A Season on Earth by Gerald Murnane

It was a shock, coming to this from Murnane’s first, Tamarisk Row. Not that there aren’t ongoing themes, young male experience, Roman Catholicism, gambling, isolation from culture. But this one is very focussed on the teenage boy and therefore on sex: how it fits in with RC and gambling is the overarching story of A Season on Earth. I do wonder if people now can read this, especially since Roman Catholicism is so marginal to life in Anglo-Saxon countries, not least here in Australia. The shock, though, is the style. Where Tamarisk Row was a struggle – pleasurable, but nonetheless difficult – A Season on Earth is easy. If you don’t want to read a lot about Roman Catholicism and the teenage boy’s relationship with it, this book is not for you. But there is always humour, or something approaching humour there, it is not a story of dour epiphany. Recalling my primary school attempts to fast-track sainthood whilst avoiding any pain, which involved much research to find saints who had nice lives (needles in a haystack), it was easy to empathise with the young protagonist’s attempts to negotiate the facts of a teenager’s desires, if not urges, with his supposed religious feeling. It’s here that the gambling comes out and that involves deal-making with God, another RC habit which will be familiar to those brought up in that unkind religion.

Still shaking my head about this one and have put it on my ‘I’m moving on but I can’t get you out of my mind’. Perhaps that’s a recommendation to read it.

 

Magpie by Peter Goldsworthy and Brian Matthews

Not one of my GR friends has read this! Not one person on GR has reviewed it. It’s an even worse cold-shouldering than Australian books get in general and I’m guessing that’s because it has the wrong number of authors. Don’t let that put you off, this is a hilarious short novel – I would have called it a novella, but I guess that’s the kiss of marketing death along with joint authorship.

Spoilers follow.

Should you happen to be an Adelaide person, then the particulars of the university merger will seem somewhat prescient. I loved the description of the military influence on the merger – no doubt this is the case, some 32 years later as it actually unfolds. Oh, and the tone of the book has it all just right. Apparently it is no accident that in the real world now, the joint committee calls their get-togethers the Future University meetings. Magpie gets the FU tone perfect. Talk about crystal ball.

But this is just a small aside in the book. The major theme is writing and publishing, and in this case, I think it’s better to stay schtum, other than to say it’s clever, witty, and if you have ever wondered if fictional characters should have rights, then this is the book for you. Highly recommended.

Tamarisk Row by Gerald Murnane

I’d forgotten that horse racing and gambling on it were once such an endemic part of Australian life. My own upbringing, like the protagonist’s in this story, was RC and poor. Like his mother, mine was virulently anti-gambling. And like his father, mine was addicted to ‘the races’, as they were always called. In the case of my father, this was despite the stories he would tell of those around him, including his own brothers, being unable to afford warm coats in winter because all their money went on feeding the bookies. The difference, however, was that my mother wouldn’t let my father do it ‘for work’, in that way Augustine justifies his relentless losses, and so almost all my father’s bets were purely theoretical….in that way Augustine’s are when he ‘stops’.

Thank heavens my mother held her ground on this. She herself had experienced anguish at the hands of the ‘industry’. Her very decent father suddenly died when she was at the end of primary school, forcing my grandmother to make ends meet for her four daughters and herself by opening a fruit and veg shop. Unfortunately her very decent dead husband had a brother who was quite the opposite. He ran an SP booking racket using my grandma’s shop as the front. Eventually it was raided and there was a most upright, decent, God-fearing sort of woman up before the courts, taking the blame for her brother-in-law. Perhaps the memory of this was partly to account for my mother’s attitudes, but in any case, she would also have been well aware of what happens to the families of those who decide that they are brighter than the trainers and the bookies and the big punters with their scams.

I never lived in small town rural Australia, but every Australian has been through them, they have felt the glazed heat, understood what the local pool means, seen the still smallness of such places. The aloneness that creates the rich imaginary life of small children like Clement. Because others drink with the consequent brutal behaviour as well as bet, his father Augustine sees the extreme poverty through which he puts his family as somehow more acceptable, superior perhaps. However sorry we feel for Clement, we know there is far worse, within the walls of the story and without.

Murnane has both the knowledge that comes of his own fascination with the horses and the understanding, I suppose born from a capacity to stand outside himself, to see it for what it is. Again, it was incredibly evocative for me. There is a moment when Augustine is regretting not the amount he has lost – that is never a source of regret for compulsive gamblers – but the amount he has won. It brought to mine my friend B. with whom I was flatting. We were part of a community which saw itself as a group of pro betters, this was back before computers made ordinary people able to compete. My friends were all numbers people. Some of them were dedicated professional winners. But some, and B. was one, were mere addicts. B. always made sure he paid his rent and his health insurance, but other than that, it was all for the horses. Or rather, for the people who won from people like him. One work day (as the horse betters saw Saturdays) I heard he’d won a lot of money, it was around 30K. I called him and said the kind of things you say at such a moment. But he was sad, just like Augustine was sad with such a win. Addicts think not of what they did win, but of what they didn’t. It was the one they should have had the house on. It was the first time I really felt pity for B. He couldn’t win, even if he won.

This world of horse betting is dying in Australia. Partly this is because there are so many ways to part addicts with their money these days. But it’s also because horse racing is seen as bad for the animals involved. Gone is the culture of Melbourne Cup day, a day which unofficially served as a national holiday throughout the land. My mother, harking back to the period when this book was set, recalled the big hall at Wayville in which school and university exams were held. At the time the race started, pens were downed, the radio put on, and for ten minutes all in the hall were transported to a different place. Murnane has preserved an Australia which is dying, not only because of the horse races, but because drinking has changed, isolation has changed, attitudes have changed.

Some years back the NYT predicted a Nobel prize for him and I can understand why. By the time I was a few dozen pages into Tamarisk Row, I went back to Imprints and bought another eight by him that they had in stock. I haven’t started my next yet because I found this one deeply painful. Not only because of the horse racing, but also because it dragged up memories of the brutality of Roman Catholicism as we children experienced it in that period. Oh, and we can add gender relations into the mix as well. But above all its precise exquisiteness hurt like needles being placed in just the right positions.

Maybe it’s a book to love, rather than to like. But don’t let that put you off reading it.

The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World by David Robson

Some years ago, my Swiss doctor suggested that the first step to dealing with really bad adjustments to jetlag – it would take me weeks to recover – was to take melatonin. When I went to the pharmacy and asked for it, the girl serving said ‘we only have homeopathic’. ‘Oh, that’s okay,’ I said, thinking that it was a brand. I’d never heard of homeopathy before, and only when I got home did I discover that this meant there was nothing in it. Actually, it said in very big font on the label 2X, and apparently that meant I’d just bought two times nothing. That night come bedtime, I was really cross, drafting the letter of complaint to the pharmacy governance board. I should have been warned! But at the same time I thought well, I’ve paid for the darn bottle of these ‘pills’, I might as well take one. And I did. Then I laid in bed, irate, starting to imagine how I was going to lie there all night stark wide awake… when I fell asleep. Just like that.

Yes, I know, it’s only an anecdote. But when I started reading about the astonishingly scary way that the brain gets on with the body, not only inadvertently passing on false information, but even deliberately, I could see how this might have worked even if I didn’t believe in it. Maybe at some level my brain was able to ignore my conscious reasoning and said to my body, sleep treatment taken, let’s go. Holy Toledo if stuff like that happens….

And indeed, according to this book, such stuff happens all the time.

I’m in at least two minds about this book. It’s an enormous literature review done in an accessible way, though Robson is no great prose stylist. Every time he points out another way in which the expectation effect seems to come into play, we are bombarded with examples from scientific and medical trials/experiments. The reader really is overwhelmed by the evidence, so that although he occasionally points out that an experiment did not have a meaningful number of subjects, and even though we might have at the back of our minds some suspicion about the methodology and motives of such research in general, nonetheless it’s hard not to say, okay, you win, it is a real phenomena. Indeed, I happened to talk to a doctor about some of this recently and she said the results are amazing in reference to knee ‘operations’ being performed instead of knee operations. Ie that pretending an operation has been done, even if the patient is informed, has an impressive success rate.

If half the stuff in this book is true, the implications are revolutionary. If only one of the cases talked about is true, it will be transformative: that we don’t need painkillers – or at least in nowhere near the doses currently being prescribed and taken. This is not just about being tricked, that is, the normal way we think of the placebo effect. Given the ethical dilemmas surrounding that concept now, medical experiment is moving towards telling people that they are on a placebo and this has startling results. If it is explained to me that I’m taking a ‘medicine’ which has nothing in it, but that the expected consequence is that my body will feel pain relief, this could be the turnaround for ending the massive domination of the pill industry in particular in the US.

It’s worth mentioning, for those like me who may have some issues with the trials/experiments he talks about, that he gives fascinating examples of this phenomenon simply taking place and only then gaining the attention of the medical or scientific communities. Things like a large number of teenagers falling ill in Spain and it was determined that the connection between them was a teenage soap opera they all watched. It had a made-up illness in it and teenagers around the country started developing the symptoms – not imagining the symptoms, actually getting them. The Expectation Effect. In the US people being ill and the hospital finding that the way to cure them was to bring in Shamans. Here in Australia, of course, we have Pointing the Bone.

At the very least, we discover from this book, that the connections between our brain and the rest of our body are fascinating, complex, and by no means understood yet. The author takes some pains to disassociate himself from the positive thinking industry. Despite that, I was left with this uneasy feeling that this is the point, and if you are left behind, you’ll be seen as the one who didn’t believe. Others who have read it are welcome to jump on me and say no, that isn’t true. Perhaps it’s simply that the author himself, like the rest of us, doesn’t really understand this potentially amazing thing, the expectation effect, but is an enthusiastic proponent nonetheless. It’s definitely worth reading to make your own call.

The Urge, Our History of Addiction by Carl Erik Fisher

One can read this as a thorough and engaging sociological account of why and how we continue to fail as a society to ‘deal’ with addiction. Fisher builds up a picture of Churchill’s ‘Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it’, but it’s more complicated than that, of course, as he takes pains to delineate in his multidisciplinary complex analysis. He manages to stay calm despite the anger one can feel behind some of his words as he describes the failures of the US.

He details the behaviour of doctors who are complicit in the addiction process, not to mention the pharma companies. I can’t speak for the US, but in other parts of the world it is often the local pharmacist who educates the unwitting potential addict presenting an unnecessary script provided by a doctor whose motives must be questioned. I had a friend a while back who broke his ankle in Melbourne and when he gave his script to the local chemist, the reaction was something like this: you know that’s a highly addictive opiate and you don’t need anything like that for your condition. Errrm, no he didn’t. A dozen years ago I presented such a script to a pharmacy in Geneva and although it was filled, it was with the greatest of reluctance and I more or less had to promise not to use it….a promise I kept.

What Pharma like Purdue has learned from history is that to repeat history is to fill their coffers. Doctors fill their appointment books and create any amount of work for their associates. Lesson: if history is to be changed, it will be by people who need it to change.

From The House Hearing THE ROLE OF PURDUE PHARMA AND THE SACKLER FAMILY IN THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC, Chairwoman Maloney’s opening statement.

For too long, justice has been out of reach for millions of American families whose lives have been ravaged by our Nation’s
opioid epidemic. For decades now, parents and family members have watched with broken hearts as their loved ones struggled with opioid addiction.

Since 1999, nearly half a million lives have been cut short by opioid overdoses in the United States alone. These lives were taken from us too soon. They were taken unnecessarily and they were taken unfairly. For each life lost, there have been many other family members–aunts, siblings, children, and loved ones–left to pick up the pieces.

And right there in the middle of all this suffering was Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of a highly addictive prescription painkiller, OxyContin. This company played a central role in fueling one of America’s most devastating public health crises. Purdue has generated more than $35 billion in revenue since bringing OxyContin to market.

Purdue has been owned by the Sackler family since 1952. The Sackler family has profited enormously from the OxyContin business. Since bringing this painkiller to market, the family has withdrawn more than $10 billion from the company. Purdue has now admitted that after it got caught in 2007, after it pled guilty and paid a fine, it continued to commit crimes for another decade, like nothing happened.

Documents obtained by our committee by the Department of Justice and by state attorneys general say that members of the family were directly involved with the day-to-day operations of the company. And they launched an incredibly destructive, reckless campaign to flood our communities with dangerous opioids.

At the behest of the Sackler family, Purdue targeted high-volume prescribers to boost sales of OxyContin, ignored and worked around safeguards intended to reduce prescription opioid misuse, and promoted false narratives about their products to steer patients away from safer alternatives and deflect blame toward people struggling with addiction. And most despicably, Purdue and the Sacklers worked to deflect the blame for all that suffering away from themselves and on to the very people struggling with the OxyContin addiction.

Yet despite years of investigation and litigation, no member of the Sackler family has ever admitted to any wrongdoing, taken any responsibility for the devastation they caused, or even apologized for their actions. In their settlement with the Justice Department, Sackler family members admitted no liability.

I believe it was appropriate that Purdue pleaded guilty to criminal charges because that’s what it was, a crime. It was a crime against the American people. And with all the evidence that the Sackler family was directly involved and produced criminal actions, they were pulling the strings in fact, they should not escape accountability for these criminal actions this time around.

Today, for the first time, two members of the Sackler family, David Sackler and Kathe Sackler, will be testifying publicly before the American people about their role in the opioid crisis. They held senior positions in the company and on the board of directors. As these documents shows, they placed their insatiable thirst for personal wealth over the lives of millions of American families they destroyed.

It is my hope that today’s hearing will give the American people, including the scores of victims who have had their families shattered, an opportunity to hear directly from those responsible for these atrocities.

Next there is the role of politicians and law enforcement, sometimes working against each other, but more often in alignment. Here Fisher explores the racism of addiction. For two hundred years Americans have been sold the notion that non-white people are addicts seeking out (never mind that they are forced to by the very system defining them) horrifying illegal drugs which turn them into fiends, while white people merely have ‘habits’.  In the case of the former, prohibition has often been seen as the way to deal (so to speak) with the problem. In the case of the latter….it isn’t even a problem, not really. Ask Purdue. Unexpectedly for me, Fisher shows us that white US citizens are at least as badly off, with their constant supplies of highly addictive but legal ‘medications’ as are non-white citizens who buy and use on the street.

Another layer again shows how hard ‘learning from history’ can be, and that’s the research industry’s role. From the scientists searching in the body to the psychologists investigating the mind, a couple of hundred years has left us without the simple explanations and solutions we would definitely prefer. That is probably the case even if we take into account that it is an industry, with the lack of objectivity that likely accompanies it. Inadequate methodology, axes to grind, theories to prove.

What makes this book incredibly human, and far from the coldness of sociology, is that the author is himself an addict and he tells his story of his fall and his continuing recovery. As Fisher is a medical doctor who chose to specialise in psychiatry and ethics, he is able to combine knowledge with experience to tell us….well, in the end, less than we might have hoped for. Perhaps I should say less than I hoped for as I would have liked to have answers that I could apply to myself and I did not find them. But given that he hasn’t even found his own answers, I can scarcely blame him for not giving me mine.

He must have thoughts about the relationship between addiction and the internet/social media/phones. I hope that’s for the next book. And, having read just before this one, The Expectation Effect, it’s hard not to wonder what relationship there may be there, both placebo as treatment and nocebo as exacerbating, which further complicate an already exceedingly tangled web.

Highly recommended.

QAnon and On: A Short and Shocking History of Internet Conspiracy Cults Book by Van Badham

With an election coming up, if you live in Australia you should read this book in order to ensure that you don’t vote ScoMo. He hangs out with people who either believe QAnon shit or are using it. I don’t think it matters which.

If you are American, get over the fact that this book starts in Australia. Americans, you have spread this shit around the world. Own up to that. Read what it means in practice in a democracy which is still a lot healthier than yours.

Russians: get rid of the creep.

Although a friend said to me recently that she found Badham ‘hysterical’, this book is anything but. I found it remarkable that while delivering such horrifying news of the world it nonetheless remains sober. Her careful research leads her to conclusions which will be very hard for normal people to take. In particular that the only thing we can do about psycho conspiracy theorists is keep reminding them of the good life they are missing by cutting themselves off and remaining in locked up spaces with those of the same ilk. Whilst I dare say that can work, any normal people will find it a pretty revolting task. And in any case, this process assumes that we normal people are the ones who can make the decision to stay in touch and hope to deprogram those who are lost. Most recently it is a friend of some standing who has cut me off because she is QAnon. As for those who think that they can talk QAnon but not be QAnon, which is another alarmingly large group of people I know, I am lost as to what to do about them too. Some of them seem to think it’s amusing. Others analyse the world in QAnon ways without, apparently, realising. One of that group declined my recommendation to read this book because he finds that books have points of view. He is under the impression that if he reads shit on the internet that isn’t book length he will save himself from such horror. He’s a mathematician and apparently is so naive that he thinks he can gather data and draw his own conclusions. The consequence is that he has no idea that he is doing the sociological equivalent of adding 2+2 and getting any number other than 4. He has no idea that he is thinking exactly like a QAnon person.

Read the book.

Saved by the Siesta: fight tiredness and boost your health by unlocking the science of napping by Brice Faraut

To set the scene, I have been desperately sleep-deprived for some time. My mother suggested this book and I found myself starting it on the sofa at 3.30am a few weeks ago, after waking up and knowing going back to sleep was impossible. No better time to seek rescue in a book which I could well believe might save my life. That was my theory.

In practice, I think that the title promises much and delivers little. For a start most of the book tells you why sleep is important and the impact of being sleep-deprived. But we all know that. It’s why, after all, we buy the book, because we know how important it is and we can’t get it. He explains the different sleep waves of night sleep, which is partly because the siesta is going to emulate them. It’s quite well written, presumably well-researched, and it is interesting to read of how badly we sleep in the noise and pollution and expectations and technology of the present. But none of that helps get more sleep. Get to the siesta bit p-lease. I need to read it before I literally die of sleep deprivation.

It does come, right at the end of the book. For me, however, it wasn’t nearly adequate. Basically it tells you to go to sleep for 20-30 minutes in the afternoon and that it’ll take 10 minutes preparation and so you need 30-40 minutes set aside. He talks about the post nap grogginess, so there is that to take account of as well. If it’s too much or the wrong time it’ll mess up your night sleep instead of complementing it. All in all, it’s quite discouraging. I’m going to try doing it because I’m desperate enough to try anything, but what person lives a life where they can set aside pretty much an hour in the afternoon to napping? A privileged person who probably doesn’t need to???? I certainly won’t be implementing it on a regular basis because my afternoons are never going to revolve around the idea of setting aside an hour. I am also pretty certain that there is no way I will fall asleep within the allotted time of ten minutes. Lying down to sleep is pretty well guaranteed to mean I lie there bolt awake with sleep as unattainable as any wild fancy.

I can see all the above is written with the ingrained negativity of a person whose sleep deprivation sets the tone and nature of everything they do. I hope I might be proved wrong. Nothing would thrill me more than to be able to add this to my ‘Changed my life’ bookshelf. And if anybody else has taken the advice, I’m really curious to know how it’s turned out for you!

 

 

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

With Clock Dance I started doubting Anne Tyler for the first time. Why, after all, should the 22nd novel not have run out of steam? Refreshing my memory I see that I read it in a day. But it didn’t have the impact of most of the 21 predecessors. Nonetheless, in the very same shop as I picked up Clock Dance I spotted Redhead by the Side of the Road. Of course I bought it. And it is a gem by any standards. The reader finds themselves in that zone of OMG, late seventies and nailing it. Not just nailing it, but gets into the head of a computer nerd who voluntarily falls from grace, where grace is defined as being success of the Silicon Valley ilk.

My mother started reading it and called it ‘light’. I suppose that was because, like me, she read it immediately after Ferrante’s Lying Lives of Adults. But although Tyler has a light touch entirely lacking in Ferrante, that belies the topic of her work, which is always The Human Condition. When my mother said to me that Micah is like her, always having to pick up after other people, I told her I’d remind her she said that when she’d finished it. Because by the end, Micah discovers that it is he and not everybody else who is the problem. Because he expects perfection, seemingly everybody does wrong by him. It’s a revelation and I wondered if my mother would learn anything about herself from it.

Italian Life, a Modern Fable of Loyalty and Betrayal by Tim Parks

On his website Tim Parks insists that much of this novel is made up…and maybe that’s true. On the other hand, you can see why he’d need to say that.

To begin with, the reader is mainly laughing whilst shaking their head. But as the story unfolds, it begins to horrify and you realise that you don’t even know how that happened, the process by which the laughing stopped. The night before I finished it, I had an angry sleep. James’ boss, the Rector, is – put-downable, by which I mean the world would be a much better place without this scumbag. I laid in bed probably feeling about the same as Robert De Niro does the night before he does the scenes where he bashes people’s heads in with whatever sporting equipment he happens to be carrying at the time. BRING IT ON. Memo to PA: cancel my craps game in the morning. I’m playing baseball.

Another way of putting all this is that it’s very hard to believe it’s made up. It could scarcely feel more real. And, as is so often the case when I read literature set in Italy, I see my own childhood, which was quite brutal in parts, on the page. The irony being that my father perpetuated what he had intended to avoid when raising kids. Uggggh.

I have a friend who is Italian working in an Australian university after doing her PhD here. Although she is having a miserable time, as all academics are – the ones who do all the shitwork, not the management academics who take all the money – I do wonder if it is nonetheless a better scene than she’d be experiencing at her level in Italy. I must ask her.

This is my first Tim Parks, he’s a great writer who I suspect is undervalued for the reason we look down on so many talented people today. He is good at more than one thing and declines to specialise. He is a highly regarded translator, a critic of note, a writer of memoir, and last but not least a talented novelist. I’d never heard of him and nor had half a dozen other well and widely read people I asked. I’ve now collected half a dozen more by him from secondhand shops. I’m going to read the lot.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

I read this several years ago, and catching up now to put pen to page.

All games players should read the first half or so of this book. As I read it, page after page was covered in notes, ‘yes’ ‘no’ ‘really?’ ‘but’….

What Kahneman discusses in this book is something we’ve all known in a less rigorous way, perhaps – the intuitive and the analytical paths to decision making and action.

Two Systems

Psychologists have been intensely interested for several decades in the two modes of thinking evoked by the picture of the angry woman and by the multiplication problem, and have offered many labels for them. I adopt terms originally proposed by the psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West, and will refer to two systems in the mind, System 1 and System 2.

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

The labels of System 1 and System 2 are widely used in psychology, but I go further than most in this book, which you can read as a psychodrama with two characters.

Surely you chess and bridge players are already sitting up and paying attention. We all know about that psychodrama. He continues:

When we think if ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do. Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book. I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. The automatic operations of System 1 general surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps. I also describe circumstances in which System 2 takes over, overruling the freewheeling impulses and associations of System 1. You will be invited to think of the two systems as agents with their individual abilities, limitations, and functions.

Of course this hasn’t been written with game players in mind, and you may, like me, find yourself disagreeing with some of the ideas here. For a start, System 1 is based on the infinite hard work of System 2. As far as playing games go, you aren’t born with S1, it grows and improves because of S2. However, it is definitely food for thought and may help clarify aspects of how you are thinking and how you might address issues.

Educational and sometimes astonishing when it comes to how bad we humans are at dealing with data. There is a chapter dealing with Linda.  It’s quite incredible to see that around 90% of undergrads at major universities (I assume US), when presented with details leading to this:

Which alternative is more probable?
Linda is a bank teller.
Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

As the author notes, 89% of undergraduates had violated the rules of probability.

Equally, people were more likely to favour as more likely, the scenario of ‘an earthquake in California leading to a massive flood’, than they were the scenario of ‘a massive flood in the US’

and, most amusingly for all my sports betting friends, the scenario set at Wimbledon with Borg #1 at the time:

A. Borg will win the match
B. Borg will lose the first set
C. Borg will lose the first set but win the match
D. Bord will win the first set but lose the match

The critical items are B and C. B is the more inclusive event and its probability must be higher than that of an event it includes. Contrary to logic, but not to representativeness or plausability, 72% assigned B a lower probability than C

An important part of the book looks at financial investment at low and high levels. Highly worth reading to see what is being done to us from the top.