This year’s Cards Against Humanity secret Xmas surprise has begun, and on day one, they’ve delighted buyers (I’m one!) by sending us a share certificatefor an infinitesimal fraction of a stretch of US/Mexican borderlands, along with details of their plans to keep the land secure from Trump’s attempts to seize it and build a stupid wall on it.
The first line of defense is a pack of rabid attack lawyers from the firm of Graves, Dougherty, Hearon, & Moody, who’ve penned a letter vowing to fight any eminent domain seizure with everything they have, running out the clock on the Trump administration before any wall can be built.
The second line of defense is much more direct: Cards Against Humanity have built a 30’ trebuchet, a medieval siege engine used to knock down walls since the 12th century, as an object lesson in just how far behind the times Donald Trump’s mentality is. The have paid 300 gold to increase its attack damage, so it’s very powerful.
It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point.
And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again.
And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil.
“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”
So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.
THANK YOU FOR THIS.
Because at its heart LOTR is WWI fiction, and nothing kills your optimism like watching your friends die at the Somme.
Chris Vickery from Upguard found an Army Amazon Web Services instance with no password or encryption, containing 100GB of data on a defunct NSA program called Red Disk.
Red Disk was to have been a cloud system for the NSA to use to coordinate battlefield intelligence. The Agency spent more than $93 million on the program before the Pentagon pulled the plug. Nothing of any value was salvaged from that $93 million investment.
The first time I interacted with the US medical system was when I was a student at Michigan State University with a comprehensive travel insurance package my bank sold me before I left Canada: the cafeteria food gave me my first case of acid reflux and after it had persisted for several days, I went to the walk-in clinic on campus.
As soon as they found out I was insured, they sent me – a 21-year-old, healthy young person – for an EKG, a full blood panel, and urine and stool tests, before saying, “Huh, that’s bad heartburn all right. Go take a proton pump inhibitor.” I forget what the total bill was for that, but it ran to the thousands (also, don’t take proton pump inhibitors! They have crazy long-term side effects. Take an H2 blocker instead!).
As the healthcare business has boomed and concentrated into ever-larger groups of ever-more rapacious for-profit firms, the wastage has only ever increased. As Propublica’s Marshall Allen writes in a deep-dive, America has become a country where doctors suggest that children get ear-piercing procedures while they’re already under, then bill their parents for $1,877. It’s a place where women who have cysts in their breasts are given multiple, unnecessary, unindicated imaging scans, then have the clear fluid that’s eventually drawn from their breasts sent for unnecessary cancer tests (one woman Allen profiles just bought some needles and now she drains her own cysts).
Pharma companies produce patented medicine in quantities that guarantee some will be thrown away, and fiddle the expiry dates so even more ends up in the trash. It goes on and on.
The upshot is that incentives matter: people who go to the doctor’s office worried about breast cancer will get whatever procedures the doctor recommends (especially if the doctor won’t treat their cysts unless they agree to expensive, superfluous procedures), and since the doctor and the doctor’s employer benefit when that woman gets as many procedures as possible, the procedures multiply.
Healthcare is a perfect seller’s market. The invisible hand guides sellers to maximize their shareholders’ return by overtreating patients and wasting as much as possible. But it’s a wildly imperfect buyer’s market – at the extreme, someone having a heart attack doesn’t shop around for an ER; but even when it’s a mother sending a kid in for a routine procedure and telling the surgeon she’s OK with an ear-piercing at the same time (“it could be a nice thing for a child”), then getting a $1,877.86 bill for “operating room services,” the system’s market fundamentals guarantee wastage.
Cartoonist Grant Snider created this heartfelt Ode to Lost Pens for all of us who’ve lost pens and will no doubt lose some more. May we all find a lost pen the moment we need it most.
there’s a website where you put in two musicians/artists and it makes a playlist that slowly transitions from one musician’s style of music to the other’s
