AtD flashback to Reef & Yashmeen and roulette and chance

[Mark Kohut]

Does AtD have just about EVERYTHING IN IT? like those who find that in the Talmud or the Christian Bible or the Koran?   Or, of course, how much is just me, mad connection-finder everywhere?
   
  Anyway, back to the subject line, I SIMPLY OPENED a book called "Every Man a Specualtor; A History of Wall Street in American Life" by one Steve Fraser, Harpercollins 2005, to page 251 and I read this:
   
  "The very notion of chance was undergoing a philosophical reevaluation. Modernist thinkers
  like William James and Charles Sanders Pierce abandoned an older mechanistic worldview
  resting on a rigorous adherence to the laws of cause and effect. They came to terms with 
  an inherently uncertain universe governed by probabilities and devised notions of the 'standard deviation' and "risk assessment" to lend it coherence. Chance was thereby made both inescapable and controllable. The gambler's mad conceit, that he depended not on luck
  but on a kind of inner divination through which he exercised a magical control over his fate, was smuggled into the "science' of speculation....
           "As Walter Benn Michaels notes, the world seemed not so much rule-bound as it was controllable by artifice and intention. The Stock Market and its oscillations were merely phenomenal instances of this deeper orderly disorder.'---p. 252  
   
  Now is THIS a gloss (one of them) on Reef & Yashmeen's roulette 'work'----and maybe TRP on 20th Century capitalism and the whole f'in' UNIVERSE???!!!!  [I am not crazy enough to think TRP got anything from this book, but that he already knew this stuff that Mr. Fraser
  literalized.]   [right before this section, we read of "bucker shops' and Teddy Roosevelt and risk-taking in 'darkest Africa']....!!
   
   
   
   

       
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