The price of everything

Unclean !

“The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact.”

- Thomas Huxley.

Mary Mallon managed to infect 47 people during the course of her career as a cook. Three of them died of the disease. Between 1900 and 1907, she infected two dozen people with typhoid fever. She worked in Mamaroneck, New York for less than two weeks when residents began to succumb. She moved to Manhattan in 1901 and members of the family where she was employed started to develop fever and diarrhoea. The laundress died. She then went to work for a lawyer and managed to infect seven out of a household of eight. In 1906 she moved to Long Island. Within two weeks, six out of eleven household members were hospitalized. She changed employment again and managed to infect three more families. Her fame “is in part due to her vehement denial of her own role in causing the disease, together with her refusal to cease working”. We are more familiar with her unofficial name, as ‘Typhoid Mary’.


Download Unclean !

World On Fire

“We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law !”

- John Proctor, The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, 1953.

Nothing quite says ‘Happy new year !’ like the threat of a new, as yet incurable, global, Chinese-born mystery virus. To readers of a certain age this will inevitably prompt memories of the BBC 1970’s eco-thriller Survivors, whose title sequence is a triumph of brevity and intimation over budgetary constraints. (To show the awesome, immersive, positional power of soundtrack, users of Twitter can check out Graham Kibble-White’s Survivors montage recut to the theme tune of Carla Lane’s sitcom Butterflies – and then his montage of the Butterflies title sequence to the theme tune of Survivors.)

Download World On Fire

Inflation: try to remain calm

“I think it is obvious that we’ve finally reached the limits of monetary policy. Does the ECB taking rates 10 basis points more negative do anything but accelerate the bankruptcy of the Eurozone banking system? Does it increase consumption or capital expenditures? Of course not. If anything, it just starves the system of capital by taking everyone’s return on capital investment down towards zero and below. Who invests when expected returns are negative? What the world needs is a big reset of the system where leveraged firms default, solvent firms pick up the pieces and get to earn excess returns due to their past fiscal sobriety. Since we live in a democracy, that won’t happen, instead we will have extreme fiscal stimulus in order to kick the can further down the road.."

Download Inflation. Try to remain calm

Monetary Massacre Theory

“A deeply disturbing account of the destructive potential of belief.”

 

- Ammar Kalia, reviewing BBC Four’s Storyville: Jonestown – Terror in the Jungle.

 

When it’s not trying to overturn legitimate plebiscites or shoving woke propaganda down the throats of its reluctant viewers, the BBC is still capable of showing half-decent documentaries. This correspondent recently caught the tail end of one such piece, Storyville: Jonestown – Terror in the Jungle. Being nine at the time of the original atrocity, we don’t remember any coverage of the story being aired, but 1978 was a different age, and wary parents might well have suppressed the news in any case.

Download Monetary Massacre Theory