Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

recent posts

about

An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Steamlands Session 9: The Drowning Well

    The morning after ...
    The morning after …

    The murderer was clearly in the volcano. Our heroes, having been asked to go and find him, set off up the mountainside to the location of his victim, from whence they hoped to track him. Now they were joined by Grunstein the wizard, who had travelled ahead to Steamline Spa on his own business. The slopes of the volcano loom over the northern side of Steamline Spa, and take some hours to climb to the misty summit; but all these slopes were smooth and perfect as an old Emperor’s burial mound, and a smooth path wound up the sides of the volcano, through fields scattered with sheep and dour shepherds. Brom Barca’s attempts to buy sheep having been rudely rebuffed, the group trudged on without incident until they reached the murder scene, a smear of blood and gore behind one of the volcano’s scattered basalt boulders. Rounding the rock, they found a scene of horror: the body of the dead shepherd had been torn apart and scattered across the land behind the boulder, disfigured so thoroughly and violently that it was almost impossible to say how the victim had died. Nonetheless, Leticia the elven swordmaster was able to piece together the clues; the attack had started with a sudden strike of the shepherd’s head against the boulder, and the shepherd had then been mercilessly mutilated while he yet lived. There was evidence that he had been drugged – perhaps with a soporific called Poggle’s Drakeboon – in order to ensure his unhappy compliance with his own dismal destruction. They could not find the head, though the ears were resting on a ledge of the boulder …

    Having established they were most certainly dealing with a murder, the PCs set off up the mountainside to catch this evil Otto Mercads. Grunstein employed a new spell to transform himself into a wolf, and easily followed the scent of death and terror up the mountainside. They marched for another hour or so, into the mists that surrounded the top of the volcano. Here was a caldera, surrounded by high but broken walls of old volcanic stone. A narrow crevasse ran through the caldera wall, and they found themselves looking inside the volcano. The caldera was a rough bowl shape, filled with steam and a gentle rain from the higher steam as it emerged from the caldera to suddenly cool in the mountain air. A narrow path ran down from their crevasse to the bottom of the bowl, but it was impossible to see where it ended due to the steam billowing around the caldera. They reached the caldera a little after midday, so the bright mountain sunlight was streaming in great golden lances through the steam, but it was obvious that in just an hour or two this cloistered feature would be shrouded in clammy darkness as its walls cut out the sun. Realizing it best to do battle in the bright noon light, Azahi the dwarf marched forth down the narrow path. The others followed, and as they approached the bottom of the path they could hear the sounds of manic laughter echoing off the walls.

    At the bottom of the path they found a small, neatly laid-out camp under a lean-to, with the shepherd’s severed head in pride of place in the middle. The steam parted for them as they fanned out in the caldera, revealing a large central pool of nearly-boiling water. A large stone jutted into the pool, and on this outcrop they could see Otto Mercad’s crouched and chuckling, painting pictures of blood with a loop of intestine and talking to himself. They approached carefully but he did not seem to care, and just laughed manically as they grabbed him, beat him a little, and tied him up.

    Too easy. Just a few hours later they were leaving Steamline Spa with Otto chained in an empty wine barrel out of sight of prying eyes in their wagon …

    The storm and the Drowning Well

    That day’s travel was uneventful, but towards evening a vicious storm rolled in off the mountains, and they found themselves being pummeled by howling winds and heavy rain. Fortunately they had been told of an inn along the road, that most travelers a day out of Steamline Spa could expect to lodge at for the night. They redoubled their pace to this tavern, passing as they did a band of four road-wardens who had been called out in the inclement weather to attend a possible beastman raid. They were also surprised by a bounty hunter called Elizabeth, who emerged from the shadows of an old redgum to ask for their company on the final kilometre to the inn. She told them her horse had been lamed in the storm and, having killed it, she was walking to the inn to pick up the tail of her targets, two bandits who she had a mark on. A dour and tough-looking woman, she seemed more than capable of killing a horse and capturing two ruffians. All travellers on the road were focused now on the inn and respite from the rain, so few questions were asked; instead, they all slogged on through the gathering gloom, the howling winds and the mud.

    By the time they arrived it was not yet sunset, but the storm was so intense that it had blocked out most of the light, and they arrived at the gates of the inn feeling as if it were already late. Grunstein the wizard had transformed into a raven and flown ahead, so he missed the strange arcane markings daubed on the wall by the gate, and none of the other PCs were able to decode them. Against the backdrop of the raging storm they pushed their way through the rain-soaked doors of the inn compound, and found themselves lodging within.

    The inn was a large complex, consisting of a central three-storey mansion surrounded by stables, outhouses and gardens. The whole was ringed by a wall just over 2m high, made of dressed stone and thick enough both to repel any serious attempt at battery and to enable defenders standing atop the wall to fight back from crenelations. This kind of travelers rest is a common sight in the wilder fringes of civilization in the Steamlands, where local farmers are used to the predations of greenskins and, occasionally, beastmen. When a band is spotted approaching the neighbouring farms they lock up and flee to the travelers rest, from where they join together to fight off any siege and wait for roadwardens from other towns to relieve them. Like fighting summer fires, community defense is something that all remote farming hamlets practice at, and the scattered houses around the Drowning Well were no different, so it was no surprise to the PCs to find such a staunchly defensible tavern so far from civilization.

    So, the PCs ducked into the tavern and booked a night’s accomodation, and a cellar for Otto Mercads. The cellar was as safe as a prison cell, pre-fit with chains and a portcullis that locked only from the outside, as well as a staunch outer door that only a minotaur could smash through. The Drowning Well was obviously used to hosting its share of passing prisoners, because the landlord locked Mercads down in this hole without a single word of complaint, and the group were able to repair quickly to drinking and relaxing. The evening passed uneventfully, and after a few hours’ rest the PCs were able to retire for a long, relaxing sleep.

    The murders begin

    The PCS were woken by the maid’s screams during the dead of night. The storm was still raging outside, but the maid was so disturbed that her anguished cries could be heard over the racket of howling wind, driving rain and banging shutters. Of course our heroes ran into the hallway to see the problem, and found themselves facing a familiar scene of horror: one of the guest rooms was open, and the occupant had been murdered in a very familiar way – the same way as Otto Mercad’s victim. There was blood and body parts everywhere, and guests gathering in the darkened hall to retch and cry in horror at the sight. The PCs, along with Elizabeth the bounty hunter, took charge, shepherding the guests downstairs to the common room and rushing to check on Mercads. They found Mercads sitting comfortably in his cell, chuckling and grinning and with not a drop of blood on him. How had he done it?

    Other murders soon followed, with the maid, the landlord and his wife quick to succumb to some kind of brutish and supernatural force. Every time the murder was so reminiscent of Mercads’ artwork that the PCs just had to return to his cell to watch him, but the third time they returned they found him, too, dead, torn apart in the same way as the others. However this time they were fast enough to see the killer – a grotesque, incorporeal ghost, 3m tall and shaped like a beastman with a single eye. They attacked the ghost but it fled too fast, disappearing through a wall and out into the wilds of the night. Shocked, they realized that Mercads must have been the channel or conduit for some darker creature. They remembered finding a necklace made of a fleck of old beastman’s tusk when they captured him, and wondered if he might have been somehow connected with this ghost. While some of the PCs rushed to protect the guests in the common room, Gregor dashed to their own room to check on the chaos artifacts they were transporting to Heavenbalm, lest that should prove to be this beastman ghost’s true focus.

    The ghost wasn’t there though, it was gone … but the beastmen were coming.

    Artuta rises ...
    Artuta rises …

    The beastmen come

    Shortly after they saw the beastman ghost, the PCs heard yells and clamour from the front door. Residents from nearby farmhouses were gathering at the gate, telling urgent stories of a new horror: a horde of beastmen was gathering in the darkness to attack the inn. As they filed in, bedraggled and dishevelled from the storm, they and the residents began to prepare for a siege. The PCs, however, were distracted by a light in the corner of the compound. Approaching, they saw the vague outline of a ghostly form, glowing faintly and flickering in the onslaught of rain and wind. This was no beastman, but the remnant form of a witch hunter, obviously injured and looking desperate, and wearing clothes from a previous generation – the ghost of someone with something important to tell them? As they approached the ghost whispered to them with a voice that carried despite the snatching wind and rolling thunder:

    The truth is beneath the words. The truth …

    With these words he disappeared, revealing a slab of stone, scoured clean of earth by the rain and wind, on which a short passage was inscribed:

    Here lies Artuta,

    Most twisted of the changer’s brood,

    Cleansed by Solkan’s hands.

    He will not be the last.

    The PCs dug up the stone quickly, and beneath it they found a waterproof scrollcase, laid carefully in a hollow beneath the stone. Dashing out of the rain, they opened the case to find a torn piece of parchment, on which someone’s story was written:

    I do not know why I have written this but I feel death is close. Artuta stares up at me. His one eye is still, but maybe it watches. Foolish thoughts, but in the forest lurk the remains of his band, now led by the Shaman Grazzt. He has strange dark powers at his call. Who knows what he can do?

    What has brought this disquiet upon me? I cannot say, although a strange dream came to me last night. I was guarding Artuta even though he lies dead. Even in death, he led them. Yet I could not escape from this task for a wall surrounded me on all sides, a tunnel above through which I could see the stars. It was difficult to move, for my limbs were heavy.

    This vision fills me with fear.

    May Solkan watch over me.

    Were these the words of the ghostly witch hunter?

    At this point the party fragmented. Gregor fled back to his room and began a frenzied effort to destroy the amulet of the beastman tooth; Leticia and Brom Barca headed to the walls to coordinate the defense of the inn against the gathering horde of beastmen, who could now be heard outside the walls howling and preparing their attack; and Azahi the dwarven Trollslayer ran with Grunstein the wizard to the well after which the inn was named. Azahi had interpreted the “tunnel above through which I could see the stars” as the well, and wished to explore it. As he and Grunstein lowered themselves into the well they heard behind them the first roars of beastmen preparing for battle…

    Born under a subterranean star ...
    Born under a subterranean star …

    The well and the battle

    In the well Azahi and Grunstein found a tunnel leading into the earth below the inn. They followed it inward, Grunstein lighting the way with a cantrip, and soon found a locked stone door, on which a clear warning was written:

    Ye thatz enter here, beware

    For liez here, Artuta

    When he rizes

    Come hiz brood

    To spill the blood of all.

    The door was locked, and neither Grunstein nor Azahi a thief, but Azahi managed to remember a few hints of technical trickery from his dwarven tribe and disabled the lock. They opened the door to find a crypt, rough-hewn from the earth. In the centre was a depression covered in brush and rubbish; leaning against the walls of the room were four skeletons of beastmen. The mark of Tzeentch was carved into the wall at the far side of the room, and it was obvious what this room was – the resting place of something called Artuta, probably an ancient and powerful beastman. Grunstein began breaking up the first beastman skeleton, but before he had done much damage the other three came to life and attacked Azahi. The dwarf braced himself, and battle was joined; but as he fought the ghost of Artuta arose from the central resting place and fled out of the door. Both he and Grunstein struck at it, but their attacks failed to kill it, though they seemed to wound it badly. The ghost was now obviously more corporeal, gaining in power from the murders it had managed to commit, but still able to shift to ghost form, in which shape it drifted rapidly down the tunnel and out of the well into the stormy night.

    Upstairs, the beastmen had begun to gather together for battle. Their force was far larger than a normal beastman band, numbering perhaps 30 in all and with four beastman captains. Lurking at the rear near some kind of makeshift altar was a strange figure indeed – a smaller beastman similar in appearance to a Gor and lacking full horns, unarmed and dressed in tattered cloth but obviously in charge despite its small size. As Brom Barca and Leticia watched, this figure was joined by the ghost of Artuta the beastman, and the attack began.

    The inn compound had two gates, and the beastmen attacked both at once. Their attack was artless and brutal. A beastman captain charged forward, and used his enormous strength to boost a couple of Gor onto the walls; these then hauled the massive captain on, and they attacked. Meanwhile a gang of larger Gors lined up and took turns charging at the main gate, trying to smash it in with their horns. By this means, should the captain fail to seize the wall itself, his minions would still eventually beat down the gates. Unfortunately for this beastman captain and his Gor minions, Leticia and Brom Barca guarded the gates; Brom himself almost the size of a Gor took on the three minions, and Leticia moved forward to engage the captain, fighting with delicate poise and grace despite the slippery stones, the howling wind and the beating rain. The battle was short but brutal, and within a few short exchanges Brom and Leticia had slain their enemies. Leticia hacked off the head of the slain captain, and as Brom Barca lifted it high for all the beastmen to see the captain at the other gate began a temporary retreat. At this point Gregor joined them on the wall, scattering the fragments of the beastman amulet before him into the wind. This seemed to have no effect – the distant shaman ignored it, and Artuta’s flickering form did not change except to howl in rage at the retreating beastmen. Now Azahi and Grunstein also trudged up onto the wall through the rain, and our heroes grouped together ready to receive the next charge.

    As the beastmen milled about, preparing to make a new attack and being berated, beaten and enraged by their captains, Gregor remembered the Hochland long rifle he had looted from bandits on the journey to Steamline Spa. Though the ghost of Artuta was far from the walls and beyond easy range of a crossbow or longbow, it was not beyond the reach of a long rifle, and Artuta was obviously injured. Perhaps if Gregor were lucky … he carefully lined up the rifle, Brom Barca and Leticia holding their cloaks over him to try and prevent the worst of the rain from damping his powder. He fired as the beastmen formed their lines for another charge, and his bullet flew true … with a single howl of outrage and shock, Artuta’s ghost dissolved into the storm, vanquished by the witch hunter. The beastman shaman took one look back at the walls, screamed his rage to the uncaring tempest, and without further ado turned to flee into the distant woods. His followers, seeing the destruction of their plan, lost all their lust for battle and fled after him.

    The battle was done. The beastmen had failed to break the gate, and Artuta had been killed before they could drag any prisoners back to sacrifice for his manifestation. Whatever sick plot had been laid to wait here in the courtyard of the drowning well, it was done now. Though the PCs had inadvertently brought about the invocation of Artuta’s ghost by bringing Otto Mercads to the inn, they had triumphed over Artuta and his whole tribe. They could rest, and enjoy the reward of heroes. And heroes they must be, for in the morning they must surely head off in pursuit of the shaman, to uncover the full story of how Otto Mercads had become the kingpin in a plot to bring back an undead beastman; and to slay the shaman before he could foment more mischief. Perhaps in those hills they could find more dark magic to take to Heavenbalm for destruction … or perhaps there they would find their doom …

  • Decarbonization: Perspectives from Public Health

    And yet it still appeals to some ...
    And yet it still appeals to some …

    Recently Myles Allen wrote a piece for the Guardian suggesting we should use direct action to mandate fossil fuel companies deliver carbon capture technology, and appears to be juxtaposing this with carbon taxes. A few global warming blogs I read took issue with the piece. I’m suspicious about the feasibility of carbon capture technology, so the idea of forcing fossil fuel extractors to implement this technology seems far off to me, but I believe we need to get serious about carbon, so in principle the idea appeals to me, along with a whole bunch of emergency measures. Rational economics suggests that Allan’s policy is at best going to be no different to a carbon tax that applies an equivalent cost to carbon production, and probably less efficient, but I suspect that there is something going on here that lies outside of economic theory, and I think it can be well understood by reference to a couple of public health principles, and some successful public health campaigns. Basically, over the next 30 years we need to go carbon neutral, that is to a society that exhausts no carbon. If we delay, we may have to go negative. Some economists think we can do this simply by taxing carbon. I want to use the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) to show that’s probably impossible without broader measures; and then I will use the example of HIV to show that the debate about mitigation may also be a lost cause, or at least to show that we shouldn’t be too confident that humanity can solve a serious problem through mitigation measures alone.

    Comparing Decarbonization with the FCTC

    Let’s not beat around the bush: the purpose of the tobacco control movement is to eliminate the consumption of tobacco from the face of the earth. One day there will be no smokers, because smoking is a poison. But the goal of the FCTC is to achieve a non-smoking world through the free choice of individuals – through health promotion and intervention measures aimed at reducing smoking. The FCTC proposes a variety of methods to achieve this goal, but only one of them is taxation. Taxation has been a core tool deployed against tobacco, and with devastating effect, but it has not eliminated tobacco smoking. Taxes on tobacco in Australia, for example, have essentially increased exponentially since 1985, but they haven’t achieved their goal: something around about 20% of Australians smoke, and Australia (as the picture above shows) is one of the most aggressive anti-smoking nations on the planet.

    And this is the thing that is relevant to decarbonization: 16% of Australians still smoke, despite huge legislative efforts to convince them to stop. Not just punitive taxation, but a whole raft of other measures: plain packaging, banning smoking in public areas, very strict measures against underage smoking, bans on advertising, forcing cigarettes to be hidden from shop counters, widespread distribution of subsidized treatments for tobacco addiction, huge investment in educating general practitioners about smoking cessation, investing overseas aid money in developing alternatives to tobacco crops and increased funding to police action against illicit tobacco trading. With regards to children, a whole range of laws have been passed to prevent them from getting access to tobacco. Companies and public organizations – especially hospitals – have gone further, passing laws to prevent teachers, doctors and nurses smoking within sight of such facilities. The WHO will not employ smokers. Some states and countries have suggested a gradually increasing age-related ban, so that everyone coming of age in the west is permanently banned from smoking – a kind of generational form of prohibition.

    Yet despite this campaign, 16% of Australians still smoke. What would the equivalent measures be in a “voluntary” decarbonization scenario: finding that massive carbon taxes failed to prevent the use of carbon-based energy, governments would be required to ban certain uses of coal or oil, would force all petrol companies to use the same non-branded advertising, would require all public organizations to use non-fossil fuel energy and would push big private companies to do the same; would pass incredibly strict air quality laws; would invest aid money heavily in non-fossil fuel energy products; would introduce any other public measures against carbon that could be effectively policed; would heavily subsidize all alternative energy sources.

    Without these interventions, smoking rates would not have dropped to 16%; and smoking is an addictive substance. If exponentially increasing taxes cannot prevent smoking, why do carbon tax advocates think it will work to reduce carbon emissions to the required level : zero?

    The lessons of HIV and AGW mitigation strategies

    In the early years of the HIV epidemic, before treatments became available, the only prevention was behavioral change: wearing a condom, and always using a clean needle. In a few settings, promotion of condom use worked, but in sub-Saharan Africa HIV became a generalized epidemic before people even knew what it was, and by the time the preventive measures were understood it was widespread and devastating. In this context, mitigation through behavioral change became a completely ineffectual tactic. From 2000 under PEPFAR, the Presidents Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, testing and treatment strategies – essentially, adaptation strategies – became widespread in sub-Saharan Africa. This wasn’t due to any progressive plan of George Bush’s, but through dumb luck they were successful because treatment reduces the infectiousness of treated people by about 95%. In the long term, in the face of a complete failure to effectively disseminate behavioral change in Africa, testing and treatment made huge gains in combating HIV, and now there is a lot of confidence that if well managed and supported by international donors these strategies may be sufficient to eliminate HIV. Those of us (like me) who grew up in the era of HIV in the west, where HIV never became a generalized epidemic and gay men responded well to condom use initiatives, were initially unwilling to believe the success of test and treat strategies – we falsely believed that our mitigation strategies would work in all settings, but we were wrong. As the evidence came in, I changed my mind and now recognize that behavioural change for HIV (mitigation) is a tactic that works in unique settings (primarily, injecting drug users, politically connected gay men and unionized sex workers). In a generalized epidemic, such strategies fail.

    Of course, global warming is a classic generalized epidemic. Mitigation won’t work by itself, but at the moment we have no alternatives – just like HIV in the 1980s. We need to do whatever is necessary to prevent further spread of the disease, but as soon as someone finds an effective treatment (carbon capture and storage) we need to switch.

    Public health lessons for decarbonization

    If we can’t eliminate smoking through exponentially increasing taxes, why do we think we will do better with carbon? No one really cares if people choose to smoke, it’s a personal choice and a non-zero smoking rate is no big deal. But we need to be carbon neutral within 30 years. We couldn’t do that through taxation alone for smoking, so why does anyone think we can do it for decarbonization? Such a goal is going to require measures well in advance of the FCTC, and those measures are pretty harsh. We also need to accept the possibility that mitigation measures aren’t going to work. In health, naturally, no one assumes that prevention is the only cure. We look for a cure. The same attitude needs to be applied to carbon. We need a range of strict legislative responses, and we need major investment in projects to find cures. And we need to treat this situation with the same urgency we applied to the HIV epidemic – or more. Carbon taxes alone will not be enough. We need a full range of legal interventions, now.

  • Jim Crace’s Harvest: My First and Last Booker-nominated Novel?

    The 2013 Booker prize shortlist was released recently, and to my surprise I saw a book on the list that looked appealing: Jim Crace’s Harvest. I’ve never read a Booker prize winner and only read two books ever nominated – both by Margaret Atwood – so I thought it would be interesting to see if the prize functions as any kind of recommendation.

    I won’t make that mistake again.

    Harvest is a novel supposedly about the period of Enclosure in Britain, when land previously held in common was enclosed and privatized. As far as I understand it, the common view of history (and certainly the one I was taught in school in the UK when they taught this) was that Enclosure was an enormously important and beneficial land reform that improved productivity and wealth, and led to the modernization of Britain. An alternative theory of history that I think has some popularity amongst radical leftists (especially anarchists) and eco-radicals is that Enclosure was an act of theft, in which the wealthy and ruling classes of Britain expropriated land from their tenants, drove them out to form a landless labouring class, and then exploited them as cheap labour. I think there is some truth to this claim, though it needs to be counter-posed against whatever horrors subsistence farming on the feudal commons brought about for the peasantry; certainly when I was taught Enclosure at school in the UK, nobody mentioned sheep – it was presented as a way of improving productivity and the lives of peasants, and presented as having been introduced alongside the agricultural advances of crop rotation.
    So I was interested in a novel which explored a social drama against this context, of a village life being rapidly changed through Enclosure. The basic story is summarized at the Picador website:

    As late summer steals in and the final pearls of barley are gleaned, a village comes under threat. A trio of outsiders – two men and a dangerously magnetic woman – arrives on the woodland borders and puts up a make-shift camp. That same night, the local manor house is set on fire.

    Over the course of seven days, Walter Thirsk sees his hamlet unmade: the harvest blackened by smoke and fear, the new arrivals cruelly punished, and his neighbours held captive on suspicion of witchcraft. But something even darker is at the heart of his story, and he will be the only man left to tell it . . .

    Told in Jim Crace’s hypnotic prose, Harvest evokes the tragedy of land pillaged and communities scattered, as England’s fields are irrevocably enclosed. Timeless yet singular, mythical yet deeply personal, this beautiful novel of one man and his unnamed village speaks for a way of life lost for ever.

    The story proceeds very quickly from the harvest to the events described above. It is a straightforward plot, viewed through the eyes of a man who slowly gets excluded from his community as events turn nasty. It’s well written and evocative, although one quickly begins to see the technical devices Crace is using, so the prose becomes a bit same-same after a while. This isn’t a bad thing though, since the consistent style and the nature of the imagery are evocative of a late summer in the country of the distant past – you do feel like you’re reading about a different, simpler world of growers and spinners. Crace also manages to very solidly ground the lead character, Thirsk, in the foreground while making many of the villagers distant and washed out figures, not really described in detail and their inner lives hidden, in such a way that you do feel like you stand only with Thirsk, that you are something of an outsider, and that the village has an inner life you don’t understand. I think this is good for looking back at a time that we can’t really understand or feel any common cause with.

    However, the book has serious flaws. First and most importantly, the ending is completely unsatisfactory. You don’t find out most of the reasons why most of the things described in the blurb happened, and you certainly don’t get to see any kind of resolution of any of them. Maybe it was Crace’s intention to have 7 days of chaos fall on a village for no reason, to be left unresolved and confused at the end … if so, he’s a punishing and mean writer. I think more likely he thought that he had resolved the story, and didn’t realize he hadn’t at all. Walter Thirsk’s final actions are also incomprehensible and weak, and we don’t see in them what I think Crace intended us to see. The plot is building to an interesting resolution involving several forces – the villagers, the strangers, the two lords and Walter – but instead all these separate threads go basically unresolved (except perhaps the strangers). To the extent that any of these people are built up as characters in the novel (and most aren’t, or drift through it as archetypes), Crace betrays them by showing a complete lack of interest in their fate.
    Second, Enclosure plays almost no role in this story. Enclosure does not happen to the village, and the technician charged with the central task of implementing it is treated in such a way as to give the reader the impression that no one is interested in Enclosure and it is not going to happen. We are told that the strangers are fleeing from the enclosure of their own lands but we see no evidence of this, and because we never meet those strangers properly we cannot hear their story of Enclosure or know if their flight was the correct response – maybe they were criminals at home, too? Much of the resistance to Enclosure described in the book is also based on cultural objections, with no deeper political or structural analysis. We don’t hear any hint of empoverishment or land theft, though there is the impression given that some villagers will have to leave; nonetheless the villagers’ objection to Enclosure (described entirely through the opinions of Walter Thirsk) is primarily cultural: they have a way of life they don’t want to change, and they don’t like sheep. I don’t think, given this, that it can be said that “Harvest evokes the tragedy of land pillaged and communities scattered, as England’s fields are irrevocably enclosed.” There is nothing irrevocable about the enclosure in this book (that doesn’t happen), and the reasons the community is scattered are to do with witchcraft and feudal terror, not enclosure – which most of the community are still ignorant of when they leave. Even the three we supposedly know are on the lam from their previous community are clearly criminals, and could be fleeing for that reason as much as any other. I guess we’re meant to see the interaction between village and strangers as a clash between the new, threatening post-enclosure world and the Britain of the rural past, but I don’t see it, and the villagers respond to the strangers solely on the basis of their foreignness – their response is that of old Britain, and not motivated by (or even aware of) the possibility that these strangers might be a new class of dangerous, land-less worker. There is no political struggle in this book. Which is fine, but I think the role of Enclosure in the story has been completely over-egged.
    Finally, this story has no special underlying thread or deeper plot: it is not the case that “something even darker is at the heart of [Walter Thirsk’s] story.” It’s just a tale of stupidity and nastiness on the edge of the earth, and the nastiness is so disconnected from sense and so pointless and stupid that it’s hard to credit on its face, let alone as the surface manifestation of “something even darker.” This is a story of a bad lord and some stupid villagers. Maybe the bad lord has a bigger plot to what he is doing, but we don’t find out because his story is not resolved; and if he does have a bigger plot, it’s clear what it is, and it’s not “something even darker,” it’s just plain old-fashioned viciousness deployed in the economic interests of the ruling class – something the book studiously fails to draw out in any great detail.
    So in the end I just can’t see what is special enough about this book to win it a nomination for a Booker prize. It’s just a simple though well-written story about some trouble in a village. What are their criteria? Why is this prize special? Certainly some of the winners look like insufferably self-conscious attempts at literary fiction, and I guess that being on the panel must be unrewarding drudgery if you have to read through 6 or 8 novels desperately trying to be “weighty” without offending anyone. Harvest certainly gave the impression of trying to be weighty and literary without actually having anything resembling a decent plot or systematic under-pinning. It’s good, but it’s not exceptional and it’s certainly not well-crafted.
    I’ve noticed that the Booker prize has come in for a fair bit of criticism on the grounds that it is really just a sheltered workshop for a dying and falsely ring-fenced genre, “literary fiction,” and I think I’m inclined to agree. This blogger describes the panel as an “ethnically pure, upper middle class cartel” and bemoans the lack of science fiction or fantasy in the prize. Certainly, looking at the lists of past short-lists and winners it seems pretty clear that the “cartel” are restricting the prize to an in-group of a few authors. For example, the 1985 list includes Doris Lessing, Peter Carey and Iris Murdoch – 50% of the list are past winners or regular short-listers. How is it possible that amongst all the literature of the Commonwealth for a single year, the same three people can end up getting in the top 6? Is the pool of good literature in the Commonwealth really so limited? Iain M. Banks’s The Wasp Factory was released in 1984, and he has published almost every year since – yet he doesn’t appear in a single short list, and I can’t see any evidence that this novel made the longlist either. Similarly Mieville’s best-constructed three works (The Scar, Perdido Street Station and The City and The City) don’t appear, neither does Philip Pullman, Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and of course nothing from the crime and mystery genres. I would say that The Rivers of London is a better work than Harvest, yet nothing like it appears on the short list. As others have observed, this prize exists to police the perimeters of a dying genre of literature, whose purveyors are labouring under the false impression is not a genre, but somehow the essence of fiction. It isn’t – it’s a dull backwater for people who take themselves too seriously.
    From next year, the Booker will be opened to American writers, and some see this as the end of the prize. I’m not a big fan of contemporary American fiction, so I don’t see that as a likely outcome, but were the Booker panel to consider science fiction, fantasy and genre fiction then yes, that would be it for the Commonwealth writers – and certainly for British writers. How amusing, then, that a Guardian critic of this decision writes:
    When eligibility shifts from the UK, Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe to English-language novels published in the UK, it is hard to see how the American novel will fail to dominate. Not through excellence, necessarily, but simply through an economic super-power exerting its own literary tastes
    Well, whether it’s an economic super-power exerting its literary tastes or a white upper middle class conspiracy theory, we’re not going to see a shift to any kind of recognition of actual quality in literature. At least if the Americans are let in, there might be a chance of introducing a bit of democratic diversity to the judging. Or will there? I bet next year’s prize will contain the same narrow range of “acceptable” lit-fic blandness, and not a whiff of genre fiction in sight. Which is a great thing for all 6 lit-fic authors still plugging away at that stuff, but a shame for all the unsung novelists who write genuinely good stuff that people actually want to read.
    At least until it diversifies we can be fairly confident that the Booker prize is a warrant of mediocrity, and avoid wasting money on its nominees …

  • Steamlands Session 8: Bushrangers!

    Brom Barca at the docks
    Brom Barca at the docks

    There are secrets in Separation City, but our heroes cannot plumb their depths from the confines of that small town – they must at some point follow the clues they have toward Heavenbalm and Store. Though they could stay a little longer to explore Separation City for further clues, our heroes now find themselves in possession of items of deep evil – a fragment of warpstone and a vile book of darkness – that they must take to Heavenbalm soon, before the essences of chaos should corrupt someone anew. They must also find a powerful priest who has some special blessings, that their minds can be put at ease from the horrors they have seen in these past months. With this in mind they decided to temporarily take their leave of Separation City, and head northwest to Heavenbalm. There they would destroy the evil items they had gathered, find ease in Sigmar’s peace, and investigate – probably brutally – the associates of the wizard they just recently vanquished in the crypts of Separation City.

    Before they left though, our group of adventurers decided who would stay in Separation City, and who would venture forth. The journey to Heavenbalm is some 7 days in good weather, and knowing our party’s penchant for getting side-tracked in the war against evil, it seemed wise to expect the same band of adventurers would be together for some time. The newly-formed band included two new adventurers, once again introduced to the party by their patron, Baroness von Jungfreud. Four stalwart souls elected to leave the dubious sanctuary of Separation City:

    • Gregor Thornton, the witch-hunter who carried the evil items
    • Azahi, the dwarven troll-slayer, who would set out with the party in a covered wagon, so great was the affliction of his insanity
    • Brom Barca, human pit-fighter, a veritable giant of a man on a quest to find the only pit-fighter who ever beat him (and that through treachery)
    • Leticia, elven sword-master, of mysterious purpose as are all of her kind

    Brom and Leticia were introduced to the party by von Jungfreud, and it was at this final meeting that the PCs were able to learn some things about her and her husband’s past that might in future help them to understand the importance of Separation City.

    Meeting with Baroness von Jungfreud

    With the spring weather becoming finer and warmer after the closing of the wattle-viewing season, Baroness von Jungfreud invited our heroes for a small party on her private yacht, perhaps also to do a little whale watching. With the sun glinting on the still waters of Separation Bay, a gentle breeze blowing through the canopied deck of her pretty little yacht, Baroness von Jungfreud treated our heroes to a fine repast of roasted meats, raw fish eaten fresh-landed and still dancing on the plate, bowls of preserved lilly-pillies, and rice wine in capacious quantities. As they ate and drank she freely answered all their questions, and the PCs learnt many things about her and her dead husband Mattix’s past:

    • Mattix was heir to a farming demesne in the sunlit highlands between Store and Heavenbalm. It was inland, on the slopes of Realmsight Mountain, in an area of rich forests and rice farms, and he stood to live a long, boring and healthy life taxing the local farmers
    • He never gave a clear reason for the move, except that he thought there were better prospects in Separation City – to do with trade between Dwarves, the Palace Cape and also opening up the inland
    • It was Mattix who set about establishing the Dwarven trading post and community. He employed a Dwarven architect, Archaex, to help build the ship spire and the associated underground storage and power source. He may still have the plans to it, and certainly still has the communications with the Dwarf amongst his personal possessions
    • Mattix had contacts in Store and Heavenbalm
    • Occasionally Mattix visited Store, always without the Baroness, and she thinks that he maybe had a lover there.

    By the end of the meal they had come to understand that Mattix von Jungfreud had some plans involving the dwarves, and to know more about his past they would need to find this Dwarven architect Archaex. Baroness von Jungfreud, the dutiful wife and society socialite, gave no indication that she had any knowledge of whatever secrets his plans contained. They would need to investigate his lover, and his contact Archaex, to learn more.

    But first, they needed to find solace and redemption at Heavenbalm, so they took their leave of Baroness von Jungfreud and headed into the hills

    Bushrangers!

    Springing the trap
    Springing the trap

    Their journey would take them through Steamline Spa – about two days’ journey from Separation City – and then on to Heavenbalm, another three days’ journey beyond that. The roads in spring were easily passable and smooth, so they took with them a wagon, holding their travel supplies and their dwarf, inchoate with crawling terrors after the undead near feasted on him. The first day of their journey was uneventful, but on the second day they came upon a strange and sinister tableaux. At this point the road parted around a small satoyama, with the main road continuing to the northwest but a small, disused trail cutting left from the road to ascend the satoyama in switchbacks. A crumbling and fading shrine gate on this smaller road pointed to a disused shrine in the heart of the satoyama, but the switchbacks were overgrown and obviously unused. To the left of the road and behind them were loose and scrubby eucalypt forest; to their right, open land leading to a small stream, which was surrounded by reeds and thick grasses. In the junction of the road, where the smaller path split from the main road, lay a fallen horse and rider, both clearly dead. The PCs stopped their wagon and horses and approached the bodies to investigate, leaving their dwarf rambling to himself in the wagon. They tried to see where the body had come from, how long it was dead, and what killed it, but none of them had any facility with medicine, and perhaps the bright sun had already begun its hideous work on the corpse. Brom Barca noticed, however, that the horse’s saddlebags seemed full of coin, and all three of our heroes descended with glee upon the corpse.

    It was as they began to tear open these saddlebags that the bushrangers sprung their trap. Small squads of archers appeared simultaneously from the streamside, the forest behind the wagon, and the switchbacks on the satoyama. Each squad had three archers and a leader: a wizard on the hillside, some thug with a long rifle in the trees, and a sword-armed maniac in the stream. Caught on all sides in a hail of gunfire, our party had to act fast. Gregor moved to the edge of the path and opened fire upon those attacking from the stream; Brom Barca hauled his huge body up the switchbacks of the satoyama, charging through loose scrub and undergrowth with roaring, frenzied abandon; Leticia moved to engage the archers from the forest as they dropped their crossbows and charged to close combat.

    Things did not go well at first, though. Brom Barca was caught in entangling vines by the wizard’s magic; Leticia was forced to cut and run in the face of superior numbers; and Gregor found himself sorely pressed and beaten back by the force of his enemies. As Leticia ran she was cut down with arrows, but the archers left her to deal with Brom Barca, who soon hauled himself from his entanglement and slew the offending wizard, spattering his fellows with gore and causing them to flee. Gregor, it seemed, would be surrounded and cut down like a dog, but the sounds of battle roused Azahi from his insanity and, stumbling from the wagon, he engaged Leticia’s foes before they could reach Gregor. This gave Brom Barca time to return to the fray, and soon the tide turned: all the bushrangers died like pigs at a slaughterhouse, Brom Barca laughing with joy as their blood spattered his apron and smeared his face, and Gregor pale-faced and grim with the dark job of stabbing, smashing and shooting. Then the job was done, Leticia rescued from a bad fate, the dwarf Azahi regaining enough poise to return to future battles, and Brom Barca bloodied, joyous with the thrill of murder done righteously.

    They chased the remaining few bandits to the abandoned shrine, where they found them taking cover behind a wagon at the entrance, firing down the path at the party. Brom Barca cared not for the sting of bolts, though, and charged forward, his huge bulk hitting the wagon with such force that it overturned, splintering, and crushed the last three men beneath it. Then it was a simple job of jumping on the wagon, driving its splintered axle and wheel-frames into the pinned and desperate bandits until they writhed no more, and their blood consecrated the entry of the shrine: a bloody and frenzied chozubachi this. Once Brom Barca had spilt the blood on his hands and face, he entered the shrine to see if anyone else dared worship at the altar of death; but none were there. So they looted the bandits temple, and continued on their way to Steamline Spa.

    The murderer of the caldera

    When they reached Steamline Spa they handed in evidence of the dead bandits, and found accomodation in a fine hotel near the central lake. They were soon approached by an elder of the town, Merschak the steward, who asked them to attend to a delicate matter: a murderer called Otto Mercads, last son of a noble house, had returned to Steamline Spa and begun his horrific killings again. So far no one in the town knew except Merschak and the local lord, and they wanted some out-of-towners with a good reputation to go and find Mercads, and bring him back alive. Once caught, Merschak wanted the PCs to escort Otto to Heavenbalm, where he would again be locked up in a secure place far from harm – being a scion of a wealthy family, he could not be subjected to the rough justice of commoners, but would be locked away from the rest of the world for good. For finding him and taking him to Heavenbalm, the PCs would be paid 5 gold each.

    The PCs agreed, and said they would seek out Otto the next morning. His victim had been found on the slopes of Mount Steamline, and it seemed likely he was hiding in the caldera; they must travel up the mountain the next day and find him. So bid, they agreed to the deal, and settled down for a pleasant and restful sleep, free of dreams and worries …

    (Picture credit: the image of Brom Barca is by Guilherme Formenti)

  • Getting Serious About Climate Change

    In case anyone hasn’t noticed, the Philippines was just hit by a monster storm that killed more than 1000 people. It’s likely that this is going to be the third year in a row that the Philippines experiences a new record-setting disaster, and this is also probably the fourth biggest storm on record anywhere in the world. Of course, others have noted that certain infamous denialists are trying to pretend that this is just a normal storm, but only idiots would believe such crap. The world has changed. In this same year Australia has had record bushfires occurring earlier than ever before; Japan has suffered at least two moretsu (extremely violent) typhoons, one of which was generally described as “never previously recorded”; Japan’s summer was excessively intense; Japan’s cherry blossom viewing season was delayed by heat; and the Southern hemisphere had the hottest year on record. Britain also had its second strongest storm in 100 years, and Somalia experienced its worst ever cyclone simultaneously with typhoon Haiyan. Natural disasters from storms, flood and fire are coming thick and fast, and every year sees a new record in at least one and often more than one of these dimensions. It’s time to recognize that we aren’t in Kansas anymore.

    Scientists, of course, want to proceed steadily without jumping ahead of the evidence. For example, the current thinking in science is that the arctic won’t be ice free for a long time (probably not till 2050, I think) because that is what the theory and models tell us; but the evidence is pointing at 2020 by the latest, and the consequences of extreme arctic melt (such as occurred in 2012) for North Atlantic countries are serious. This year Britain had to import wheat for the first time (Kelloggs stopped producing Shredded Wheat!) because of rain-related crop failures. Hurricane Sandy’s extreme damage was directly related to the arctic ice melt – everyone knows it, but science isn’t able to prove it, so we have to just pretend that yet another extreme weather event was just random variation. Yet nothing about what happened in Sandy or Haiyan matches our understanding of normality – I am quite familiar with tsunami damage and the pictures I am seeing on TV of the wake of Haiyan look to me exactly like the northeast coast of Japan. No typhoon has done that in the last 30 years, and our instincts tell us this. We need to recognize this: the climate has jumped the shark, and science isn’t keeping up.

    On the other side of the coin, economists and political scientists are used to the measured rhetoric of equilibrium, and they don’t have a language or a culture that is able to accept what is happening, because what is happening is disequilibrium. Economists are still labouring under the impression that the changes that are coming – and the changes that are happening now – can be expressed in percentages of GDP and the cold calculus that applies to growth in ordinary times. They can’t. Today 8 people died in a riot at a rice factory, because the destruction in the central Philippines is so complete that millions of people are going without food, and desperation is their watchword. The calculus of mainstream economics is not geared up for looting, for the destruction of cities, for life on the edge. And that is where increasingly people are being driven. Economics hasn’t come to terms with the concept of ecosystem services – it’s too far outside the selfish, consumerist culture of economics to make sense – but this is where we’re at. Our ecosystem has turned against us. Which means we’re fucked. Does George Mason University’s economics faculty have a department of We’re Fucked? No, which is why they’re still churning out plagiarized shit about how climate change is all wrong and stuff. Economists still think this is a problem that can be dealt with using the numerical analysis of small changes: Nicholas Stern on the one hand with his arcane trade-offs and debates about discount rates, and the Lomborg’s of the world on the other hand with their ideas about balancing the future costs of adaptation with the current costs of mitigation, and angels dancing on the heads of pins that are buried in the debris of Leyte Island.

    No, we’ve entered a new era: the Anthropocene. The era of We’re Fucked. We need to develop a new politics, a politics of Getting Unfucked, and we need it now, not 10 years from now when the baby boomers have finally chuffed off to the next plane and stopped complaining about ineffectual carbon taxes. We need to get desperate, and we need to do it now.

    This is going to mean some radical changes. For starters, and most importantly, every developed nation needs to ban coal. Set a deadline: five years from now, anyone who owns a coal-fired power station is done for. Get rid of them. And while we’re at it the main providers of coal need to stop. Australia needs to declare: we ain’t selling no more, 2018 is it. Sorry kids, but your dope dealer is planning to retire. Canada needs to do the same. And this decision shouldn’t be enforced with pathetic halfway measures like taxes. We need to ban that shit, before the planet decides to ban us. What’s going on in Germany – closing nuclear plants and falling back on coal and gas – is absolutely criminal. Let’s not beat around the bush about this. Anyone in Germany who supports this kind of ecocide should get on a plane right now, fuck off to Tacloban, get on their knees in the salty dirt and say “I’m sorry, but your family died because I’m stupid.” There is nowhere on this earth where coal is a good idea, but a country with power and choices like Germany is absolutely behaving like an international criminal in choosing to go back to this poison. Anyone who supports such a move should be ashamed of themselves. Ten years from now people with such views will be being locked up, mark my words.

    We also need to give up on the idea that solar and wind are our short-term saviours. Long-term, yes, they are the siznich. But right now, we have a grid that is developed for baseload generators in centralized locations, and we need to recognize that. So we need to go nuclear. It’s the simple, clean, safe alternative to coal. Every country with a major energy economy needs to shift to a world war 2 style war economy of energy, and replace its existing plants with nuclear. Don’t fuck around with new technologies, because we’re heading into a disaster zone. We have perfectly good nuclear plant designs now, so let’s get them up and running. With robust oversight and good monitoring agencies they’ll be fine. Sure, there’ll be accidents, but the reality is that nuclear power is not that dangerous. It kills a crap-ton less people than coal and it’s easy to live in areas with nuclear fallout. It’s not so easy to live in areas that are too hot to grow food, too stormy to build, or too flooded to stay. And – sorry, country folks – if you build nuclear plants in the country, the accidents really don’t affect many people.

    Some people say that nuclear is too expensive, it needs heavy subsidies, but who cares? Home owners in Australia get $35 billion a year in state subsidies, and no one would dare interfere in such a sacrosanct subsidy. Why not give another 35 billion to an industry that might save us from destruction? Why quibble? And if you’re going to quibble about the cost of nuclear, then fuck, let’s make this clear: remove all state subsidies to all industries, and let them fight each other to the death. Don’t want to do that? Then stop pretending the electricity market is free of distortions, stop pretending it’s somehow above politics, and above all stop pretending it’s not going to destroy us all if we don’t interfere.

    Since the Kyoto protocol was first signed in nineteen fucking whatever, people – well, economists anyway – have been trying to pretend that we can solve the global warming problem through market mechanisms. Well here we are 20 years later, and fate’s duck is crapping on our eiderdown. We don’t have a functioning market mechanism that will prevent diddly squat, and we have ascended beyond diddly squat to epic storms that wipe out cities, fires that threaten whole communities, homicidal heat and wholesale changes to the way we live. It’s time to recognize that the market has had its chance, and every oily fucker, grafter and spiv who had any chance to get in the way has spoilt the opportunity. So let’s drop the pretense and get serious. We need to move to legislative and political solutions to the most serious environmental problem the world has ever faced. Scientists and economists need to take a back seat to eco-fascists and hard-arsed decision makers. Ban coal, bring on the nukes, and let’s fix this problem the old-fashioned way – through the cold, hard application of power.

  • 日英語でソードワールド

    ４匹の怪しいもの
    ４匹の怪しいもの

     

    ２週前に、いつものTRPGメンバーと一緒、ついに初めてのソードワールドをやってみました！いつものグループは普通に英語でTRPGを行うが、今回、マレーシアの女の子のメンバーのCちゃん（２２歳）が、初めてのマスターをしてみたくて、日本人の友達の３人を誘って、英語と日本語と両方でゲームを行おうとした。今回のゲームは、外国人５人、日本人３人が参加した。外国人の中では、２人が完璧な日本語が話せて、私とそのあと２人の日本語初心者がいた。日本人は皆英語があまり話さなかった。Cちゃんは、なんでも話したり読んだりできますから、大丈夫だった。日本人の３人は、初めてTRPGをして、初めて私たちの怪しい外人プレイヤーと会った。怖いじゃない？

    ゲームの準備をしたときに、いつものグループのプレイヤーが、「タビット同士グループ」をやろうと決めた。ソードワールドを考えるなら、「タビット！」だと思いつけるから。日本人の新しいメンバーは２人人間、１人ルーンフォークとして参加した。ゲーム日の前に、いつものメンバーは少しだけFacebook でセッションを行ったから、準備がすでにできた。

    キャラクター

    私のキャラクターはタビットの魔術師・フェンサーだった。名前は、Booze (ブーズ）だった。魔術師は２レベル、フェンサーは１レベルだった。他のキャラクターは：

    • キナコ、人間（キャリアーは内緒）
    • そば、ルーンフォーク（スカウトか忍びタイプ）
    • らーめん、人間（なにかのプリースト）
    • ナットー、タビット魔動機師
    • うどん、タビット魔動機師
    • たこ、タビット（グラプラーみたいなタイプ）

    このゲームのプレイヤーの文化は、お互いにキャラクターシートを見せないから、詳しくない。

    私のキャラクターの経歴は：

    • 本来と異なる性別として育てられた
    • 大失恋したことがある
    • 歳の離れた友人がいた

    （全部はサイコロで決められた）。経歴表を基づいて、このタビットは男性として育てられた年下男性と恋愛が大好きな女性だと決めた。歳の離れた「友人」は大失恋の過去の恋人だと決めた。分かれた理由は。。。年差のため、恋愛が違法だった。。。

    さすがに、このタビット同士グループは怪しい。。。

    冒険背景

    私たち怪しいタビット４匹がある町（「ドーミ」という村だと思う）に使命をもらった。簡単に、カボチャ祭りに使われるカボチャを村まで持って行く使命だった。それは、無事にできたが、町に入ったとたんに日本人のメンバーの３人のキャラクターと会った。 その３人と一緒に、村長と使命の第２次ステージについて話した。最近、この村のオジーちゃんの３人が行方不明になった。この３人は昔に冒険者で、村を悪魔に予防してくれたから、村長の心配はその悪魔との関係の悪い者が来たようだ。特に、昔の冒険者のグループの中にいたナイトメアの冒険者が裏切りして、悪魔の見方になったから、そのナイトメアとの関係だと考えていた。私たちー４匹の怪しいタビットと３人の人間の冒険者ーがその悪魔がいた遺跡に行って、調べて欲しい。

    行ってきます！

    魔法的な牛達とウサギ

    遺跡は森の中にあるから、森に入った。タビット達がすぐ、第六感で危ないものの近さを感じた。後ろ足を踏み鳴らしながら、グループに報告した。ルーンフォークが前へこっそり歩いて行って、危険なところを覘いた。

    森の中の空き地には、牛達がいた。１匹は、普通の牛ではなく、普通より大きくてエラそうな首輪がついている魔法的な牛だった。危なそう！通るために、この魔法牛を扱わないといけなかった。

    奇襲を計画した。グループのメンバーが道で待って、ルーンフォークが森の中の空き地で顔を出した。牛が見て、ルーンフォークを戦おうとしたときに、ルーンフォークが逃げた。グループに戻して、魔法牛が見えるようになるから、皆が牛を戦った。

    ちょっと失敗したけど。。。普通の牛の５匹が追いかけて、その牛も戦闘できる普通のない牛だった！グループの７人は牛６匹に対して攻撃しなきゃ！

    この戦闘がうまくいけなかった。牛達が丈夫な敵から、すぐキャラクターのHPが失われた。私のタビットは真吾魔法使いから、「スリープ」という呪文があって、それを魔法牛にかけた。運が良くて、魔法牛が抵抗判定を失敗して、寝るようになった。そして、他のキャルクターが牛３匹を殺せて、残りの３匹が逃げた。ぎりぎりに生存した！それで進んだ。

    悪魔との解決

    遺跡に入って、すぐ悪魔呼び出し状態を見つけた。昔のグループのナイトメアとプリースト３人が魔法公式で悪魔を呼び出し中だった。タビット４匹が近づいたら、光っている魔法的な線につながられて、公式に絡まれていた。どうすればいいかを考えるときに、ゴーストみたいな子供が現れた。この子供が、Facebookで行われた冒険準備セッションに、タビット３匹が出会った子供。昔のグループとの関係があるが、私と人間のメンバーの３人は初めて会った。

    この子供が私達に報告した：「ここでは、何もできないから、悪魔が現れる前に逃げて！」って言った。

    怪しいタビットの４匹は、お互いを見て、少しだけ考えて。。。逃げちゃった。人間のメンバーもすぐ逃げちゃった。逃げながら、遺跡が潰れそうになった。もっと一生懸命逃げちゃうと、ギリギリに遺跡から出られたとたんに、遺跡が潰れた。悪魔もプリーストもナイトメアもゴースト子供、皆遺跡に生き埋めになった。

    ホッとして、帰った。

    ２つの言語で初心者とのゲームに関する

    このセッションは、長くなくても、色々な初めてのことだった。Cちゃんの初めてのマスターの経験で、Cちゃんの友達３人の初めてのゲームだった。そして、私にとって、初めての２つの言語のゲームだった。この間、別府に住んだときに、何回も日本語でゲームをやったことがあるが、英語と日本語のチャンプルゲームはやったことがない。それは、特にいい点はないと思う。言語での交換は、ゲームに影響はなかった。時々、日本語があまり話せないメンバーと英語が話せないメンバーとの通訳したが、普通の会話と同じように流れたから、とくにクセはなかった。そして、日本人の３人の初心者は、普通の初心者みたいでした。。。多分、外国人の初心者よりshyだったからもう少し遅めにゲームの流れになれたが、いつもの通りにすぐなれて楽しく参加してくれた。

    ソードワールドの経験

    これは私の初めてのソードワールドの冒険だった。簡単で習いやすいシステムだから、早く流れるゲームのようだ。少しD&Dの味だけど、D&Dより危なくてシンプルな感じだ。冒険者レベル２のタビットキャラクターは少し異ならないけど、それは種族の選択のせいだと思う（タビットに合うキャリアーが少ないから）。基本的に面白かった。日本の一番有名なゲームは、楽しくて面白かった。またやりたいが、次回は二つの言語でやらなくてもいいと思います。ソードワールドの市民さん達は、気をつけて！４匹の怪しいタビットがきま〜す！

  • Asking a Rich Philosopher About Entitlement

    Last weekend the Guardian had an interesting article about the New College for the Humanities, some dodgy knock-off rich-kids proto-university in the UK, land of inequality. Apparently it’s being run by someone left-wing, so we have to take it seriously even though it charges 18,000 pounds a year (twice the cost of Oxford) for a humanities education. For my reader(s) who is not familiar with this issue, the college was set up by A.C Grayling (apparently a lefty, apparently a philosopher). His college has a bunch of famous professors like Richard Dawkins and Niall Ferguson (who lectures precisely two classes a year) and offers the following quality of service:

    Every week, [Jamie] goes to 14 hours of lectures and has one hour-long group tutorial, with three students and one tutor, and one hour-long individual tutorial. “We’re expected to do between three and four hours personal study a day. We write a minimum of an essay a week. It is a full-on education. We are being educated actively.”

    Let me tell you something, “Jamie”: you’re being ripped off. I did a physics degree, and in first year I had 32 contact hours a week, and at least two assignments. Included in that is my first year English course, so I had to read a novel a week (sometimes Shakespeare) and attend a one hour-long group tutorial, with about 5 students and one tutor. I had three hours of laboratory a week, which (obviously) required special equipment. You can rest assured I didn’t pay 18k pounds a year – actually in 2012 pounds I paid about 1000. Are you sure, “Jamie,” that you’re getting value for money? Incidentally, I was lectured by Paul Davies, so I guess I got famous lecturers for my 1k. What do you think, “Jamie”? Are you doing better for having chosen the New College of the Humanities over some dodgy red-brick or an ex-teacher’s college?

    Despite this, the article makes the environment sound fairly good, and certainly it seems like the lecturers and tutors are generally attentive. But the cost keeps being raised, and I can see why – not only is it a lot of money, but there are a lot of people in Britain (i.e. most British people) who really aren’t very wealthy, and for whom 54,000 is completely out of their range (especially since everyone is culturally expected to be up to their eyeballs in housing debt). Now, I’m sympathetic to the argument that poor people choose not to go into debt for education for cultural, rather than financial reasons – they’ll take on huge debt for a dodgy housing investment, that they wouldn’t take on for a reliable education investment, for example – but still, 18000 pounds is pretty damn steep. So I was interested to read AC Grayling’s response to the cost issue. And what did this famous left-wing philosopher say?

    “The downside of being educated at someone else’s expense is that you may not value it,” he says. “You may regard it as an entitlement. Unless you are acutely aware of the opportunity that is being offered to you, you may be rather cavalier about it. [You] might not be quite so keen to suck the marrow from it.”

    Statements like this leave me simultaneously angry, sick, disappointed and confused. First, let’s make one thing clear: no one in Grayling’s college is being educated at their own expense. No one at the age of 19 – people who have never worked – can afford 18k a year. They’re all being educated at someone else’s expense. Of course, in this case it’s their parents’ expense, but why should that matter? Certainly when I was at university I met a wide variety of people being educated at their parents’ expense, and I can assure you that they were “not quite so keen to suck the marrow from it.” But this was not what Grayling is thinking of when he said this – so much is clear from the context. He was clearly thinking of people being subsidized by the state.

    And this is why his statement leaves me angry, sick, disappointed and confused: why is there a difference between the state paying and your own parents paying?

    It makes me angry because there are a lot of people out there who are desperate for an education but can’t afford it, and if someone else paid they would snap up the chance. One of my players is from the Dominican Republic, and he finds it amazing that in Japan there are still people who don’t really care about the education they are receiving, because in the Dominican Republic an education is a difficult and precious thing to get and so many people who want it will never get it. Yet somehow Grayling – advanced philosopher that he is – thinks that all those people out there hungering for an education can’t really properly value it because if they did get it would be through someone else’s largesse, thus suddenly their desire is sapped.

    It makes me sick because I am one of those people. Abandoned by my parents at 17, with no money and no prospects, I was funded through my education by the state. I appreciated every single fucking minute of it, thank you very much, and I shat all over my private-school educated, parent-funded friends. I fought my way into university, I studied hard, and I loved it. I still remember in first year my private-school-educated “colleagues” openly challenging my high school grades because they didn’t believe a pleb like me could have done so well. Fuck you, you rich fuckers. I beat you every step of the way. Not only was I better than you, but I understood the value of the benefits I was getting from the government. I knew exactly what my “free” education was worth. But here we have some famous, apparently left-wing philosopher recycling this crap about how because the state paid for my education, I didn’t value it? That makes me sick.

    It disappoints me because it shows how far the understanding of welfarism and inequality has fallen in the UK – once a beacon of thought on these issues – if supposedly left wing philosophers are spouting this claptrap. What chance have we of addressing the serious inequality issues in the UK if serious educators seriously believe that anyone who is funded by the state to support their education is going to be inherently inferior in attitude to someone who is funded by their parents? What hope for redistributive justice in such an environment?

    Finally, it confuses me because, as someone whose parents never helped him out, I can’t understand why receiving fat scads of cash from your parents is okay but getting the same cash from the government is poisonous for your character. I don’t deny the right of parents to pay for their kids’ education, or the fundamental rightness of people supporting their own children, flows of capital through families etc. That’s all fine. But the idea that a person’s character and attitude towards self-improvement (represented, in this instance, by education) should be somehow reduced by being supported by a soix-distant patron, rather than a family member, is just confusing. I mean, it’s all free moolah, right? How come one is character-endangering and one is not? I have never, ever been able to understand this, and I think I’ve never been able to understand it because it is bullshit.

    An interesting aspect of our culture is that we make these cultural assertions about how weak and inferior rich kids who receive gifts from their parents really are, but we make policy that benefits those people and encourages that act. So we refer to rich kids as “spoilt princesses,” “trust fund babies,” etc.; but we make policy that is explicitly designed to benefit these people and we make philosophy (apparently) that values their personal achievements more highly, even when those personal achievements were bought not earnt. For example, in Australia everyone can take a university debt; but rich kids’ parents can pay up front, in which case they get a 15% discount. So rich people get exactly the same education as poor people, but pay 15% less for it. So on the one hand society is laughing at these kids for being supported by the mummy bank, but on the other hand society is guaranteeing that those kids and their rich parents pay less for the same product. And then those poor people are meant to thank their all-powerful masters for their beneficence? Or maybe we’re supposed to accept these crumbs of wisdom from people like Grayling, who tells me that even though I paid 20% more than my neighbour for exactly the same product, I value it less because the government, rather than my rich daddy, dropped the money in my lap.

    What can I say to this logic? Fuck you, AC Grayling, and your “philosophy.” I didn’t go to your top quality university, but I think I can detect bullshit a lot more easily than you can. But I guess, sitting in your room labeled “Master” after a life of success, you don’t really care how much your bullshit smells to people like me, do you? Is there a word for a philosophy like that?

     

  • Playing Simplified Warhammer 3: Dropping Action Cards

    Yesterday I GM’d a session of Warhammer 3rd Edition (WFRP 3), the next instalment in the Steamlands Campaign, but this time due to a lack of space and the ongoing fragmentation of my card collection I decided to implement some of the ideas I’ve been working on to simplify WFRP 3. Today we used the following:

    • Drop all active defenses and basic melee combat cards
    • Drop all more complex action cards that don’t involve a unique benefit: so e.g. Thunderous Blow is out, but Riposte is kept (since it gives a second attack)
    • Calculate combat difficulty from attributes, instead of using “one challenge die plus defense” rules
    • Allow players to use all their talent cards, not just the slotted ones
    • Make exhaustable talents a once-per-encounter phenomenon (most encounters being less than 5 rounds anyway)
    • Enhance fortune points: they now add expertise rather than fortune dice
    • Allow the expenditure of fatigue to gain bonus fortune dice
    • Fortune and misfortune dice cancel before rolling, to simplify dice pools
    • Number of successes on a melee attack acts as a damage bonus
    • Critical cards are for fluff only: all criticals are simply a +1 difficulty (i.e. one misfortune die) per critical suffered
    • Enemies also suffer criticals

    Two players made new PCs for this session, so they selected only action cards that give an identifiable non-attack effect in combat. Cards selected were:

    • Riposte, which enables a free melee attack in response to a missed attack
    • Counterblow, which does the same for someone blocking
    • Twin pistols, which I now treat as a special ability (it has no recharge): add one challenge die to the dice pool to attack with two pistols
    • Who’s next? Which gives allies additional attacks or enables a cleave-like attack after killing someone
    • Berzerker Rage, which should be fairly obvious
    • Combat focus, which gives the user a bonus on attack rolls (not damage)

    These cards enable the players to have more freedom to act and special benefits in combat, rather than simply making them do more damage or adding conditions as after-effects of successful attacks.

    The result of this was a faster, more dynamic combat scene. The revised rules encouraged use of fortune points and fatigue, and made managing fatigue more crucial; big dice pools enable greater damage (there is no 3-success limit to damage as occurs on the cards), so in one case I think the biggest warrior did 17 points of damage (and one enemy bandit nearly did the same). The combat was over in four rounds but was just as dangerous: all three PCs were critically injured, one was unconscious and one incurred a temporary insanity. The whole battle – between three PCs and 12 enemies in an ambush from three directions, with one group fleeing and having to be chased – took just one hour (or maybe less) and everyone was able to stay focused through the whole thing. Managing enemies was much easier for me, since I didn’t have to worry about cards and the like. There was no faffing at the end of rounds, as I think only two cards (Berzerker Rage and Combat Focus) needed to have recharge tokens removed, and there was no fussing with talent cards or active defenses. Calculating hit targets was easy – players just tell me their attribute and defense score – and converting misfortune dice into challenge dice (at two-for-one rates) reduced dice pool sizes. The increased numbers of challenge dice also increased the number of chaos stars, so at last someone’s black powder weapon blew up[1].

    I think the revised rules will also make enemies slightly more dangerous if they have attributes much bigger than the PCs, which means forces will be more evenly matched. For example, one bandit had a strength of 5 that he could use to defend with, which in the revised rules means 2 challenge dice and one misfortune die added to the dice pool. For an attacker with strength less than 5 this is going to be a tough target, and in fact in order to kill this guy the players had to use fatigue and fortune points to bolster attacks. Under the standard rules this guy would have been no more difficult to hit than any of his minions, and making him harder to hit would require me faffing with a variety of action cards.

    Although I’m not fully assured of its effect on game balance, I like the effect of simplification on combat flow. I’m thinking of dropping armour-based defense scores too (making armour provide only soak values) to further simplify the combat resolution task. I’m also watching the revised collection of action cards to see if they’re worth the effort. But as a first attempt at speeding up and streamlining WFRP 3, the changes seem to have worked, and rescued the game from being crushed under the weight of its own innovations.

    —

    fn1: actually now I think about it, in the standard rules it is almost impossible for a black powder weapon to blow up. Most are Unreliable 2, which means you need two chaos stars to blow them, but chaos stars only occur on challenge dice and in most ranged combat situations you will only ever throw one challenge die. The standard rules make the difficulty of a ranged combat attack 1 challenge die + 1 misfortune per point of defense, so unless you’re using a card with additional challenge dice (of which there are few) you will never bow up your weapon.

  • Assessing my Prediction of Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Extent

    Earlier this year I posted a prediction of the minimum arctic sea ice extent, in which I used a simple regression model to predict the average September extent. My final conclusion:

    My final estimate for sea ice extent in September 2013 is 4.69 million square kilometres (95% CI: 4.06 – 5.32 million square kilometres).

    On October 3rd the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) released their estimate of the September extent, which was 5.35 million square kilometres. The linked blog post gives a nice description of the main reasons why the extent recovered, and some of the competing influences on the extent this year. It also explains some of the Antarctic extent’s record gains.

    The final extent for September was just 0.03 million square kilometres outside of my 95% confidence interval, or 0.05 square kilometres outside my estimate as posted on the SEARCH September Sea Ice Outlook competition. This means that I only just missed including the observed value in my confidence interval. My prediction in July was 4th closest to the true value, beaten by NOAA, NSIDC themselves, and Barthelemy et al. It was the second closest estimate based on statistical estimation, and was beaten by two model-based estimates. My estimate was also the closest amongst all those that didn’t include the true value in their 95% confidence intervals. The lowest estimate was from Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice Blog, which just goes to show that crowd-sourced estimates aren’t necessarily the best. Watts Up With That were very close to me in June and August (they didn’t submit in July) at 4.8 million km2, but they didn’t give a confidence interval. I think this is the first time in the annual SIO competition that WUWT have come close to the mark, which just goes to show that eternal optimism has its value.

    I’m pretty happy with my prediction. I originally planned to do it for the August submission adding July sea ice temperatures, and I think that would have probably bumped up my prediction a little closer to the true value. I also considered doing an ensemble model, using a wide range of different statistical models and averaging the results after incorporating more covariates. I think next year I will try to be more systematic, and submit a prediction for every month using a range of modeling techniques. The key point of my model is that it accurately predicted a very large rebound from the 2012 minimum based on just a few key variables selected without much systematic basis. I think I can do better next year!

  • Obamacare’s First Policy Prescriptions?

    Obamacare has been in place for barely a week, and already the medical journals are publishing editorials and opinion about it. The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is particularly interested in health finance reform in America, and has been publishing a lot of speculative material on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for a long time now, but this week it has three editorials in the same issue all discussing various specific aspects of the challenge of funding healthcare in the USA. These three editorials serve to show how complex health financing policy is, how hard it is to iron out all the flaws in any system, and how much reform is still needed in the USA. To the extent that it’s possible to characterize the editorial policies of a peer-reviewed medical journal, I think it’s safe to say that the NEJM is broadly supportive of health system reform in the USA, and supportive of Obamacare but probably generally hoping for better. Certainly articles about America’s reform journey over the past few years, along with research into specific aspects of health system challenges in the USA, have been getting a big run in the NEJM.

    The first of the editorials, The ACA and High-Deductible Insurance, describes an unexpected (to me) and unfortunate side-effect of the ACA: the introduction of new, cheap insurance plans with very high deductibles of up to $10,000 per patient. The NEJM describes these policies as “blunt instruments” and suggests they are the fault of Congress focusing on market-based cost controls. These high-deductible cheap plans are necessary because the ACA will mandate all Americans must have a form of health insurance, but many individuals not able to get employer-funded plans will simply not be able to afford standard plans, so they will need to buy cheap high-deductible plans. The editorial points out the potential costs of this and gives a fairly strong judgment of its worth at a population level when it says:

    previously uninsured people might effectively become underinsured, and their aggregate health and economic outcomes might not improve substantially. The United States seems destined for a “bronze” health insurance system that could create financial burdens high enough to cause adverse outcomes in vulnerable populations.

    Their argument in support of this is that there is some evidence that high-deductible plans discourage use of discretionary and essential health care, which means that basically a group of working poor are being forced to take up a product (health insurance) that they can’t afford to use and that is essentially just going to act as a safety net for extreme emergencies only. The editorial also points out that there isn’t actually much research on high deductible plans and their effects, and the USA is about to embark on a big experiment with these instruments. My view, of course, is that the American people are being sold short by the politicians’ naive distrust of socialized solutions, and its refusal to properly fund this essential service: so instead of having a properly run and well-subsidized single-payer system for all the working poor (i.e. an expansion of medicare/medicaid to cover a very large part of the population) the govt has opted to force those poor people to fork out for a very poor quality product. I guess given the shenanigans in the House and Senate over the past two weeks, no one should be surprised.

    The editorial suggests an interesting, almost libertarian solution: that employers should facilitate payments into health savings accounts (HSAs) for these working poor. HSAs get favourable tax treatment and could basically be used to cover the deductible part of the health care plans, reducing their negative effects on healthcare access. But reading the list of recommendations in the editorial, it seems to me that they are all very poor attempts at putting lipstick on a pig, which either end up costing the working poor more, or falling back on vague and hopeful benefits from poorly-researched policy ideas. I don’t blame the authors, because I guess that’s what you are left scrabbling to do when you are dealing with a political class as timid and out of touch as that of the USA.

    The second article, finely entitled The Thousand-Dollar Pap Smear, describes some of the crazy ways in which the US health financing system works to drive up costs. This article has a very well-crafted introduction, which first points out that the physician author has actually seen bills of $600 or $1000 for a mere pap smear, and then links the cost of smears to the broad sweep of cervical cancer protection in the modern world:

    Cervical-cancer screening is one of the 20th century’s true public health successes. The incidence of a disease that once caused more deaths among American women than any other form of cancer has decreased dramatically since the introduction of routine Pap smears in the 1970s. In the modern era, most deaths due to cervical cancer occur among women who have never been screened or who have gone decades without screening. One of the main factors in helping to conquer this once-dreaded disease has been the availability of a cheap, effective screening test that can detect disease early, while it’s still very treatable. Yet increasingly, in my roles as the chief medical officer of a community health center and as a family doctor seeing patients in that system, I hear from women who are choosing to skip their screenings because of skyrocketing costs.

    She then describes how it is possible for a pap smear to cost $1000, and it’s a pretty embarrassing process. Part of the blame for this lies with physicians and part with the pathology companies, who have developed new and cunning ways to ensure that the physician orders, by default, tests that are not needed. They use systems of defaults and check boxes, and do their best to keep the actual pricing opaque:

    Costly tests that once would have required physicians to submit multiple collection vials and specimens can now be ordered with the Pap smear simply by clicking a single box in the electronic medical record. Nothing at any point along the way alerts either the clinician or the patient to the high costs of these tests or to the fact that there is little medical evidence to suggest that they are useful for most patients.

    The author compares this behavior to that of pharmaceutical companies. It’s also an example of how little control ordinary patients have over health prices, and how invulnerable the system is to individuals’ price negotiations. In many cases, the women receiving the smear don’t know what tests are being done – they just assume it’s the pap smear they asked for or had recommended to them – and are shocked when they receive the bill. The risk from this is that women won’t undergo the pap smear, because they can’t control the price they end up paying. As we will see in the next article, negotiating over price is difficult.

    As a final parting shot, the author points out something that is genuinely amazing about the US system, and which makes it even harder to argue for the benefits of price control through individuals negotiating with their doctor:

    The final step in creating these astronomical bills for women without health insurance is that some laboratories charge uninsured women vastly inflated amounts, while offering insurers steep discounts from these “usual fees.” Although some laboratories offer discounts to uninsured patients, others do not, leading to the phenomenon well documented in other areas of medicine in which the uninsured pay premium rates, often having to set up multiyear payment plans for services for which a health maintenance organization would have paid a fraction of the charges.

    This has always struck me as crazy, but seems to be  a common problem in the USA: prices are not fixed by the cost of providing the service, but are based on what the company is able to gouge from the patient. In the case of uninsured women, women relying on HSAs, or women obtaining insurance from a private, individually purchased (rather than workplace or group-purchased) insurance plan, they have no group negotiating power, and the laboratories simply charge them more because they can. The same bill sent to a health insurance company would be sent back with a sneer – or wouldn’t be sent because the company had negotiated a bulk rate – but for a woman negotiating alone, the price is fixed as high as possible. Most ordinary consumers of healthcare are unlikely to even realize they are being gouged, let alone have the power to negotiate.

    The final editorial ties this together with a discussion of the similarities between out-of-pocket payments and treatment side-effects. This article points out the high cost of out-of-pocket payments in the USA, and gives some hideous examples:

    The Center for American Progress has estimated that in Massachusetts, out-of-pocket costs for breast-cancer treatment are as high as $55,250 for women with high-deductible insurance plans; the out-of-pocket costs of managing uncomplicated diabetes amount to more than $4,000 per year; and out-of-pocket costs can approach $40,000 per year for a patient with a myocardial infarction requiring hospitalization.

    Some of these out-of-pocket costs are above the median income of the USA, so there is no way that the majority of the population are going to be covering them from petty cash – you’re looking at years of savings, remortgaging houses, or other distress financing, to cover diseases that are common in the life course. And these costs are being paid by people with insurance plans – they have already paid into some kind of risk pooling mechanism before they wear these costs. In research in developing nations, we refer to these effects as “financial catastrophe due to out-of-pocket payments” and “distress financing related to healthcare costs,” and most developing nations are working on universal health coverage plans to try and eliminate these payments. Yet Obamacare intends to do nothing about this aspect of the system: the working poor in the USA will be able to afford nothing better than these high-deductible plans. The article suggests that physicians should start including discussion of out-of-pocket costs in their routine discussion of the risks and benefits of the treatment, and gives several reasons for this, some of them directly related to health. These include:

    • Patients often don’t raise the costs initially, but bad experiences with costs may lead them to reject subsequent treatment suggestions, avoiding essential care before they know what it will cost (or because they can’t trust the cost, in the case of the $1000 pap smear)
    • Patients who know the costs in advance can prepare, and avoid the worst forms of distress financing
    • Often there are cheaper alternatives to the standard treatment, or special plans (research projects, government support) that can be used to reduce the burden of payment; discussion of these issues upfront can help patients to choose a care package they can afford

    I’m really surprised that in a society with as much upfront payment and as much fear and concern about health costs as USA (and where health costs are so high!), physicians don’t routinely talk about this in the consultation. I remember my local dentist here in Tokyo had a tick box on the registration form when I first visited that asked if I wanted to only receive treatments fully funded by my insurance plan. Surely US doctors should be doing this? But apparently, despite years of debate about health financing, it’s not routine in the clinical visit. The editorial also points out that there is a real lack of information, so often even clinicians can’t work out clearly how much a procedure will cost (see, again, the $1000 pap smear); some States have even passed special laws to help with this! How is it possible to be an informed consumer if a) the person providing the service is reluctant to talk about the price, b) the person providing the service controls all knowledge about alternative products, and c) the person providing the service can’t tell you how much it will cost? For people on high deductible plans, this minefield of price negotiations is going to come straight from their pockets. It’s fairly obvious that in this situation many people would forego care before they even know its price – it turns a visit to the doctor into a kind of gambling game, with only negative outcomes. Who wants that?

    My guess is that this issue is going to come to the fore over the next few years as millions of people enrol in health insurance that can’t help them. The Democrats now own Obamacare, and the way they have set it up means that they now also own all the problems that the private market presents to the millions of people who will begin to experience it for the first time. I guess this means that sometime in the next few years we will see a concerted attack on high deductible plans. That is going to be impossible though, unless the government is willing to engage in a bit of socialist interference in the market. If they don’t, will Obamacare deliver benefits worth the huge political battle it took to implement? And if they do, will the USA be able to present a largely free market solution to the challenge of universal health coverage? My guess is that the answer to both of those questions will be “no,” and the USA will either continue to struggle with a broken system, or finally bite the bullet and go for a full universal health system. Sadly, probably, the broken system will prevail.

    Still, at least since this morning’s vote on the debt ceiling we at least get to see how the story ends. I’m glad I’m not part of the narrative, though!