Merry Xmas Tolkien Fandom
If Real Life Were Like YA Fantasy
I just was a homeless orphan, living on the streets of Washington, DC.
Every day, I would stop and look up at the White House, imagining how nice it would be to be inside those white walls, warm and fed, with the riches of the entire 13 trillion dollar United States budget deficit at my disposal.
One day, I was standing across the street from the White House as usual, digging through a dumpster and clutching my only companion close to my chest: a small pendant filled with plutonium that my mother had given to me before she died mysteriously.
Just then, a black limousine came out of the gates of the white house. The window rolled down. It was the Secretary of State. He looked directly at me and saw my plutonium pendant. “That’s plutonium!” He cried. “After her!”
Instantly a fully armed SWAT team came running after me. I ran through the slums and back alleys of DC, knowing that I could easily escape them because I knew the city better than they did.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t watching where I was going and I tripped and fell into the pool in front of the Washington Monument. The SWAT team pulled me out and brought me back to the White House.
Once there, they dumped me, still wet, in the Oval Office. The President was there, in his chair.
“Who is this girl?” he said. “Why have you brought her to me?”
“She was carrying this, Mr. President,” said a secret service agent, and held out the plutonium pendant.
“Aha! Plutonium!” Said the President. “How did you get that?”
“My mother gave it to me,” I said.
“What was your mother’s name?” asked the President.
“Jane Smith,” I answered.
“Jane Smith!” said the President. “I did not know you were the daughter of Jane Smith! Your mother was a member of a secret organization called the CIA. She served us well, but died fighting the evil organization known as ISIS. She must have given you the plutonium to protect it.”
“She must have,” I agreed.
The President gave the plutonium back to me. “In honor of your mother’s memory,” he said, “I’ve decided to give you a White House internship. Who knows? If you serve well enough, you may one day become a helicopter pilot for the Secret Service.”
“Thank you,” I said, overwhelmed.
“Oh, and one more thing,” said the President. “This belonged to your father.” He took down an AR-15 hanging on the wall and handed it to me. “Use it wisely.”
I hate my scanner, the colors just don’t look like they really do but it’s better than the phone camera
I say this every time I argue for raising the minimum wage. I never hear anyone else say it and I’m glad I found this.
If you build your business and your bonus on the backs of others who you don’t pay a living wage you don’t deserve to be in business.
this is making capitalists bleed from the ears keep reblogging it
Since I tend to get into this with people who argue that robots will replace minimum wage workers if they get too expensive, I like to lean into the robot metaphor.
If you have a machine performing a valuable talk for your company, the upkeep of that machine is part of your operating cost. You have to pay to power it, to upgrade it, to fix it when it breaks. And if you can’t afford the machine, the manufacturer doesn’t have to do business with you. They’re free to take their service somewhere else where they think the price is fair.
For humans, a living wage is the operating cost. If you can’t afford to pay your worker enough to live nearby, feed themselves, and get basic health care – all of which are things they need in order to be able to work for you – you’re failing to pay for the cost of their service.
The difference is that humans have to eat, like, all the time, so they often don’t have the option of taking their business somewhere else if the price isn’t fair – even insufficient food and shelter is better then starving on the street. But that means those people are not really able to act as agents in a free market, and it’s easy to exploit them under the guise of “the market setting the price.” People can’t act like reasonable economic agents when they’re desperate. As for as I can tell, that’s the whole point of having a minimum wage.
Keep reblogging this, it’s making capitalists mad and reaching out to the working class
⌆ for Galadriel, but only if you feel like it!
a story about their family/home life
“With so nimble a mind, Estel, there is little doubt that you shall win great favor by picking gifts as apt as this one for your future allies. It has been long since I have seen the bright berries and dark leaves of Eregion, the Land of Holly. I had heard they had nearly died out in that land, fading, like many things.
Will I remember? They were my daughter’s delight, in her childhood when the first stones of Ost-in-Edhil were laid amid our cottages in the wilds before the gate of Khazad-dum of old. She loved them because they were bright even in the dark of winter, and under the snow. Fitting, for her! But no doubt you have heard many a tale of her in your old home. But I remember clearest when she was still mine. My husband and I do not sit remembering often, now. Happy! Too happy and too busy to dwell unduly upon what was lost to me, my brothers, my cousins, my teacher. Each day different from the last, each day my lord and I began a new work, each day the stones of our towers reached higher, each day our daughter brought us some new pleasure of parenthood that we could not have imagined, and our family and home and people grew together all at once. Do you know what delight it is to build a home of your own? Perhaps you shall, in the north kingdom: my granddaughter must know it in her span of time.
Time! Time was different then. How fast did my daughter grow! How fast our city! Our works, and our arts! How busy was my family! Curious – things changed so much, so fast that the time never dragged, yet never did it slip by unnoticed as it does now. So much was done that the time seemed much more full than it seems now, yet it weighed one down so little. Curious – that the holly remains little changed all the year, yet in my memory never does it seem to stand so still as the falling golden leaves.”
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