Tag: disinformation

What Is The National Debt, And Why Does It Matter? (Part 1 – What Is Debt?)
A recent social media conversation brought forth the question, “what is the ‘national debt,’ really?”

This came by way of one person’s well-intended insistence that the national debt isn’t “debt” at all, really…which, is almost right, but also so hugely wrong that deconstructing it in a useful way that wasn’t dismissive or confrontational required a good deal more than a simple comment.

More to the point, when I realized the comment was approaching 700 words and not nearly done, I thought it would make a better blog post here…

Exhibit “A” – we’re going to ignore the questionable assertion that bankers and investors no longer “control the money supply.” Pretty sure the governors of the federal reserve are still “bankers.” There’s a lot wrong here, and the problem is how much if it is based on misunderstanding or misrepresenting useful and factual information.

So let’s talk about what’s wrong about our friend’s assessment, then why, then why it matters, and hopefully we’ll all walk away having learned something useful, and we’ll be better empowered to make well-reasoned decisions at the voting booth!

We began with a comment I saw in my feed that said “the only debt the US has is treasury bonds” or something to that effect, to which I replied “not quite true; 78% of the national debt is the money in circulation.”

This is a great place to note I was a bit wrong there. In a bit of synchronicity that number turns up in the current data, but the actual information I was communicating was something else and my communication was based on outdated data; the actual number is 76.6%. The information below is compiled from the most recent “Monthly Statement Of The Public Debt,” issued by the US Treasury Department.
- 22% of the “national debt” is debt held by various departments of the government against other departments of the government. This amounts to money deliveries and exchanges that haven’t yet been completed for one reason or another.
- Of the 78% (there’s that number) that remains – called “Debt Held By the Public” or “DHBP,” – 30% is held by foreign entities.
- 78 * .3 = 23.4. 100-23.4 = 76.6% of the national debt is, one way or the other, money we owe only to ourselves.
- That other 23.4% is the number on which our friend and I agree as being “debt.”
- In the sense that it is not the same as a e.g. a household, personal, or business debt, the original poster is right, however it is debt, and it’s important to understand how and why that is, in order to understand more completely “how money works.”
So with all of that said, it’s understandable that our correspondent insists that it’s “not debt.” That’s probably more correct than the general perception that this debt represents something that must be paid from some finite store of resources. Indeed, this debt will never be “paid off” or “balanced,” nor would you want it to be?

Why? Because even though there are a lot of misunderstandings about what it means, and those misunderstandings are very much leveraged maliciously against those who subscribe to them (and the vast majority of the rest of us), in the end from a standpoint of economics a dollar bill is a debt instrument, it’s a token representing a legally binding agreement that someone owes someone for something, and unraveling that is much more important than simply engaging in some grand “pulling back the curtain AHA YOU SEE? NOTHING!” gesture. Plus the gesture’s wrong. There’s definitely something there, and it matters. Just not how you probably think…and it all adds up to the simple reality that if the national debt were “paid off,” that would mean there are no more US dollars.

There are only two ways that’s going to happen: if the US unilaterally defines and adopts a successor currency (which it sort of already did, see notes further on in this series about the “gold standard”), or the US collapses entirely and ceases to exist as an operating entity.

What your money’s really worth. Don’t get any bright ideas; destroying coinage is a more serious federal crime than you think.

A “debt” is something that is owed; a “fiat” or “token” is something that holds the place of the debt in a way that’s generally accepted as valid and enforceable by the general public. All paper currency (and most coinage now) is “fiat” currency. Currency’s not valuable in and of itself, it’s just paper (well, cloth) and ink, but it’s still valuable because we all agree to let it represent value under certain conditions and for certain purposes. (Coinage may have intrinsic value depending on the composition of the coin, but as far as I know there is currently no nation producing coins whose metal content is equal to the face value of the coin. US pennies, for instance, cost about $1.07 per dollar’s worth at current (2:18pm 15-May-23) commodity prices.)

In the case of your dollar bill (or its electronic representation in a bank computer somewhere), what it represents – what it is – is a token legally validating that “The United States” is owned, to the tune of 1/x where x= total $ in circulation, by the holder (or “owner”) of that dollar bill, whose ownership stake has not yet been converted to real property or services.

Ergo, “The United States” owes that person or entity one dollar’s worth of real property or services, which they have not yet claimed. (Note to self: stretch this into a separate short piece about the international bond market…) Unavoidably, by definition, every dollar “in circulation” is a dollar of debt.

NB: In this case ‘in circulation’ simply means it’s not in the government’s hands, nor is it in the hands of a governmental unit who is using it for trade, and includes ALL money, not just that which physically exists. About 95% of it doesn’t – around a trillion and a half of that debt is circulating currency and coinage, the rest is electronically recorded and doesn’t “really exist” at all. This is often used as a cheap-shot, elementary school rebuttal to the observation that the “national debt” is in point of fact the collected dollar savings of the United States, to the penny.

Savings accounts, the values of stocks, commercial lending, are all dollars “in circulation” in this sense, and they all represent a debt, usually on multiple levels. But getting back to dollars, the only exceptions are those which make their way into the hands of those who collect coins or currency as a hobby, or trades in those items as collectibles as a business. Then they become a “real resource” rather than a representation thereof. Even at that, the US government will happily cash in your silver and gold certificates and coinage at face value, just take it to any bank and they will replace your old worn-out five dollar bill or twenty dollar gold coin with a nice crisp new Federal Reserve Note in the amount of your bill or coin!

That is why a dollar bill is a debt, not because of some archaic and nefarious witch-doctoring by those mysterious bankers and businessmen. It’s literally a legally binding note saying the United States as a collective political entity owes you real property or services in the amount of that note, and there are very good reasons for that arrangement which are entirely without ideological or political cant; neither capitalism nor communism required.

In Part 2, we’ll take on the question of The Gold Standard, why we’re not on it, and why we definitely don’t want to be. Later we’ll talk about how you get “real value” out of your pile of notes and those ‘very good reasons’ I mentioned. See you soon!
May 15, 2023
The Progressives Are Winning

We – the people, the “left” – are stronger every day.

We have it right. We know – at least in broad general terms – what needs doing to create a smooth transition into the next chapter of human evolution, and we know how to do it. All we need now is more people tuned in and turned on, so to speak.

It is absolutely critical to this effort to break the hold panderers and grifters have over left wing discourse in this country. I’m talking about the clickbaiters who don’t really do anything but copy and paste other people’s tweets into their branded template and call themselves activists, Twitter insta-pundits whose only discernible contribution to the discourse is being able to write “fuck” a lot and direct it toward right-wing public figures (James “Sweary History” Fell excepted because that’s his gimmick and he’s written books and done other things and has an identity beyond his Twitter handle). Superfluous grifters. The kinds of drizzling puddles of humanity that charge you five hundred bucks to “engage” with you for four tweets. The kinds of self-proclaimed “liberal” and “leftist” and “progressive” “activists” who are so bad at what they do that they will unironically create a campaign shaming mental illness and playing on violent racist tropes to defeat a candidate that was a laughingstock in the first place.

Now people are catching up and catching on, and the time is (at least of those presented thus far) optimal to start pushing hard on this whole concept of media and information literacy, discernment of sources, knowing who’s getting paid by your social media activity and making sure they really are who they represent themselves to be.

These people and others of their same basic mentality and ethical vacuum have spent ridiculous amounts of energy trying to end progressive integrity completely, and they have failed. They have failed because they understand neither integrity nor progress. Fundamentally they want to make money, and the way they’ve chosen to do that is by pandering to the political biases of people who think of themselves as progressive. In doing so, they’ve cratered genuine leftist movement in this country and did a great deal to give us President Donald Trump by throwing their weight behind status-quo middle-path capitalism in the hopes of making political careers for themselves through sycophancy to entrenched power.

They hurt us, and they hurt our country, and they made fools of us, and they took millions of dollars from us.

Now it’s time to return the favor. Not by going after them personally (because that’s petty and weak), but by ending the whole series of logical breaks, ethical corner-cutting, and self-deception that empowered their grift in the first place.

We must stop taking our cues on the left from people who don’t care about what’s right but only about what’s profitable. It’s a conflict of interest; if all you care about is numbers, it doesn’t take long to start making sacrifices to integrity in order to chase them.

The folks who do this are a big part of why instead of looking for new progressive leadership so we can all have the lives we want, need, and deserve, we continue looking at the old pillars of the center-right capitalist wing of the DNC, which is the wing that controls most of the party, hoping that somehow THIS will be the time when capitalism-lite works.

The win condition of capitalism is fascism. It’s unavoidable, and it’s time to start crafting whatever we decide to call the thing that is post-capitalism.

These bad actors don’t want to move past capitalism because it’s the only reason they have any power in the first place and they know that they can’t survive on a level playing field where merit and integrity are more important than one’s ability to buy their way in.

They’re part of the reason we’re not moving forward like we should be, and it’s time to shed their anchoring weight from the evolution train.

We have the numbers and we have the ethical high ground. They’ve got money, and right now that’s an advantage. We live in a capitalist system and to some degree are forced by that to need money; that’s why I have a Patreon.

The only reason people like Omar Rivera (Occupy Democrats) and Matt Desmond (Being Liberal/AddictingInfo) and other grifters and panderers like them aren’t out here doing the same thing I do, asking directly for contributions to help them stay alive and able to produce work, is they lie through their teeth about what they’re doing (generally lies of omission; they just don’t mention it). They’re living on what they make online just like I do, I’m just honest about it. I say “hey I’m doing this work and need to survive.” They want to sell you branded beach towels – the illusion and presentation of an identity offered as a for-profit saccharine homoncular pretense of activism, intended primarily for consumption by that particular breed of human who values style and social validation over truth and accuracy and progress. I and others like me – writers and activists of integrity – are trying to eat, pay bills, and have the equipment to put our skills and talent to the best use to make the world better.

It’s the same thing all these people who do kickstarters for books and stuff are doing; trying to survive and pay the bills long enough to do what they believe they’re supposed to be doing. “Pay me, and I can write a novel.” It’s really not that complex or underhanded, until people like the Occupy Democrats and Being Liberals of the world get involved and try to turn it all into a grift, and they’re terrified you’ll notice that some of us aren’t doing that, so they work to take us out before you do notice and realize you’re being taken for a ride by them. Since they’re starting from a position of power and are willing to make compromises to core principles (if they’re even able to recognize a compromise when they see one), they naturally have the upper hand against the rest of us.

The behavior tends to be self-rewarding and self-perpetuating; it’s hard to lose money by pandering to people’s egos…and when money’s the point, any damage done to discourse or our overall political health, for instance by allowing critical messages of truth and progress to be dulled and deflected by those more interested in pleasing those holding power, is just another bullet point on the collateral damage list.

With friends like that, the US left definitely does not need enemies.

That’s why it’s so important that we, the people, get it together on an individual level and take it upon ourselves to seek true literacy with humility and an open mind. In particular we need to be very cautious about allowing the knee-jerk emotional reactions of our ego to lead us into ignoring realities that are unflattering or unpleasant.

That set of problems solves itself when people get too smart to fall for cheap appeals to ego and bias in the first place. That’s what I’ve been working to do for these last dozen years or so, beyond a broader lifetime of other activism.

That’s why I particularly scare them and why I draw so much heat from them: because that’s exactly what we’re making happen and I’m the face of that.

Thanks for continuing to energize and support me and us and what we do here. We’re right.

We are right.

We have the answers we need.

Now we just have to push past the bastards that don’t want anyone to hear them.

April 3, 2023
Best Of A Bad Lot

When every political candidate’s best pitch is “I’m not as bad as the worst,” it’s tough to believe you’re in a truly free system.

The Frame

Over on a big Facebook page where I’m an admin, “I Loved To Wake Up In The Morning When Barack Obama Was President,” one of the other admins posted the meme you see as this article’s header image in celebration of President’s Day, with the caption “America thrives with Democratic Presidents at the helm.”

While I personally am not a Democrat and have some major problems with the party, as an independent leftist I find that to be a valid statement. I’m less inclined to “go team” and personality cultism than some – although I’d hardly be an admin of a fan page for Barack Obama if I thought he wasn’t worthy of the effort, I don’t endorse or promote anything I don’t believe in – but I don’t think in its context this image is out of place or unreasonable.

When you look at the numbers and what gets done and why, as a general rule the US does better with Democratic presidents, and ideally we’d have about a 16-year run of them with significant periods of legislative majority, while the GOP continues falling off the right end of the spectrum into flat-out Neo-fascism, the Dems continue to drift rightward, and eventually a third party rises from the left within the Democratic party to fill the “other major party” void left by the declining Republicans.

As one might expect with that sort of content in that sort of context, reaction was largely positive. There was one that caught my eye though, because it was pretty hard but not without significant merit and truth. I’ve no interest in bringing any heat on the commenter so I’ll leave their name out and not screenshot lest anyone think I’m encouraging some kind of argument with them, but the comment was thus:

The ONLY good thing about Democrats, is that they’re not Republicans. Literally it. All 3 of those men suck major donkey balls, they were just a hell of a lot better than the alternatives.
Facebook

I don’t feel as negatively as the commenter, but I also sure wish there wasn’t quite so much truth in this as there is.

What really stood out for me wasn’t the harsh criticism in the first part of the post, but rather the last phrase: “they were just a hell of a lot better than the alternatives.”

That really struck me, because that’s been the core decision-making guidance in presidential (and most congressional) elections in my lifetime.

This “best of a bad lot” game has been going on for several cycles now. I think we got fairly lucky with Obama, frankly, and I put him well above Clinton. (I’m not taking a position on Biden’s presidency as a whole until it’s over.) Any of them I’d take over any republican president in my lifetime, which would start with Nixon. Eisenhower was a different breed and I’d have to take a closer look at his policies to say how much I’d care for him versus say Clinton.

But generally in my lifetime it’s been “horrible” versus “a little less horrible,” often with so little difference “horrible” wins. When this is not the case, for profit media (“independent” or not) will work diligently to make it seem so, because underneath this whole process is a matter of conditioning us as a population to always accept “just a little better than the worst” as the only alternative to anything.

This is exactly why we end up with people like Reagan and the Bushes and McConnell and Trump and may all the gods I don’t believe in forbid whatever the GOP is queuing up to be even worse than that. We’re conditioned to not only accept that bold progressive change is impossible, but that it’s rather flighty to even suggest. Here, have a personable character who will do far less than they should. Wouldn’t you like to have a beer with them? How could you reject someone so friendly and nice? At least he’s not as bad as that OTHER one…

The Game

The first half of the game is first finding a truly odious candidate, then getting a candidate who’s just slightly different enough to be “better than THAT guy” and conditioning voters to accept that this is the best we can do because look at the alternative.

The second half is to limit the alternatives to only those candidates sufficiently friendly to existing holders of wealth and power.

We’re not allowed to have good alternatives, and when one arises – see e.g. Sanders in ’16 and ’20 – they’re excluded from the process by manipulation and artifice, usually with a big assist from the media driving narratives that deliberately – and let’s be clear, artificially – induce a sense of hopelessness and failure among those supporting the good alternative, and a wearing away of the will until you throw up your hands and go well I guess this is what we’ve got, because there literally are no other choices.

More Of The Same

Those same influences of media and commerce will then throw support behind saccharine facades of the good alternative, like Gabbard or Sinema or Manchin, and manipulate us into believing the artificial is genuine…just long enough to get them into office where they can screw things up and make a big mess and confuse the conversation, lather rinse repeat.

You can count on two hands, if that, the number of currently seated US federal legislators who aren’t to at least some degree putting up a front of populist nonsense and cheap sloganeering in the pretense of working “for the people” while as soon as the cameras are off they’re having $25K/plate fundraisers with industrial tycoons. Maybe your toes too, if I’m being optimistic.

Whatever one may think about any given President’s ideology or accomplishments, all of this seems like one damned strange way to have a free country to me, and it’s bothered me for decades.

We never should have been ON this handcart, and now nobody wants to hit the brakes because then they’d have to deal with themselves.

We’ve had warnings – loud, clear, lucid, consistent warnings from subject matter experts in every imaginable field -that this mess was coming for decades, and we ignored them all because they were uncomfortable, inconvenient, and unprofitable.

Now just look at what we’ve done with all the privilege and liberty we were born into. Corrosion, corruption, connivance, exploitation, greed, and way too many of us are STILL sitting here insisting “no wait, we don’t know FOR SURE where this handcart is headed, let’s keep going!”

Because they’ve got good seats in the handcart and they’re comfortable and they think if they stay real still and don’t upset the handcart, they’ll stay that way and by the time it gets to hell who cares they’ll be dead anyway.

That has to end.

The entire way we think about everything is a broken cobbled-together mish-mash of superstitions and emotional manipulation leveraged by the powerful against the powerless, all hiding behind the facades of good will and best wishes and thoughts and prayers. We are dragging around thousands of years of ridiculous social nonsense and mechanisms of oppression and abuse, and it’s time we faced ourselves and started letting them go.

That’s not a suggestion; it’s going to happen because the only other option is extinction. The question is whether we lean into it and grow and evolve, or whether we choose to fight back and try to cling to old systems of inequality and oppression because they benefit us materially, and find ourselves miserable and tied up for generations in decline and oppression as we teach ourselves over and over that the old ways simply don’t work anymore, to the extent that they ever did.

But for too many of us right now, it’s almost like watching hardcore addicts, people who are deep into like meth or crack or opiates. They always think they’re getting away with something, and if you call them out they’ll just stand there lying straight to your face about it until one way or the other you leave them alone about it.

Every one of us from the most powerful personalities in government and commerce to any one of the half-million or so people who go to sleep homeless every night in the United States knows that we have a serious problem of our world being largely controlled by and for narcissists, egomaniacs, and sociopaths.

In our earnest desire for fairness and equity, we allow ourselves to be painted into a corner where if we stand up against autocratic or totalitarian or fascist or otherwise oppressive and harmful ideologies, we’re accused of “intolerance” and shouted down as though that’s really a substantive point.

Worse, trapped in a fog of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, propaganda, advertising, marketing that begins assaulting our senses nearly from the moment of birth and follows us all the way to the grave, we’re often easily misled by cults of personality and pandering to our biases and egos and fears, and that goes in any direction; it’s no more rational to have unquestioning fealty to Obama or Biden or Clinton than to have any seething hate for them.

(Ah, but what about the Trumps of the world? Their whole function is to lower the basement by several dozen levels so the next fascist who shows up with table manners and less than grotesque personality will seem admirably restrained and lucid by comparison…and the one just a tiny bit less odious than that one will seem nearly messianic by comparison to the “new low.”

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.)

By failing to stand up for justice and equality, allowing our systems and processes to be corrupted because we believed ourselves beneficiaries of the corruption, we have sent the message to the most powerful and malicious people in the world that they can get away with anything, and now that’s what they’re trying to do.

So while there’s nothing wrong with showing respect for leaders you admire, it’s also well worth noting that we are in no way headed in any right direction at present, nor have we been for a very long time now, and if we don’t get serious about fixing it right now a whole lot of us are going to get hurt as the whole mess collapses on top of all of us – and it will be all of us, this isn’t just a US or “western democracy” or “modern world” thing.

The very underpinnings of human liberty are at grave risk of disappearing entirely. While it’s in no way my intention to insult or criticize memes like this one or celebrations like President’s Day or any of the particular people in the image, if we’re truly going to honor and respect our humanity in the veneration of historical figures we absolutely must reject the idea that “not as bad as the worst,” is the best we can do.

February 21, 2022
“The Drill” #1 – Greta Thunberg, Neil Young

Welcome to the very first edition of what I hope will become a regular weekday post rounding up various bits of news and entertainment I’ve found during my online travels, and various thoughts, anecdotes, trivia, and analysis pertaining thereto. What ground I’ll cover is up for grabs; there’s sure to be some socio-political content every day because that’s where I live, and likely to be plenty of stuff about music, films, etc.

While “news” will play a role, it’s not my intent to be just another copy-paste gimmick that does crappy rewrites of articles from bigger sites and passes it off as original material. Expect anything that catches my attention and inspires 250-500 words of thought, with maybe four to eight stories per day.

With that said, let’s get right in to it!

In today’s issue: Greta Thunberg reminds us that she ran out of f**ks to give about five minutes after she was born and good for her; Neil Young sings about other people; YouTube bans antivaxx misinformation. Read more using the navigation links (pro tip: the header is a drop-down menu), and don’t forget to add me on social media so you don’t miss anything!

Greta Gives ‘Em Hell

Climate and autism activist Greta Thunberg hit another one out of the park this week while speaking at the Youth4Climate summit in Milan, Italy. Reading like a classic George Carlin stand-up routine, Thunberg read through the obligatory list of cliches and empty promises – creating a new prosperous future full of green jobs and so forth – with open scorn and mockery before dismissing the lot as “thirty years of blah blah blah.” CNN’s report is at https://us.cnn.com/2021/09/28/world/greta-thunberg-climate-intl/index.html and features some highlights or you can watch the video in the embedded tweet below. One of my favorite passages, via WaPo:

They invite cherry-picked young people to pretend they are listening to us, but they are not. They are clearly not listening to us. Just look at the numbers. Emissions are still rising. The science doesn’t lie.
– Greta Thunberg

What I love about this particular quote is that she doesn’t flinch even a little bit while citing her own presence in that place at that moment as another attempt at performative distraction, a bit of token attention to settle the kids down. In the “bigger picture” sense again we see a dramatic shift in decorum over the last few decades; no more are these folks all just showing up to have their pictures taken and get their name in the paper. They haven’t come to recycle the same old talking points that benefit nobody except those desperately working to preserve the status quo that keeps them extraordinarily wealthy. Moreover they’ve come to eject those who do.

It absolutely must be taken as critical to this conversation that we stop playing word games and employing euphemism and trying to protect the feelings of the guilty at the expense of the lives of the innocent. Seeing this ongoing evolution of discourse is heartening and I certainly encourage everyone to do what they can to emulate it. Enough with the “blah blah blah” already, let’s get something done.

This is the generation of kids I was trying to be in thirty-five years ago and we weren’t ready. We’re not ready now…but the universe isn’t gonna wait for us to be ready. Change is happening, evolution is here, and it’s get on board or get left behind.

When I think about what “on board” looks like, it usually looks like this.

“We can no longer let the people in power decide what hope is. Hope is not passive. Hope is not blah blah blah. Hope is telling the truth. Hope is taking action”
My speech at #Youth4Climate #PreCOP26 in Milan. pic.twitter.com/BA62GpST2O
— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) September 28, 2021

Neil Gives ‘Em Grief

There’s a pretty nifty little trivia-listicle over at Far Out magazine (https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/neil-young-songs-wrote-about-fellow-musicians/) in the UK which lists songs Neil Young wrote about other musicians. If you’re into Young or music trivia it’s well worth scrolling through on your lunch break or whatever. Of course it’s not exhaustive, just a handful of tracks, but if you’re of a mind you can start following links and reading and learning all kinds of stuff about Young.

Of course it’s almost endemic to Neil Young that you think his songs are “about somebody,” and often their subjects are obscured through metaphor. Sometimes it’s an obvious homage (“Buffalo Springfield Again”), sometimes it’s a callback to himself (“Harvest Moon”). Sometimes he gets “feisty” ($1 Eddie Vedder, see embed) and takes on a whole idea (“This Note’s For You”), or a whole region of the country (“Southern Man”). Then there are the songs that you didn’t even realize he wrote, or about whom (“Lotta Love,” made famous by Young’s then-partner Nicolette Larson), and you could spend a lifetime speculating on the veiled references to his various interpersonal loves and hates with old bandmates like David Crosby and Stephen Stills.

Part of Young’s appeal as a songwriter is he knows how to make the specific feel general and vice-versa; he resonates, because he finds the resonance between the individual, subjective, personal experience and the collective, shared, objective “world” in which it happens.

Enjoy this fun video of Eddie Vedder inducting “Uncle Neil” into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, in 1995.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMmT6JN5Pqc

The Great Ticketmaster Food Fight of 1995 is rarely discussed today out of respect for the survivors.

Things I Love Today

This cat:

YouTube Bans Vaccine Disinfo

Another entry in the “Big Brother?” argument: NPR reports (https://www.npr.org/2021/09/29/1041493544/youtube-vaccine-misinformation-ban) that YouTube has now announced a generalized ban on vaccine disinformation. This extends the existing ban on fake or misleading info about COVID and related vaccines and other management measures. You can read the details of YouTube’s position on the matter in the linked article.

This naturally brings to the surface questions about censorship and information control, and it’s quite reasonable to be concerned when any private company has the ability to exercise that level of content control over public discourse. Sorting out the imperatives of free expression and public safety in a moment like this was never going to be easy, and the flag-waving and sloganeering around the issue from all directions don’t help.

The real, core solution to all of this is of course education, but that takes time we don’t really have. The problems with our failure to sufficiently educate are manifest and must be dealt with on a basis of exigent need, even as we work diligently to construct robust, effective, and meaningful core solutions. How that will play out, I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling free expression is going to take a hit in the end.

Meanwhile, those of us who would like to help educate others (or ourselves) should find this video from UNESCO quite handy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7hvv3z1gqc

Thanks for reading, please remember to like, share, comment, and subscribe, and we’ll be back Friday…you know The Drill 😉

September 30, 2021
I’m Vaccinated. Here’s Why It’s My Business That You Aren’t

(This post was updated on October 25, 2021 adding a link to mutation data and adjusting calculations resulting from a transcription error rendering “12,700” as “12,400.” Ultimately this results in the originally-reported 53-minute strain cycle being closer to 48-minutes. -jh)

I keep running into this dishonest, manipulative, and frankly stupid response from the murdering plague-bearers who refuse to do what’s necessary to end this pandemic. (Don’t @ me and don’t bother whining; if you don’t like the description, don’t fit it.) It goes like this:

“Well you’re vaccinated, so why do you care what anyone else does?”

This is a question that really does require quantum-singularity level stupidity to even ask, and a complete lack of self-respect to do so out loud, but it seems to be the narrative the boiler rooms are using to troll the stupid into killing as many people as possible, so since the stakes are that high let’s go ahead and answer the question definitively, then you can just link this article from now on when you run across that puerile, psychopathic, abjectly dim-witted and pathetically gross argument.

I care what anyone else does because I understand how viruses work (at least to a point sufficient to this conversation).

Makes a big difference in your attitude.

See, while a bunch of knuckle-dragging pencil-necked fit-throwing entitled twits decided this was their moment to claim the 15 minutes Andy Warhol promised them, this virus has been mutating. Last time I had solid numbers, between Feb 2020 and April 2021 it had mutated some 12,700 times (per https://srhd.org/news/2021/coronavirus-mutations-and-variants-what-does-it-mean using WHO & CDC data), which bakes down to about one new strain every forty-eight minutes or so. Given the radical increase in the number of cases since that time, I would imagine this estimate is if anything fairly optimistic, and the actual average time between new mutations is probably more like half an hour. That would mean 48 times a day, every day, all day long, we are spinning the chamber and pulling the trigger.

Someone who actually understands these things will immediately point out that probably 12,200 of those strains were self-terminating; they had a failed mutation that caused them to be non-viable, and they died out.

But someone who actually understands these things will also immediately point out that every single mutation carries the risk of hitting the big trifecta: resistant to existing antibodies, far more contagious, and far more deadly. If that combination hits, it’s the end of life as we know it, permanently. IF the species survives, the impact will be immeasurable and will absolutely and fundamentally change who we are, quite possibly thrusting us back into pre-technological and steampunk pockets of innovation at best for centuries.

Every time that virus mutates is another round of Russian Roulette we’re playing with the species because some Muffy somewhere misses her afternoon delight with the pool boy that she can’t have now that the kids are going to school in the living room.

Every hour we take the chance of wiping ourselves off this planet, and the ONLY reason it’s happening with that frequency is because people think they can argue opinion against science. I swear it’s like some of y’all WANT to meet Randall Flagg. If people get vaccinated, mask up, and stay home as much as POSSIBLE – which does not mean “as much as I want,” but “as much as is needed” – the possibility STILL remains that we can get a lid on this stupid thing, even though the chance of actually eradicating it are now very, very slim (15 months ago it would have been easy, if we’d done what we were supposed to THEN instead of cutting corners and letting the plutocrats rush us back to work).

The longer we continue this infantile, suicidal, ego-driven insanity, the greater the chances are that you and I will live to see at least the genuine beginnings of a civilizational collapse on a scale that simply can not be imagined.

And that is why your vaccination status is my business.

September 27, 2021
We Are Not “Back Where We Started” With Coronavirus

Screenshot of CBSNews.Com headline. Courtesy CBS News.

One of the headlines I’m seeing quite a bit this morning is former FDA director Scott Gottleib saying we’re “right back where we were.”

That’s not true. We’re far worse off. If we were back where we were, we wouldn’t still be setting new infection records. But we are. It’s not like we’re back where we were; where we were was doing something to keep this mess in check. We were staying home, we were distancing, we were masked.

Now it’s like we didn’t even do any of that, because of these selfish, obnoxious fools who can’t get it through their heads that it’s not “democratic Governors” closing things down, it’s A DEADLY PANDEMIC VIRUS. It is real, it is happening, it is killing people, and our president and his supporters are so completely off the rails they think as long as they stomp their feet and insist this isn’t all happening, it won’t be.

Yes, I said fools. The time for being polite about this has passed.

Worse Than That

We’re not “right back where we were,” because where we were was starting to do things right, and we’re not doing that anymore. Consequently we’re worse off than we were, by far. We’re seeing record numbers of new infections, the death numbers are rising in correlation. And when you take out the places that got hit hard early and clamped down much harder, it’s even worse than it looks.

States like NY and MI peaked early and even if they have a recent increase it’s not too terrible. States that refused to close entirely in the first place and then re-opened far too soon are setting new records daily. Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University.

The simple reality is that we need a relief package NOW. Not a “throw money at them to stop them from rioting” relief package, a comprehensive regular payment to ensure people aren’t dying and losing their homes.

Unfortunately, it is precisely these people who refuse to cooperate that will eventually cause more draconian measures to be taken to enforce masks, social distancing, and the stay-home orders that I’m quite sure are upcoming again. This isn’t going to go away because of political arguments; it’s here until a vaccine is found. I’ve been saying that since day one. It’s not going away just because we want it to. Until a vaccine is found be prepared to stay home.

But The Economy…

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I frankly don’t care much about landlords and mortgage holders at this point. The stock market doesn’t mean anything to me, nor to most of us. That’s low-speed money, it doesn’t really do anything but sit around and be shuffled back and forth between service institutions with no value add. We need money going in to the economy, that currently isn’t, to keep goods and services moving. When they stop they tend to be tough to start up again. We can let the landlords and mortgage holders wait for the moment; that money isn’t going anywhere fast anyway. Right now people need money in their hands, they need to be able to stay the hell home unless they’re essential, if they’re out they need to be covered, protected and protecting. We can work funding for maintenance technicians at rental properties and private property later, it’ll hold for a couple of weeks. Right now, people need money in their hands.

Ignoring this or pretending it’s not really as bad as it seems is killing innocent people. We have played enough games with this nonsense. Your anxiety is just one more reason you should be staying home. If you’re not capable of working in a mask, don’t work. That’s exactly why the unemployment extensions and modifications are in place.

We are at high and growing risk with this virus, and it kills. If you’re not worried about that, that’s on you. But as long as the consequences you reap from that attitude are also mine to bear, you simply don’t have the right to impose that on me and therefore you must either voluntarily stop doing so or be regulated by the government into stopping.

You WILL stop putting other people’s lives at risk. It’s not a question anymore.

The virus doesn’t care if we like it. Doesn’t care that we’re uncomfortable, doesn’t care that we blah blah blah doesn’t care. Doesn’t care about our pretense that we don’t “believe” it. What we believe is not relevant to the decision-making process anymore. Nor is what we “like” or that we’re not “comfortable” with.

Dying now.

Dying.

We don’t argue anymore. We shut up and do what we need to do to stop the dying, while we do our best to improve the science so we can understand how to properly get things rolling again long-term in the worst case scenario, that being that this simply does not go away until we achieve herd immunity. At present understanding of the numbers, this entails a minimum of a few million dead just in the US, and the only real question is how long will it take. This is the current reality.

Sidebar: How To Get Herd Immunity

The idea that speeding up infection rates will somehow provide a solution as we magically get to herd immunity without losing a substantial part of the population is nuts. The way you get to herd immunity is when some majority percentage of the population has been exposed to the virus, and it has run its course in them. In the current best case scenario that calculates to about 2 and a quarter million Americans dead in the next fairly short period – year to two years. It means permanent regulation about social distancing, masking, etc. It means nobody will ever be safe and every year a few thousand or hundred thousand people will die of this until a vaccine is developed, people who would not have died otherwise.

That is what people who keep talking about “herd immunity” and “only one percent” and so forth are saying. They are literally saying out loud that they’re willing for a few million people to die for no reason beyond their personal comfort and convenience. Over a period of decades the death rate will slow, but there’s not enough data to predict reliably by how much until, literally, everyone who is not immune to this disease has caught it and either lived or died….and at this point scientists aren’t even certain that immunity is permanent, as there have been multiple reports of reinfection but unfortunately few with any great reliability. One prominent and respected immunologist, Danny Altmann of Imperial College, London, recently characterized immunity to Covid-19 as “fragile” and “short-lived.” So it may well be that there is no vaccine, or that any vaccine would have to be administered on an ongoing basis, probably with more frequency than the flu vaccine.

Do keep in mind that for those who are effected by coronavirus-related disease, “lived” is a somewhat relative statement. This disease does some pretty horrible things to the body, the full scope of which is not yet known, but we have seen what appear to be permanent and debilitating injuries to the lungs and heart, in addition to neurological disorders that may or may not be transient.

Those relying on “herd immunity” arguments are basically saying let’s hurry up and have all those people die so we can be done with this, and we don’t even know if being “done with this” is a thing yet. The argument is sociopathic insanity and absolutely represents a callous disregard for other human lives.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled article.

Back To The Economy

Congress are going to have to find what little remains of their souls and get a relief package through that MEANS SOMETHING. Canada’s model appears to be pretty successful, and other nations are doing well under similar arrangements. Essentially a UBI will be put in place for the duration. My friend Ellis, who teaches macroeconomics, has been saying for years that we would be heading that direction soon regardless. He didn’t necessarily know it would be due to Covid, but he knew we were going to end up in a UBI situation regardless of whether we tried to or wanted to or not. The pandemic just pushes us a great deal harder in that direction and makes the solutions more clear and clearly necessary.

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The pandemic creates a special circumstance window where you can get away with UBI and no job guarantee for a period – a year or so – but that’s not a sustainable model; you have to have one for other to work. We shouldn’t do it at all but we don’t have time to wait for the job guarantee foot-draggers to catch up before we start handing UBI payments. It’s really no exception to the rules or anything, it’s just that we can agree to take on a bit of a long-term hit to keep ourselves alive in the short term.

However, that also means we need to be much more ethical and focused on what that long-term hit will look like, because it won’t be us paying for it. It’ll be our kids and theirs.

You will note that this is the end of this ridiculous “social Darwinism” / “work ethic” approach to questions of employment, compensation, and so forth; this outrageous notion that a human being must do more than simply be human before they “deserve” the benefits of their humanity. Even our best politicians continue to fall for that, if for no other reason than that they know they’re playing to the working poor, who resent the non-working poor oftentimes more than the wealthy do.

(This is a key reason that the Powers That Be, the ownership class, are dragging their feet; we’re going to realize soon that we could have been doing all of this a long time ago, and the only reason we didn’t is that someone wanted to make a dollar on it first.)

The people making the dollars from it definitely don’t want us to notice that, and you’re absolutely right to be angry about it.

But we’re so wrapped up in old-style thinking, even proto-populist Sanders plays these linguistic games, right? “No working American should have to choose between rent and food.”

Excuse me, no, that’s the old way. The new way is no HUMAN BEING should have to make that choice, who cares if they’re “working” or “American?” Why does NOT being either one or both of those things disqualify a human being from having their basic needs met? That’s just wrong, stupid, and insane.

We have the capacity to do it.

So why aren’t we?

Universal Morality Strikes Again

Well, we’re not doing it so we can feel like we’re better than someone, that’s why. So we can continue to maintain a permanent slave class in the so-called “third world” to provide us with enough cheap electronics to stay anesthetized to our own participation in the oppression of others.

Isn’t that gross?

Isn’t it time we stopped doing sick things like that to each other and started working on making sure everyone’s got a fair shot at life? Isn’t now the time to stop thinking of other human beings as expendable?

I think it is, and so do a whole bunch of other folks, and that’s the way we’re going to go whether the oligarchs and their lackeys like it or not. Any other direction violates the universal morality. So that is the direction we will go. We can get there the easy way, or the hard way. Right now the oligarchy is still trying to make it the hard way – so hard that we give up.

But we don’t give up and we won’t give up because survival and propagation of the species is the only universal morality, and when we find we are violating that morality, we will, even unconsciously, act to end that violation as quickly and effectively as possible.

Solutions We Can’t Avoid

The reality that we’re being directed away from is simply this: capitalism as it is practiced in the United States and some other nations is not merely unsustainable; it is incompatible with the universal ethic. It ensures a permanent underclass just like any other top-down economic system; after all, if there is a top there must also be a bottom. As long as that “underclass,” that “bottom,” is beneath the level of not mere survival but dignity and opportunity, it is too low for the species to survive and propagate. Therefore it violates the universal ethic.

Thus, the human task before us is to ensure the bottom is high enough that any person who can be capable of it has every possible chance to be their best at whatever they choose to do with their lives.

Screenshot of my results from SlaveryFootprint.Org.

That is the only real solution to any of this. We have to live up to our rhetoric, and we have to start right this minute, and everyone has to participate.

If we were doing that, this pandemic wouldn’t be hitting us so much harder than it is the rest of the world, we wouldn’t have these egregious abuses of power that drive people into the streets in protest, we wouldn’t be building statues to traitors, rapists, and murderers. We wouldn’t have a nation of maleducated sociopaths ready to be open fascists, walking around exerting offensive violence when there’s no reasoned or moral basis for their demands to be met.

Then those same fascists turn around and claim that those who exert defensive violence are doing the same thing, because they’re gaslighting manipulative sociopaths and they think everyone else is stupid enough to fall for that deliberate, willful, and ultimately artificial stupidity.

For far too long, they’ve been right.

This cycle has to end, and it has to end today. If it doesn’t end today then it has to end every today until it ends for tomorrow too.

None of us are free until all of us are free.

July 6, 2020
It’s Not Over. Not Even Close.

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Breonna Taylor’s murderers have not been charged. The accessories to that murder are still employed.

The man who fractured Martin Gugino’s skull is out on bail, along with the only other officer of dozens who witnessed the assault and did nothing.

We still have an avowed and publicly declared fascist controlling the executive branch, and scores of not-so-publicly declared fascists in Congress, to say nothing of a judiciary that has been filled with rot.

22 states still have no legal age requirement for marriage, with parental consent – “parental consent” being a mechanism used for thousands of years to legitimize pedophilia.

8 states still forbid atheists from holding office.

There are still uncountable millions without health insurance – 44 million *before* COVID, and untold millions more since. Health care is still treated as a benefit of employment rather than a human right.

Profit interests still hold power – in some cases nearly absolute power – in our prisons and criminal justice system, our schools, our hospitals, and our elections.

Women still aren’t paid the same as men.

Thousands of police with records of violence, including both domestic violence and illegal assaults of captives, continue to be employed.

Nothing, still, has been done to help the over half a million homeless people, including about 18 thousand unaccompanied, unsheltered minors, in this country – again, pre-covid numbers.

Nothing, still, has been done to help the 38 million Americans living in poverty – pre-covid.

Legal abortions are still nearly impossible to obtain in vast stretches of our nation.

Most states still do not have laws requiring mandatory termination of parental rights in cases of rape.

Hundreds of police officers have walked off their jobs in recent weeks in protest against demands for accountability and transparency related to abuse of police power.

Thousands of pathetic, cowardly, entitled, overgrown infants continue to terrorize the streets of this nation with terrorist displays of deadly force and threat of violence against any and all who threaten the totalitarian oligarchy these supplicant bootlickers think is going to benefit them as long as they’ve got enough guns and MAGA hats.

Oh, and in case we’re not noticing, COVID-19’s “second wave” is happening before the first one was over because these same sniveling lickspittles can’t stop kissing their own asses long enough to grasp what “deadly pandemic” means. It probably doesn’t help that, under the guise of “freedom of speech,” much of the media and even the “president” himself continue to insist it’s not a thing, because if it was they’d lose money.

The struggle, as they say, is not merely “not over.” It’s barely begun. It’s not going to be easy. Some of us may lose our lives in this struggle, as some of us already have, to say nothing of grievous and permanently disabling injuries at the hands of militarized police and white fascist bigots who have, in at least some cases, been coddled by police rather than properly arrested and charged.

Some of us will become estranged (or further estranged) from family. Some of us will end marriages. Some of us will lose our livelihoods for speaking out. I personally have been targeted by fake “Antifa” trolls (and they ARE fake, at least one of them is well known to me and has been stalking me for decades) who outed my home address, putting nine other innocent people in danger of violence at the hands of bigots and fascists who might not like what I have to say.

None of us wants to go through that, and yet…we must. We must because decency and compassion demand it. We must because the very concepts of human freedom and dignity are at stake. We must because until the oligarchy that controls most of the planet is crushed into a bad memory, we are all a moment’s notice away from returning to the darkest of all imaginable dark ages, a world in which all the evils of the past combine with the technology of the future to create a dystopian hellscape that Orwell couldn’t have imagined in his worst nightmares.

“It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now?”

We MUST keep fighting. MUST. It’s been a minute since anyone in this country had to truly and seriously consider whether they’re willing to risk their lives to uphold and advance the cause of human decency, compassion, and dignity; to wonder if they might just end up being a martyr for the causes of justice, equality, prosperity, and peace.

That time is now. That place is now. We who cherish genuine freedom and who seek genuine progress are looking directly into the eye of our moment in history. One hundred years from now, either this moment will be taught as the moment when we finally decided to start living up to our own hype…or it won’t be taught at all.

June 25, 2020
The John Henry Show S1E020 – Fighting Back (Pt 2)

Wrapping up the point-by-point discussion on deconstructing-combatting anti-Sanders rhetoric (and propaganda in general), plus thoughts on legitimate authority and expertise + more. Video at https://youtu.be/w8X1PYH3xQY. Companion article at http://passionate-cyan-owl.192-250-227-172.cpanel.site/combating-artificial-narratives-in-social-media-related-to-the-sanders-candidacy/

March 13, 2020
The John Henry Show S1E019 – Fighting Back (Part 1)

This podcast is a little different. It takes place in two parts, this is the first. It comes with a companion article where I lay all this stuff down in writing. You can view the video at https://youtu.be/wKVFRgcZwrQ

March 12, 2020
The John Henry Show – S1E007 – Free-For-All Friday #1

The Friday evening show is going to be the weekly open-topic “free for all.” This week it was so free I didn’t bother doing it until Saturday! That won’t be the case every time 🙂 We’re discussing a range of things today including propaganda, socialism, an interesting look inside the administration of a large Facebook page and how you can see them choking traffic over time if you refuse to buy advertising (it’s not about the political cant, it’s about the MONEY), integrity in matters of both public and private life, and JH’s sense of where we’re at as an evolving species and where he thinks we may be headed if all goes well.

As always if you’d rather watch than listen you can check out the stream archive on YouTube at https://youtu.be/_ECTZQHlBvk

A note about this particular show – there’s about twenty minutes cut out in which I’m discussing various aspects of the video production side of things, and an experiment intended to demonstrate some issues failed 🙁 Since there’s no point in an audio track of visual effects, I trimmed it out.

February 22, 2020