I had to go into the movie with some expectations because Steven Spielberg does not make bad movies, and the cast had Tom Hanks and Merrill Streep for starters. It’s always hard to know whether the times make the movie or the movie makes the times; culture and Art seem to take turns leading the way. In any case, I was just young enough to not understand what the Pentagon papers were in the early 70s. I distinctly remember that phrase as having been constantly in the news while I was in high school. What I didn’t know was that the events covered so well in this film blazed a trail that made it more possible for the press to act in the role of

I was a financial professional during two prior stock-market bubbles, the ones that ended in 2000 and 2008 respectively. This market acts and looks (on a chart) very much like those bubbles.  The key is the exponential curve common to each of them. As you can see with the example below, the slope gets steeper until it appears to be in “vertical climb,” going almost straight up. That’s the phase we are in now–the vertical climb phase.   In the vertical climb phase–EVERONE is buying: the last retail investors joined in, foreigners are strong marginal buyers, and short-sellers are buying to cover their shorts.   But  as stocks go higher in price, it takes more money to accelerate prices higher. Gravity always wins. The way it

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