JohnHenry.US

Category: Podcasts

  • Morning Message 1.12

    Good Monday to ya everybody I’m John Henry your gluten free emotional support host, welcome to another Morning Message!

    Debt Ceilings

    I want to take a quick look at this debt ceiling “compromise” that was reached over the last week, with President Biden signing on Saturday in what was described as a “private” ceremony.

    I’m not a fan of this deal on the basic level that it’s completely unnecessary.

    I’ve already written two parts of a series on the national debt which goes deeper in to what that debt is and how it functions and how it’s used as a weapon of disinformation against you. I should have that wrapped up in the next couple of days, and it’s well worth reading and understanding.

    The great harm this whole pointless argument causes isn’t the “repercussions” or the lowering of investor confidence in US credit, but rather in the way it’s used as an artificial threat to justify fumbling compromises when no compromise is necessary.

    This allows the folks who hold status quo power on both “sides” to both preserve their interests and act as though they’re trying really hard not to. “Sorry, it’s those darned other guys.”

    Given that on the right this means they have to step back from just flat-out ending democracy and enslaving anyone who can’t buy their freedom, I don’t have a problem with that.

    My problem is half the ostensible “left,” i.e. the Democratic Party, caves as well to the simple threat of not signing a budget which isn’t a threat at all. There are constitutional mechanisms in place to go around precisely that sort of bone-headed power play. Rather than do that, the Dems chose to cave – on student loans, on work requirements for food stamps, on the Mountain Valley gas pipeline – and make zero cuts to the outrageously bloated defense budget. Moreover, increases in non-defense spending are capped, but defense isn’t.

    This is the same old crap, sorry. It’ll be interesting to see if and how Biden chooses to paint himself out of the corner on the student loan problem. It’ll be more interesting to see if the rising voices in the electorate can manage to get more folks like Sanders and Fetterman into office and start standing up to this game, because the simple truth is that it is a game, and it has to stop.

    Poverty is a political choice. It is not an economic necessity. We could quite literally top everyone off to $50K right now if we wanted to. There are good reasons we don’t, but those reasons are never part of these conversations. Realistically if we made the political choice we could implement a universal basic income and federal job guarantee program in a year or less. Problem is that would free a lot of people from being required to work for someone else’s profit in order to survive, and the people whose profit is at stake don’t like that.

    So they fight against it and we continue with half a million homeless, millions more on the brink of financial disaster – a brink the GOP insists on pushing them over after stomping on their fingers to make them let go, via that student loan problem I mentioned – and we continue playing these ridiculous games.

    Game Over

    The picture isn’t entirely bleak. Whether we progressives like to admit or not, Joe Biden is canny as hell, and he’s pulled a swerve more than once to end up far ahead of where we thought he was, even going back to his coming out in support of LGBTQ rights. I’m not betting you’ll see some workaround that extends the student loan repayment pause, but it won’t surprise me if you do either. The edge of what the GOP wanted in terms of cuts and Malthusian demands that humans with a right to exist earn that right by contributing to some billionaire’s monopology game was significantly blunted.

    Unfortunately, what we’re still not doing is saying loudly and clearly that we know that edge has no reason to exist at all, and the only it reason it does is so that ugly-minded, mendacious, slavering lapdogs of fascism and oligarchy can keep pleasing their masters at everyone else’s expense.

    What we’re also not saying is that we see the games the Democratic leadership is playing with trying to let things “cool down” enough that they can make their move in favor of preserving that status quo power I talked about, without causing too much uproar about it. They’re doing this by peeling off smaller groups of student loan debtors for special consideration separately from the main group, using that issue as an example. Eventually the group of people they’re sacrificing isn’t as loud anymore, and the group of people for whom it’s “not my problem” gets larger, and the problem slides into the background again until things get bad enough for people to start getting loud again.

    Lather, rinse, repeat, and the whole time the left gets to pretend they’re fighting hard and winning these big concessions. Mick Foley said it best: the real world is faker than pro wrestling.

    Until we have those conversations, out loud and without flinching, we’re not winning anything – we’re only holding the line or succeeding in not giving up completely, and frankly that’s ridiculous. It’s time to evolve, and if we’re gonna do it kicking and screaming then so be it.

    Because the other option is we choose not to evolve…which means we’re choosing to become extinct.

  • Morning Message 1.11

    Good Friday morning-slash-afternoon everyone, I’m your painfully handsome and consistently modest host John Henry, and here’s what’s on my mind this morning

    First: the obvious. I’ve changed the name of this newsletter to reflect the ongoing process of moving it out of meta-commentary and into production as a “real” newsletter, i.e. “not about me.”

    So with that handled, let’s get on with the show!

    Here’s another meme that makes me want to choke out the lower 80% of the intelligence pool.

    That word “thinking” is doing way too much of the lifting here.

    No, you probably DON’T know more about your experience in most situations where this attitude comes up

    • patients insisting their doctors are idiots because they don’t have instant magic answers
    • parents who didn’t graduate junior high but are now firmly convinced they’re qualified homeschool instructors because “I’ve got a right“
    • parents insisting the only way to keep their kids in line is to beat on them
    • people who think the rush they get from a handful of sugar pills is evidence that it’s working better than actual medicine
    • some 8th grade dropout who spends all their time at Mises dot org and Ron Paul’s website trying to explain to a political scientist what “libertarian” “really means.”

    No, chances are unless you have prior specialized training, your experience doesn’t mean you know more than the experts. Given the impact of bias in human thinking, it almost certainly means your opinions and perspectives are less objectively valid than those of the experts advising you, because they’re not emotionally invested.

    Having a heart attack doesn’t make you a cardiologist any more than having herpes makes you a urologist. Being autistic doesn’t make you a neurologist. Having several diagnosed neurodivergencies doesn’t make me a psychiatrist.

    It can be frustrating when you’re looking for professional help and they don’t have answers, or you don’t like their answers (which is most often the case when this attitude shows up), or you don’t understand their answers (second place), or they don’t seem to understand your experiences, but that doesn’t magically make you the doctor.

    Your experiences can’t replace years of education; even a bad doctor probably knows more about your body than you do…and the fact that they don’t know everything while you’re 100% convinced that hip pain is your dead aunt Shirley sending you messages from the great beyond does not mean “your experience” trumps their education, even if “they just don’t get” how ol’ Shirley used to tease you by poking you in the hip.

    Even a bad doctor on “ez mode” is diagnosing you based on a set of established knowledge and criteria that you almost certainly don’t have access to (and your Facebook survivors’ group is NOT access to that information!) And their work, unlike yours, is subject to peer review.

    People sitting around recounting their subjective experiences isn’t data, it’s anecdotes. Speaking of, how about a wrestling story?

    Back in the late 90’s when I was working as an announcer for Southern Championship Wrestling down in NC (shout out to the OmegaPowers), my buddy Toad was involved in a match where he did a diving, somersaulting body block over the top rope to the floor – through his opponent and a table.

    He immediately signaled he was hurt, the match was wrapped, and he went to the locker room and bandaged his ribs, convinced that he’d broken them. His entire torso was in pain so bad he could hardly move.

    Got to the ER, did some tests and scans, and then they asked him why his torso was ace bandaged. “Well, to keep those broken ribs from moving around too much.”

    They said “it won’t help.”

    “Why not?”

    “Your ribs aren’t injured. Your hip is broken.”

    But his hip wasn’t where the pain was, his torso was. He felt the impact of the table on his ribs and that’s where the pain was, so he assumed based on his experience that his ribs were injured…but the experts took a look and found out he was wrong, by what amounts to a mile anatomically.

    I get that it’s frustrating to deal with professionals who don’t seem to understand you, and I’m in no way suggesting that there aren’t bad or lazy half-asses hiding behind a degree they sailed through or paid someone else to do most of the real work on or whatever.

    I am telling you that by default “your experience” is about the least-qualified evidence of anything you can find because it’s filtered through your limitations of knowledge, your biases, your beliefs, your fears, and your misinformation.

    By all means, ask questions and advocate for yourself. By all means, be firm and strong when describing your issue to someone who doesn’t appear to be listening or taking you seriously. By all means if you feel you’re being ill-served find another provider.

    But never, ever assume that “your experience” is somehow of greater informational value to your situation than the expert who’s studied hundreds or thousands of experiences similar to yours.

    There’s nothing wrong with crediting experience as an information source. There is something very wrong when you start rejecting an entire field of study simply because you don’t like what the data is telling you.

    This is a meme encouraging irrationality and rejection of objective evidence and proven science in favor of anecdote and subjective perception. In no way does it advocate for “autism” (as the page that posted it claimed to be doing) nor for anyone who is autistic.

    It does, however, feed nicely into the egos of that great mass of non-autistic people who run around calling themselves “autistic” because it’s a convenient excuse to be an entitled jerk or be a pain in the ass to their waitress, while actual autistic people pay the price. Like fake “service animals” that obviously need a service animal themselves.

    A final note: simply gainsaying expertise because it doesn’t flatter you also doesn’t mean you’re an

    A final note: simply gainsaying expertise because it doesn’t flatter you also doesn’t mean you’re an “independent thinker.” It means you’re an egomaniac and have chosen to be ineducable, and I’m kind of tired of people like that hiding behind other people’s problems. Then those other folks with actual problems can’t get help with because these attention-seeking fakes have clogged the system and caused the creation of lots of barriers to prevent fraud and abuse…then those barriers only get in the way of people who legitimately need help, while the fakes and the big-mouths just lie and BS their way around the system

    Don’t be one of those people. They cause harm and do little to no good, even for themselves, beyond a little ego boost from feeling like they’ve projected power and told someone else what to do…and in the end, that’s doing nobody any good at all.

  • Morning Me 1.7 (23-May-23)

    Good morning you and good morning me I am your highly refined and erudite host John Henry, let’s get into today’s Morning Me!

    Yesterday we did a whole meta thing about this newsletter. Today we start moving the Morning Me into being less about “me” and more about doing the work I do. With that in mind let’s take a look at some news. This story at WRAL in Raleigh, NC today provides us with a nice look at how the media turns language to the advantage of those it serves. Check out this screenshot:

    Gosh I wonder who was driving a police vehicle to a call?

    What I want you to see here – and be sure you read the accompanying article! – is how much effort went into avoiding the statement “a police officer struck a civilian with a police vehicle.” The lead is ridiculous and goes so far out of the way to avoid speaking that core idea aloud that it ends up reading like someone stole a cop car and then stopped it, got out, and hit someone. That’s still a step up from the headline and the body of the story though, in which they repeatedly discuss how a “vehicle” was involved – “hit by police vehicle” in the headline, and in the story you get this gem:

    “The biggest shock for some locals was stepping out and finding a police car involved.”

    – someone who apparently thinks police cars are autonomous

    It’s not until the next to the last sentence – twenty words from the end of the story – that you finally find mention that there was an officer driving the vehicle.

    This headline and story are an absolute triumph of the passive voice. It reads like if they could’ve avoided mentioning that police were involved at all, they would’ve – “pedestrian hit by speeding vehicle.” All personal responsibility of the driver is cast aside – a cop didn’t hit someone while driving too fast, someone went and got themselves hit by a police vehicle responding to a call! How dare that scofflaw get in the way of our brave men and women in blue!

    [NARRATOR stands and salutes a billowing American flag in the background as a marching band plays “The Battle Hymn Of The Republic”]

    It really is this abstruse and arcane. Media producers really do go to this level of fine-toothed Orwellian filtering to ensure the information they feed you advances their interests.

    I’m telling you as someone whose education easily qualifies them to be the people who do this: it is not accidental. This piece was gone over to remove as completely as possible any reference to the police officer who was driving the truck. The purpose of this is to separate and diffuse reactions centering on that fact – the debates over when emergency responders should be breaking traffic laws, who the driver was and what their record looks like, the history of the department overall related to traffic safety of officers on duty and in response – to avoid energizing discussion that reflects negatively on police and authority in general. I guarantee the original copy was more direct before the editors at WRAL put hands on it, unless they were the original writers.

    End result: you read this story about a police officer who probably was not doing their best work at the moment striking and injuring a pedestrian, and you walk away thinking “boy that guy got lucky, he should be more careful.” The thought of “what’s the deal with that cop” never crosses your mind. If anything it gets shunted to general internal grumbling about “cops” and how they drive, but nothing specific to focus energy on…so the energy dissipates and what could have led to protests – certainly should lead to some pointed questions and public engagement! – instead is a throwaway story that nobody bothers paying attention to.

    Words matter, and what matters most is that you pay attention to the words being used to tell you how and what to think.

    And that’s about all the time we’ve got for a short morning newsletter/podcast. It’s Tuesday so supporters and Patrons can look forward to a new JH Afterparty newsletter in an hour or three, and everyone else can look forward to last week’s Afterparty dropping today at noon eastern.

    That’s it for the Morning Me, this has been John Henry reminding you that all our work here is brought to you by YOU and your support is desperately needed, swing by johnhenry.us/money to find out how you can contribute. Whether it’s five dollars or five thousand, it’s all desperately needed to keep me alive and this entire operation running.

    Thanks again and don’t forget the best support is spreading the word so like, share, comment, and tell your friends: when you want truly independent political activism and information, you start with John Henry.

  • Morning Me 1.6

    Good morning, me and good morning you, I am of course your painfully photogenic host John Henry and this is the “Morning Me!”

    A few new things going on today. First, when I’m finished writing this I’m going to record it as video and audio and it will be published on my multimedia channels and social media in multiple formats, including showing up in audio as a new edition of my old “In My Room” podcast (for now).

    For right now I’m doing this as no-frills as it gets, just me and a mic and camera reading my morning newsletter. You may get the idea there’s more to all of this than I’ve gone into detail about and you’re right: essentially the MM newsletter is me building and testing the infrastructure to build all this up properly into what it was supposed to be in the first place, way back when. I want to be sure I can get a daily morning thing out in three formats regularly without that itself becoming the full-time thing.

    I know that these kinds of personal musings and “what’s up” content aren’t any big moneymaker or traffic attraction, and they’re not intended to be. There are three levels to “why” I’m doing this kind of content.

    The first, I’ve already said: this is where I work with new ideas and refine them and see how they are able to spin out as production, if I need to make adjustments before I’m committing myself to “the public” as an information source on a regular schedule, that kind of thing.

    So for today’s Morning Me what’ll happen is I’m going to finish writing this, then set up and record it on webcam real quick. I’ll probably go “naked” today with maybe just a url bug onscreen for the sake of getting this out while it’s still morning anywhere in the western hemisphere, then spend some time today in Premiere working up both traditional lower third graphics I can reuse specifically for this show and some kind of vertical framework so I can put a thirty-second pointer up for each show as well.

    Again you can probably see what I’m doing here – like a stand up comedian running new material unannounced in a small club or a band throwing a private party to debut songs. The second reason I’m babbling on so much about myself and the work I’m doing here right now is that it’s as close to zero effort source material as it gets. I don’t have to read the news or do any research to write these morning newsletters, I just write them. Harder than it sounds sometimes, but generally less time consuming than trying to do “real” news and information content. This allows me to focus on creating the infrastructure and meta-content necessary to ensure the actual content gets the best possible treatment I can give it.

    The third level is transparency and disclosure and making sure I’m communicating with you folks properly. Everything I do is crowdfunded, and I feel like that gives me some obligation to keep in touch with you about what I’m doing and how I’m doing it.

    All of this in service of being able to create better content and get it out to you faster, with broader distribution scope and therefore more positive impact in the world.

    As of this moment I’ve got nearly an hour in just writing this and figuring out what I was going to say – deleted a LOT of content for the sake of keeping it short – so I’m gonna let both of us get out of here, just want to say on the way out how much I appreciate you taking the time and supporting my work with your engagement and contributions. It’s a slow build but we’re on the ramp and rolling now, and things are looking very, very positive. Thank you all for being part of that, stay tuned right here and watch how it all plays out, and don’t forget to stay engaged, and of course if you’re able and willing you can help support the whole thing multiple ways including PayPal, Patreon, and more, you can find out more about all that at http://passionate-cyan-owl.192-250-227-172.cpanel.site/money! For now this is JH and the Morning Me saying see you tomorrow, same bat-time, same bat-channel!

  • In My Room S1E05 – AOC Backlash Silliness And More

    [powerpress]

    This episode originally broadcast on April 8 2021 includes discussion of the obviously contrived “progressive backlash” against AOC (look for more of it!) and more.

  • In My Room S1E04 – Workplace Gender Equality, Orwell’s Boot

    [powerpress]

    In this archive originally broadcast April 5, 2021, JH talks about gender equality in the workplace and the problems with crusaders who can’t tell vengeance from justice.

  • In My Room S1E03 – Who Is John Henry? Plus Matt Gaetz & More

    [powerpress]

    Due to the nature of what I do online I’m often asked (and occasionally aggressively challenged) to describe who I am and what I’m trying to accomplish here, so I dedicated some time in this show to answering some of those questions. Plus the ongoing scandal with Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz trying to hook up with starry-eyed high school girls and other current events, framing a discussion about integrity in both performance and creative work and public service, journalism and other critical social functions, and how all that ties in to Gen X and Obama and progressive ideology.

  • In My Room S1E02: Filming Police, Inside the Machine, More

    “The ability of the average citizen – you and me – to be able to film public servants in the execution of their duties is fundamental to a free society.”  Another Thursday evening with JH talking about various things including filming police, a look “backstage” at some of the stuff that goes in to all of this, plus current events and much more in Season 1, Episode 2 of In My Room with John Henry!  Originally broadcast April 1, 2021

  • In My Room S1E1 – The New Poor & More

    Hey welcome to my ad-hoc replacement for the John Henry Show, which will last until I’ve got more stability and can properly plan Season 3 of TJHS. I think for iTunes we can do fractional seasons, so if it works you’ll see this as season 2.1, episode 1 of “The John Henry Show.” That’ll save subscribers the hassle of going back and forth between shows.

    This show we’re talking about fundraising, about evolution, about self-honesty, about how many times does someone have to see big public things coming way before the mainstream and have them play out as predicted before people start thinking that someone might know what they’re talking about? And “The New Poor” get a hard answer to “why is this happening to us?” All this and a ton more on “In My Room,” the new low-key, get the cool people in early show from longtime activist, musician, actor, writer, and director John Henry

    Don’t forget you can help support my work at http://passionate-cyan-owl.192-250-227-172.cpanel.site/join/ with anything from a one-time tip for coffee money to a monthly subscription. For those who prefer Patreon, membership is available through the link above as well.

  • The John Henry Show – S1E022 Biden-Sanders Debate

    The Biden-Sanders debate, the ongoing state of US coronavirus response, outrageous social media trolls (and the people who fall for them), and the nature of authority and expertise.  Video archive at https://youtu.be/xBaHGGnXLZ4