According to KnowYourMeme.com, contemporary use of the phrase “this is fine” to mean the exact opposite comes from a comic called Gunshow. The specific strip featuring the dog in the burning building denying that anything is wrong is subtitled “The Pills Are Working.”
See also “having a normal one,” or “having a very normal day,” meaning losing your goddamn mind.
BLDGBLOG notes that this would be the perfect setting for a post-apocalyptic horror movie: “unwary climate refugees of the near-future hiking through the forests of a superheated American South… approaching a super nest the size of train yard, its buzzing mistaken for the hopeful drone of distant machinery. ”
A co-worker of mine recently needed to find a new primary care physician, as one does when moving to a new town and getting a new insurance company. So I got to hear her call number after number on her insurance company’s guide to available doctors and have various versions of the following conversation:
“Hello, is this Dr. So-and-so’s office? Yes, I’d like to make a new patient appointment. Well, you’re listed as taking new patients. Gargantuan Health Insurance Corp. You’ve never even heard of them? Well, they’ve heard of you. They said you were in-network!”
I am not surprised that a list is wrong or woefully out of date. After all, patient lists fill up, people switch jobs, practices change their insurance policies. So it wouldn’t be a surprise to have a few outdated items in a directory.
Providing accurate and up-to-date guides is not easy, but it’s not impossible. But an insurer has every reason to avoid doing it. An incorrect and woefully out-of-date list is a barrier to access, and putting up barriers to access is good for the bottom line. What better way to prevent people from using expensive medical services than by making it hard for them to find a doctor?
The problem is especially acute for mental health care, because it’s more expensive to provide, and people in psychiatric distress find it especially difficult to navigate actively hostile processes, meaning that dark pattern of bad lists is especially good at keeping them from using their insurance.
Normal Mainstream Republicans Republican legislators in Oregon have walked out in order to break quorum and avoid voting on a climate change bill. That’s an OK, if extreme, stunt in support of impending climate disaster. They have been ordered to return and will be pursued by the state police. This is an escalation, but it’s sort of part of the game. One legislator has gotten an antigovernment militia to provide security and has told the police they’d better be sending heavily armed men who are willing to die if they expect to drag him back to his job to vote on a climate change bill. Yeah.
Meanwhile, Pew Social Trends notes that “There is a sharp partisan divide in attitudes about interracial marriage… Only 28% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents” believe that interracial marriage is a good thing.
I’ve finally gone and joined a book club, and the book we’re reading is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and it’s every bit as heartbreaking as you’d expect — lapse after lapse of medical ethics, multigenerational trauma, all the inequalities of American society laid bare. And the author keeps inserting herself into the story in a way that just underscores the shortcomings of every well-meaning white liberal endeavor. It’s kind of a slog.
SO HEARTWARMING! When this little boy’s family couldn’t afford lifesaving surgery his local Home Depot gave him a free shovel and drove him out to the desert to dig his own grave — pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) May 30, 2019
Semantics
minor 2019 semantic nit: now that all the fascists have come out of hiding, we should use that term “cryptofascists” just for fascists who also happen to own Bitcoin — welcome to dot 🏳️🌈 (@WelcomeToDot) May 28, 2019
A few weeks ago someone asked me what I do for work, and I had a very hard time coming up with an answer that fit into just a few words. I don’t know why I didn’t come up with something exciting and funny (Amethyst broker to the stars! Sex instructor! Marijuana sommelier!), or simple and accurate (nonprofit marketing freelancer). But I was stumped. I hesitated. What do I even do? Who am I? How did I get here? (Letting the days go by…)
More recently, I made a political donation and the form required me to list my occupation and employer. I started to write down my title and the hospital where I’m currently working, but then I realized that’s not strictly accurate. I don’t work for the hospital. I work for a temp agency that’s a subsidiary of a larger temp-agency holding company.
So I put down “temp” and the name of my sub-agency, since I can’t actually remember the name of the holding company. Then I felt sort of insignificant and temporary. And then I reminded myself that we shouldn’t let ourselves be defined by our jobs but by ourselves: “in a society where you are what you do full-time — and you’re only as good as how much you earn doing it — identifying yourself as anything can feel like a form of hubris.”
And then I went and listened to the song “Amethyst” by Low forty or fifty times on repeat. The color bleeds and fades to white…
The Buzzfeed style guide is the definitive resource for correct spelling on the internet. Not sure whether “O-face” gets a hyphen and a capital O? Buzzfeed will tell you it does! Unsure of the correct number of r’s to put into the Cardi B catchphrase “okurrr?” Buzzfeed knows! It’s a minimum of three, but more if you’re really emphatic about that affirmative. Okurrrrrrr?
So, let’s talk economic policy: Misguided austerity policies have impoverished people all over Europe and the US, but the NYT has an incredibly crushing example of how it’s played out Cumbria, abandoned by the young, by bus service, by hospitals. If you read nothing of the article, just know that it ends with someone lamenting that “it would have been a wonderful place to die.”
Actually, no. You know what, they all sort of go together. “Pro-life” legislators close rural hospitals, urban hospitals, family-planning clinics, sexual-education programs, childcare programs… and then claim Democrats are the party of death.
Mainstream Republicans
Turning Point USA is a college-Republican group. A leader at the Las Vegas chapter has recently been ousted after a video of him went viral. Guess what he was saying?
Imagine being at the beginning of a campaign in which every democratic candidate is going to be called a baby-killer who wants to let immigrant rapists into the country to illegally vote and worrying that impeachment will “energize” the republican base.
— Mass for Shut-ins (podcast) (@gin_and_tacos) May 8, 2019
(What stage of capitalism are we in where fast food chains care more about mental health than most public officials?)
Hindsight will be 2020 Paul Krugman has a warning about the old white guys running for office this year: they are arrogant enough to think they can transcend partisanship. Biden thinks he can “reach across the aisle” and Sanders thinks he can sweep across divides with idealistic policy. Neither seems to grasp what will actually happen if Dems take the presidency but the Senate and Supreme Court are still dominated by what’s basically a rebooted John Birch Society. Speaking of which…
Here is an official statement from the White House, claiming that Democrats kill babies:
As Democrat Governors in NY & VA advocate for late term abortion & even infanticide – & Democrats in Congress refuse to allow a vote on the Born-Alive bill – TODAY in Times Square an ultrasound will be shown for all to see, demonstrating the miracle of life. #AliveFromNewYork
Let me reiterate: the Vice-President of the United States is claiming that his opponents are in favor of legal infanticide. This is how you incite murder. This is how you get support for refusal to cede power after losing an election.
When I broke my hand in college, I set the bone & splinted it myself. This was the first time I found out this wasn’t normal, because I grew up either w/o insurance or w/ my mom’s terrible work insurance & not enough savings to ever afford the copay
— torrin a. greathouse (@TAGreathouse) May 4, 2019
My first boyfriend committed suicide at 19 after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and not being able to refill his meds or get treatment after being released from the psych hospital. A thousand other things, but it all started there.
My father killed himself so he wouldn’t bankrupt the family trying to treat his Parkinson’s. He was my best friend. We did a Go Fund Me for his medical care and ended up using it for his funeral
— Erin Dewey Lennox (@ErinDeweyLennox) May 3, 2019
In Oct of 2018 My friend niema went on Facebook asking if anyone had any Albuterol she could have because she couldn’t afford to get any at the time. She died early the next morning after an attack. She was an amazing human being. pic.twitter.com/V6MD8KaRii
When my employer told me I needed to come back to work or else my families health insurance would lapse.
I took that phone call while sitting in a PICU room next to my 4 year old who was in a medically induced coma
In my economics class this week we learned about asymmetric information and adverse selection, as exemplified by the lemon problem. The classic example is used cars: if someone has a good car to sell, they know it’s a good car and want to get the best price for it. But the buyer can’t know whether it’s good or not, and won’t pay top dollar for it. Therefore, only sellers of lemons enter the market, driving down prices and driving out sellers with good products. This is resolved with market signals like guarantees, which are costly to sellers of low-quality products and cheap for sellers of good-quality products.
The second example we got was education. Your extension school degree, our professor says, may or may not improve your actual productivity or value as a worker. There are people who argue that educational attainment doesn’t actually improve productivity. But it demonstrates your productivity. It is theoretically more time-consuming and therefore more expensive for a low-productivity worker to pursue a degree.
Your degree, in other words, is a badge saying you can jump through arbitrary hoops. It’s an expensive piece of paper that demonstrates how hard you can work to get expensive pieces of paper. (This model does not, of course, take into account any of the other reasons that some people might find it harder to attend and graduate from college).
It was not exactly the most inspiring motivation to study for my exam.
A while back, the NRA hired the famously ethical Oliver North (if you’ve forgotten, check this cartoon musical refresher) as its president. This has not turned out very well, as the New Yorker reports. Vast sums of NRA money have gone to outside consulting firms controlled by executives, which is always sleazy and usually criminal:
Marc Owens, who served for ten years as the head of the Internal Revenue Service division that oversees tax-exempt enterprises, recently reviewed these records. “The litany of red flags is just extraordinary,” he said. “The materials reflect one of the broadest arrays of likely transgressions that I’ve ever seen. There is a tremendous range of what appears to be the misuse of assets for the benefit of certain venders and people in control.” Owens added, “Those facts, if confirmed, could lead to the revocation of the N.R.A.’s tax-exempt status.”
Politics and media have long been vulnerable to this sort of affinity scamming, but the right seems to have really gone overboard. Brad DeLong was pointing out back in 2015 that the presidential candidacy of Ben Carson seemed to be run largely as a way to run a lucrative direct-mail operation and then use the publicity to hawk nutritional supplements. Trump’s campaign seems to have been the same thing, funneling campaign money into his enterprises and his own pockets. (The left is not immune to this same scam, of course: the Bernie Sanders campaign spent over $400,000 of donor money on copies of books by Bernie Sanders).
Disgraced ex-judge and alleged serial kiddie-diddler Roy Moore is leading in the polls ahead of 2020 Senate primary. “Polls this far out are mostly a matter of name recognition,” AL.com reminds us, but it’s still not a good look for rank-and-file Republicans.
Wait, what? The March 18 episode of the War On Cars podcast features a surprising guest: Ray Magliozzi of NPR’s Car Talk. “My brother hated cars….He was against cars because of all of the things they do to our lives and to our world. And I agree.”
The medium is the message Flat roofs have historically been more urban, and that may be related to why proposed suburban buildings with flat roofs seem to generate more opposition than peaked-roof buildings.
Twitter curation
prequels i’d like to see get made: •Jaw •Apocalypse Then •The Blair Witch Assignment •Snakes Getting A Ride To The Airport •Dance Lessons With Wolves •Star Disagreements
ThisIsFine.gif Students who protested a campus speaker will be charged with misdemeanors. This man was just acquitted… after spending four years in jail awaiting trial. From last spring but no less relevant: What happens when you kill a bicyclist? (Answer: nothing. It’s totally legal to kill cyclists. All my neighborhood Facebook and Nextdoor groups feature a great deal of victim-blaming for dead or injured cyclists, and often fantasizing about deliberately hitting them. Twitter wags often note that, for a white man, getting on a bicycle in a major city is a good educational experience about the lives of others, the way they have to be constantly aware that the world can get incredibly dangerous at any moment, and that when it does, everyone will say it’s their fault for being in the way.)
The other day, Spotify recommended me a playlist of new rock music, which is something of a reminder that rock music is now a specialty genre. Even before 2017, when hip-hop officially became the most popular genre in the US, rock was in a decline behind pop and hip-hop and r&b. But when the Coachella music festival didn’t even have any rock acts in the lineup, it was pretty clear that rock had lost its salience to the broad popular-music consumer audience.
They just don’t seem to be minting any new rock stars these days. Quick, name a rocker under 60. (Subscriber #7, I’m sure you can, but come on, Ty Segall is a niche artist.) Jack White, maybe? He’s well-known enough, I guess, but I bet you he can still walk down the street without being mobbed by fans.
So, rock stars are fading away. But the metaphorical “rock star” is still everywhere. Post Malone’s mumbled hip-hop anthem “Rockstar” was at the top of the charts for weeks, Rockstar energy drink is in every corner store, Rockstar Games is the video game company, and every other job listing describes what they want in a “rock star” contributor.
What do we even mean by “rock star” in the post-rock era?
Post Malone obviously means excess and debauchery (and the scene has definitely gotten excessive and debauched—this profile of flavor-of-the-week rapper Lil Pump is horrifying and sad). Rockstar energy drink just means everything’s turned all the way up: loud music, bright graphics, assertively gross energy drink flavors, and way too much caffeine. Rockstar games… yeah, also excess, both in the games themselves and in the long hours it takes to produce them.
What do employers mean by rock star? Not getting drunk and trashing the conference room, but still someone whose skills and performance earn them leeway for misbehavior. And obviously, a dude. (How many of you thought about Meg White when I mentioned her ex-husband Jack? Aside from subscriber #7?)
I’m guessing that in a few years, we’ll think of that metaphor as yet another overlooked sign of something amiss in our culture. (Although not that overlooked, given the number of articles with titles like “You Shouldn’t Hire That Rock Star Candidate“).
Anyway, one of the new rock songs bouncing around is called Sawed-Off Shotgun. It’s about giving in to mental illness, addiction, and pointless violence. Good times. If it ever gets any radio play, I look forward to finding out whether they bleep the words “shotgun” and “oxycodone” the way they would in a hip-hop song.
Some supervisors even gave their officers pre-signed blank warrants — in effect, illegally handing them the authority to begin the deportation process.
Hey, you remember what happened after Baltimore police were acquitted in the death of Freddie Gray? Cops rapidly decided that rather than comply with rules against brutalizing the citizenry, they’d just quit doing their jobs. Results were … not good.
The department’s officers responded swiftly, by doing nothing. In Baltimore it came to be known as “the pullback”: a monthslong retreat from policing, a protest that was at once undeclared and unmistakably deliberate — encouraged, some top officials in the department at the time believe, by the local police union.
…
Batts admitted he was having trouble getting officers to do their job. “I talked to them again about character and what character means,” he told me and other reporters following a City Council hearing.
That’s the truly cruel thing about it. We actually do need law enforcement, and too many poor and minority communities suffer from a paradoxical combination of not enough law enforcement and too much policing.
Secretly Ironic 