pointed out the contradictions: Up until this week, California has been under one of the harshest lockdowns across the country...

I watched Bp Barron's Sunday homily yesterday, in which, beyond discussing the reading from Johah himself, he urged listeners to go to Fr Mapples's sermon from the 1955 film of Moby Dick on YouTube. I've embedded it above. I would have embedded the whole film as well, but YouTube won't let me, as it's age-restricted. (There are gruesome scenes of actual whales being killed, which probably carry out Melville's purpose more than that of the Hollywood version.) The actor portraying Fr Mapples is Orson Welles, by the way. I had been thinking about Moby Dick anyhow. I think I've read it five times, once as an undergraduate, once in grad school, and three times since then. I'd set it aside for some time, as I'd begun to have my doubts about how serious Melville actually was as a writer. (Joseph Conrad annotated a copy of Moby Dick and thought little of it.) On the other hand, I've had almost ten years of Catholic Bible study, and this has made ...

A press release from the LA County health department on Friday read, in part: Key COVID-19 Indicators Trending in the Right Direction in L.A. County New cases are considerably lower this week, with a decrease of 30 percent in the seven-day average of daily cases from last week. The test positivity rate has also dropped to 12.7 percent. On January 1st, the test positivity rate was 20.8 percent; this is a reduction of 39 percent in three weeks. On November 1st, just before our surge began, the County’s test positivity rate was 3.8 percent. Nevertheless, While we have come a long way this week with community transmission, we have a long road to go and must continue to practice infectious control measures: wear a face covering and maintain physical distance when out of your home. blah blah blah. What stands out for me is that while there's now lots of happy talk, there's no indication of any prospective change in the most draconian lockdowns we have in much of the...

Yeesterday I brought up one cause of the 1980s day care Satanism panic, the underlying social tension resulting from wives and mothers working outside the home. This is actually one factor in the amorphous populist rebellion represented by Trumpism, the fact that middle-class incomes have been stagnant since the 1970s. The economic need for two-income households has been a direct result, and one source of Trump's support was his advocacy of policies that would raise middle-class incomes. In fact, I recall a Wall Street Journal editorial in the 1970s recognizing the issue in a backhanded way, patting the US economy on the back for its ability to grow at all, given the numbers of women it had sudddely had to absorb into the workforce. But was this because women suddenly chose en masse to take outside jobs, or because they had to? And if the latter, why? The Journal didn't go into this, and given its contemporary never-Trump posture, will not now. Women entering the job mar...