The price of everything

Ghost Stories

M.R. James’ Casting the Runes also casts a long shadow. A short story written by one of the finest practitioners of the ghost story in English, it deals with a scientist (named Dunning in the original), investigating an occultist, Julian Karswell. Karswell’s book, The Truth of Alchemy, has been scathingly reviewed by one of Dunning’s colleagues, who dies in mysterious circumstances shortly afterwards. The scientist begins to suspect that Karswell’s powers might be real, and that he himself has become the victim of a curse. Once the victim is unwittingly passed some runic symbols by Karswell in person, it would appear that his days are numbered.. In addition to Tourneur’s (quite brilliant) 1957 film, Casting the Runes would also go on to be adapted several times for television and radio, and more recently it has inspired or influenced films including the Japanese (and US) horror franchise Ring and the 2014 horror film It Follows. It draws its fundamental strength from a slow and uncanny sense of psychological disintegration: is the world going mad, or is it just me ?

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Into the Twilight Zone

“The 2019 General Election threatened us with the prospect of a Big State socialist authoritarian who wanted to treat “our” NHS as a deity, shut down our liberties, and tank the economy. Unfortunately, he won.”

• The biggest disappointments of 2020. A tweet by @SirDanofC, 14^th August 2020.

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive..” Boris Johnson’s honeymoon period as the ‘surprise’ Brexit prime minister lasted for roughly three months. It began, with hindsight ominously enough, on Friday 13^th December 2019, and lasted until Imperial College released its infamous forecast on 16^th March 2020, of 250,000 Britons dying of Covid-19, after which the government abandoned any aspirational policy of herd immunity it might once have had – and decided simply to concentrate on destroying the economy instead. Since March and “the lockdown”, the honeymoon has soured into a bitterly dysfunctional divorce-in-the-making, a ‘game of chicken’-style tug of common sense between the Johnson government and the people, with Boris practically daring the electorate to vote him out of office as he deploys the very latest policies epitomising the acme of pointless, inconsistent, dangerous, counter-productive farce. The pantomime of hygiene that is mask-wearing is only the tip of the iceberg of Big Government (sunk costs fallacy) cretinocracy.

 

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The Quick and the Dead

Charles Zelmanovits was murdered in Piteå, Sweden in 1976. Johan Asplund was murdered in Sundsvall in 1980. Marinus and Jannie Stegehuis, a Dutch couple on a camping holiday, were murdered in Appojaure, Sweden in 1984. Yenon Levi, a tourist from Israel, was murdered in Rörshyttan, Sweden in 1988. Therese Johannesen was murdered in Drammen, Norway in 1988. Trine Jensen was murdered in Oslo in 1981. Gry Storvik was murdered in Oslo in 1985. All of these murders went unsolved until Sture Bergwall, who would subsequently change his name to Thomas Quick, confessed to every one them in the mid-1990s. He was convicted of all eight murders and would ultimately spend 20 years in a locked psychiatric clinic, Säter Hospital, which has been likened to a Swedish Broadmoor. Just one problem: he made everything up. This extraordinary story was made into a documentary film in 2015 – The Confessions of Thomas Quick.

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Hearts of glass

In his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that the fall of the Berlin Wall just a few years beforehand marked the definitive end point of any rivals to ‘enlightened’ Western liberal democracy. Eight years later, Robert Shiller in his analysis of 2000 era stock markets, Irrational Exuberance, cited widespread investor pride at the apparent triumph of free market western capitalism against all comers as one of the defining factors behind stretched millennial era stock valuations. Both of those narratives look somewhat ridiculous now. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, US second quarter GDP in 2020 fell by an annualised 32.9 percent. To put that figure into context, that is broadly the equivalent of the first three years’ worth of the Great Depression accelerated into just three months. That slowdown is almost entirely a real world reflection of deliberate government action – if you can even call it that. This correspondent normally finds little common ground with most writers at The Financial Times, but it is difficult to argue with their US editor, Edward Luce, when he suggests that

We are witnessing the biggest governance failure in modern US history.

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When satire dies

“If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others ?”

• Voltaire, Candide.

2020 to date has been no laughing matter. For roughly 52% of the audience of alleged comedian Marcus Brigstocke, the years 2016 to 2020 have hardly been a laugh riot either. Unfunny woke comedian Brigstocke, long a fixture of the BBC “comedy” schedule, was one of the first to report to the media that his stridently anti-Brexit “humour” wasn’t working. It turns out that roughly half of audiences outside the London metropolitan bubble resent paying to be insulted by a “comedian” whose views they simply don’t share. Now, however, there are early signs of a rapprochement between Remainers and Leavers, if the latest edition of Geoff Norcott’s excellent What Most People Think podcast (parental advisory rating for some occasional fruity language) is any guide. Brigstocke is a guest on this week’s edition.

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Ever Get The Feeling You’ve Been Cheated ?

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

• Philip K. Dick.

In his book Sapiens, the historian Yuval Noah Harari posits the provocative theory that a crucial factor behind mankind’s evolutionary advantage over our ancient predecessors and biological competitors has been our capacity for, and appreciation of, the power of narrative. The thinking goes as follows. A small village of perhaps 100 people has no need of external administration. It organises itself. But a country of perhaps 70 million people requires some form of exogenous coordination, if only to provide those services that the free enterprise system cannot or will not provide itself (street lights and armies, for example). In extremis, the country has to provide a cohort of young men – it will be, invariably, men – willing to fight and, if need be, die in defence of said country. How does it achieve this ? By telling stories. National myths.

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Big Deal

“So not a deal of Rooseveltian ambition ? Perhaps not. As both the FT and union boss Len McCluskey acidly observed, Roosevelt’s New Deal spawned mega projects such as the Hoover Dam; [Boris] Johnson’s list includes the reannouncement of repairs to a bridge in Sandwell.”

• Simon Wilson on ‘Boris Johnson’s New Deal’ in MoneyWeek, 10^th July 2020.

There is a pivotal sequence in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 sci-fi classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Having been herded into an army helicopter near Wyoming’s Devils Tower with a number of other seeming eccentrics, electrical maintenance worker Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) suddenly twigs that the cover story they have all been fed by the government – an accidental toxic nerve gas spill – is just that, a cover story. He takes off his gas mask and encourages his fellow masked passengers to escape. While they stare wide-eyed in horror, he gratefully gulps in lungfuls of oxygen and tells them,

There is nothing wrong with the air !

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A four-letter word

“Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.”

• Carl Richards.

What is risk ? James Ball in his piece ‘Anatomy of a fiasco: how Britain’s pandemic defences failed’ for The Spectator offers, essentially, one currently relevant practical example:

In October, a panel of 21 experts from across the world gathered for the first of what promised to be a series of reports assessing readiness for pandemics. ‘Infectious diseases know no borders,’ warned the Global Health Security Index. ‘So all countries must prioritise and exercise the capabilities required to prevent, detect and rapidly respond to public health emergencies.’ Every country was called to be transparent about its capabilities ‘to assure neighbours it can stop an outbreak from becoming an international catastrophe’. Two countries were held up as the best examples: Britain and the United States.

If a league table were drawn up of countries that most failed to contain Covid deaths, the US and the UK would be pretty near the top. Yet both spent huge amounts of money on their pandemic preparedness and flattered themselves that their experts had built the strongest defence. The UK was ranked best in the world for its ability to stage ‘rapid response to and mitigation of the spread of an epidemic’. It was given 92 points out of 100. Six weeks later, the first Covid-19 case was recorded in China and the real test began.

That is to say, one instance of risk is a wildly inflated and wholly unjustified sense of overconfidence. Overconfidence is not exactly unheard of in fund management circles either.

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A Year to Remember ?

“Andrews: “The pumps are keeping the water down in this boiler room, but the first five compartments are flooding.”

Captain Smith: “Well, what’s the answer ?”

Andrews: “She’s going to sink, Captain.”

Captain Smith: “But.. She can’t sink. She’s unsinkable.”

Andrews: “She can’t float. Look.. She could float with any three of her first five compartments flooded. She could even float with four of them gone. But she can’t float with all five full up.”

Captain Smith: “Yes, but..”

Andrews: [cuts him off]: “These watertight bulkheads only go as high as E Deck. The weight of the water in the bow is going to pull her down by the head. So, you’re going to get the fifth compartment overflowing into the sixth; the sixth into the seventh; and so on, as she goes lower. It’s a mathematical certainty. With that amount of underwater damage, she can’t stay afloat.. How many people are there on board ?”

Captain Smith: “2,200 or more. And room in the boats for.. ? How many ?”

Andrews: “1,200.”

Captain Smith: “I don’t think the Board of Trade regulations visualized this situation.
Do you ?”

• From Eric Ambler’s screenplay for the film A Night to Remember (1958)

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EMH ? WTF ?

“My son just told me that he can only play @FortniteGame in the evening... because half of his squad started trading. He is 10. @RobinhoodApp #TrueStory”

• Tweet from Joseph S. Mauro (@jsmauro13), 11^th June 2020.

“Dave Portnoy, an internet celebrity, has posted daily trolling videos about his profits from the rally to his 1.5m Twitter followers. “The people on the internet are debating who is the better investor right now, myself or Warren Buffett?”, he said in a post this week. “It’s no debate. I killed him. He’s dead.””

• Miles Johnson, ‘Myths can make ‘smart money’ act dumb’, The Financial Times, 12^th June 2020.

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