JohnHenry.US

Tag: disinformation

  • The John Henry Show – S1E006 – Democratic Debate Post-Mortem

    In today’s show I’m examining last night’s Democratic Party debate in Las Vegas, talking who won, who lost, and why.  Do people even care in general?  Did anything change?  Also some conversation with a long-time fan about one of the big pages I administrated on Facebook and much more.  Don’t forget you can also find video livestream archived on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuJi-GAxkbU and of course as always please like, share, subscribe, comment.  This is as independent as independent media gets, and you are the fuel that keeps John Henry’s hammer swinging.

  • The John Henry Show S1E005 – History of Presidential Debates

    Who runs and controls Presidential Debates?  Why?  What regulates them, who makes the rules, and why?  Who benefits, and how?  JH digs deep into the history of the Presidential Debates to help you understand why they work the way they do, who’s in control, the pros and cons of the current system  We also touch on why we have a “two-party” system and what the real options are to get out of it.

  • The John Henry Show S1E004 – What Is Liberalism?

    In today’s John Henry Show we discuss what “liberal” and “liberalism” really mean to folks who use those words professionally, why it’s important to understand that meaning and how it differs from the popular usage, and much more including JH stumbling repeatedly to try and formulate an aphorism that never did quite come out right…

  • The John Henry Show S1E003 – Social Media Fakes (Archive)

    Today’s show got kinda rambly and off-topic, but the focus is still social media fakes in the context of political and other discussion where there’s a high rate of disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation. We discuss some common tactics they use, and some ways you can push back against them, along with a bunch of rambling about some other stuff because frankly I was out of spoons about 9am today so I really wasn’t at my best.  I’m going to do this topic again in a more organized, informative, and concise way, but it’s still worth a listen.

  • The John Henry Show Podcast S1E002 – Fairness Doctrine (Archive)

    In today’s podcast we’re talking about doublethink, how we fool ourselves, how we can trip over our own words without even realizing it, starting with an example from a prominent political page on FB where they invoked 1984, doublethink, and “Fairness Doctrine” all at once without ever realizing that in so doing, they were simultaneously warning against and advocating for government control of the media.

  • The John Henry Show S1E001 – Modern Monetary Theory (Archive)

    First episode of the new podcast.  Audio’s a bit clippy in spots, I’m not in the best possible environment; later eps should sound better.  These casts are archives of audio+video livestreams, most of which you can catch live at 8pm Eastern M-F at https://youtube.com/johnhenryus/live.

    In this inaugural cast, we’re talking about “Modern Monetary Theory” and what it tells us about how our money works and why the general public needs to basically forget everything they think they know about economics at the national and international levels and start over from scratch.

    Key concepts:

    • Federal taxes don’t fund federal spending, or anything else.
    • We don’t have to take from one thing to fund another
    • We must tax the rich, but not to pay for things; taxing great wealth is a preventative measure to stop the democratic process from being subverted by the ownership class
    • Stephanie Kelton and Bill Mitchell are your key figures in this concept
    • I’m a messenger, not an economist.  If you really want to get into the nuts and bolts of it, start with those two websites above.
    • Orthodox and heterodox economists hate MMT, but they can’t build a cogent argument against it.  They’ve spent petabytes trying, but they can’t.
    • Fuck Paul Krugman.

  • America’s Drug Problem Part 1 (2011)

    This video and post were originally published in 2011. Please note that the domain names mentioned, lowgenius.net and 40yearoldfreshman.com, are no longer active. Special thanks to my nephew James for the camera work!

    Hi, everyone.  JH here, taking on a big issue that has had a major impact on my life all my life:  America’s Drug Problem.

    The videos speak largely for themselves, but I wanted to clear up a few things pre-emptively.

    • I am not endorsing, condoning, or approving of the use of drugs, legal or illegal.  I am only imparting information that I think is important for people who choose this behavior to be aware of.  One of the key side effects of our entirely broken approach to drugs education is the dangerous equivalence of drugs which are physically addictive, and drugs which are not physically addictive, and I think this false equivalence is a root cause of much of the “hard” drug abuse in western culture today.
    • I blew a line and described a neuroreceptor as a “brain cell.”  A neuroreceptor is part of a brain cell, and by leaving those two words – “part of” – out, there’s a risk of confusion.  I corrected this in the transcript, but I just don’t have the resources or patience to go re-shoot an entire three-part video just for the sake of two words.
    • Yes, I’m aware that the wind noise is irritating.  I’ve done my best to eliminate it in post-production, but there’s only so much you can do.  You can view a transcript on-screen using the close-captioning button, or simply read along below.
    • This is the first of three videos dealing with this subject, and I strongly recommend you watch them all.  Our problems understanding the risks and differences between the drugs we’re on is only one small part of a very large problem.

    Transcript:

    Hey there folks, John Henry, LowGenius.Net, 40yearoldfreshman.com.

    This country has a drug problem.  We actually have three drug problems, and I want to discuss them, because there’s a lot of bullshit that goes around, everybody talks all kinds of mad shit, this and that, everybody’s got their agenda, everybody’s got something to  say about it and everybody thinks this and thinks that and it’s all this conflicting information.

    So, the first problem that we have, with drugs in America is that there are people that are on drugs in America…now, it’s not something that I’m proud of, or even that I really like to discuss, but it needs to be said:  I spent about thirteen years of my life wrapped up in hard drugs I know what it’s about, I know what the lifestyle’s about, I know how it works.

    There’s something that a lot of people don’t understand about drugs and drugs addiction, and that’s…that there are two different types of addiction.  There’s a physical or physiological addiction that has a physical component, there’s also psychological addiction.

    Now you can be psychologically addicted to anything that you use or abuse in an unhealthy manner, whether it’s, you know, sex or reading books or playing video games or World of Warcraft or Facebook or whatever, you can be addicted in that sense to anything.

    Physiological, physical, addiction is a little bit different.  With physical addiction there are certain drugs that actually change the shape of the neuroreceptors in your brain.  For those of you who don’t know what a neuroreceptor is, it’s (part of a) brain cell, the neuroreceptor is basically a mouth on that brain cell that eats nutrients. And it’s shaped in a certain way so the nutrients fit into it and it seeks those out, and that’s what causes hunger and on and on.

    So:  drugs that are physically addictive change your body to believe that that drug is a necessary substance for life, like food and water.  That is why physical addiction can be so very compelling, because on a primal level the addict believes and behave just as they would if they were starving, okay? That’s physical addiction, that’s the nasty shit, that’s the bad shit.  That’s what I went through for 13 years when I was doing hard drugs.

    Physically addicting drugs are your methamphetamines; cocaine-based substances; opiates – heroin, morphine, oxycontin. A lot of prescription drugs, especially painkillers, mood elevators, and anti-depressants have a physically addictive component – not all of them, and I don’t have a comprehensive list of which ones are which, but keep your eyes open.

    Those are physically addictive things, they WILL hook you.  Crack cocaine.

    Alcohol is physically addictive.  There was a study done in the early ’80s where an anthropologist looked at the brains of dead skid row bums, dead alcoholics, and the brains of alcoholics had changed in precisely the same ways and were even generating some of the same substances as the brains of people who had died of heroin overdoses after long-term addictions. So what I’m trying to tell you is that these things are very much the same, and people don’t realize it.  Nicotine, cigarettes, is another one – physically addictive.  It hooks your body, it doesn’t just hook your mind.  Now…marijuana?  Not physically addictive. Magic mushrooms, not physically addictive.  LSD?  Not physically addictive, as far as anyone’s ever proven or shown.

    Speaking from my own experience, those drugs are not physically addictive.  I’ve done them all.  I’ve also done drugs that were physically addictive, and I know what addiction feels like.  It’s a different thing.  If somebody who is a heavy pot smoker runs out of pot, doesn’t have any way to get any more…they might be bitchy for a couple of days, you know?  But they get over it, life goes on, blah blah blah whatever.  Somebody addicted to cocaine runs out, and they break into your house and steal your television set.  That’s the difference between psychological and physical addictions.  That’s not to say that psychological addiction cant be as profound as physical addiction, but it’s much more rare.

    So.  I’m certainly not going to recommend that anybody go do anything illegal or abuse any kind of drugs, but even if you’re going to take drugs therapeutically and legally for pain or whatever, be aware.  Be aware of the risk of physical addiction.  Ask your doctor, is this drug physically, physiologically addictive.  Do the best you can to avoid the ones that are.

    That’s our first problem, is the fact that people are using drugs and they don’t fully understand what the risks are of each individual drug and what the differences are between each individual drug.  The next video, we’re going to talk the second problem – which is the way we educate ourselves, each other, and our children about drugs.

    Thanks for watching.  I’m John Henry, Lowgenius.Net.  Remember to share, like, comment, drop by my blog @ lowgenius.net and 40yearoldfreshman.com, spread it around, I need all the traffic I can get, thanks very much.

  • Right Wing Media Is Professional Wrestling (2010)

    I created a bunch of videos and other digital between 2009 and 2015 or so about a variety of topics, sort of the first version of my official career as a media critic and political analyst and all-around demagogue.  Much of it was just free-form ranting on whatever subject I might find at hand, as is this video from 2010, the first zombie content I’m digging up and gathering together under the heading of “JH Classic.”

    In this video, we discuss the similarities between how right-wing media builds a disinformation narrative using the same tools employed by professional wrestlers and promoters back in the days when “exhibition wrestling” was a carnival sideshow and often involved conning local men into the ring for fights, which the promoter and his assistants would take bets (“make book”) on from the crowd while suckering their hometown boy into a fight against someone who had already lost a couple of matches and clearly couldn’t fight, but then magically became a martial arts master when Local Boy gets in the ring with him…after all Local Boy’s friends have made bets on him to win.

    The scheme varied, and continues doing so to this day, but that was the core scam, the main “work” of the spectacle.  In this video I discuss how the same basic psychology is used to befuddle and mesmerize consumers of mass media – and make no mistake, although my focus here was on Fox News and the right, the rest of the spectrum is not walking the moral high ground on this either.  You may be able to rationalize some of it by noting it’s not as extreme or as misleading, or even fall into the “ends justify the means” thinking by noting that even if it’s the same tactics, the goal of the strategy is more ethically supportable from the left.

    [do_widget id=”text-2″]

    It really isn’t; the goal is profit, not ideology, and neither your heroes nor mine are any less susceptible to its allure than those we disagree with ideologically.

    I’m not going to re-litigate the video here.  I chose this particular video because it’s one of several I filmed while staying with my friends Vince and Kym in Royal Oak, Mi. during the spring and summer of 2010.  It was they who suggested I go to college, which I did shortly thereafter.  I’ve often discussed how I felt like I’d reached the limits of my ability to self-educate in terms of nomenclature and terminology and tools to present and defend my positions in the “big leagues,” e.g. in a context where that level of academic knowledge is expected as a sign of competence like public speaking, or being an effective activist.  Plus it gave me source content to use for playing around with filters and effects in Adobe Premiere.  So this video is kind of a snapshot of that moment, basically.

    It’s well worth noting how well this strategy has played out and how much more pervasive it’s become in the last decade; we’ve elected Donald Trump, a guy who has literally been an entertainer in the professional wrestling business, to the United States Presidency.  Maybe if his fans understood some of this stuff – or if his opponents in the “independent liberal” Facebook Page-o-Sphere understood why they shouldn’t have embraced these tactics in spite of their equal utility as clickbait to generate ad revenue – we wouldn’t have that problem.

    Enjoy, and please remember to subscribe to my YouTube channel, there’s a bunch of old content that will be visible there over the coming weeks, plus I’ll be creating and publishing new stuff there as well!

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxSU-ajrcL4[/embedyt]

  • Boycotting Ignorance

    Original description:

    A response to all the people who keep saying a boycott of BP is a waste of time or that it will prevent them from compensating the victims of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Leak. NOTE: THE AUDIO IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED. Seven Dirty Words definitely get used, and then some. [Edited to add: BEFORE you tell me that all a boycott is going to do is hurt the “mom & pop” stores and “little people,” please check out the blog post for this video at http://www.lowgenius.net/post/2010/06… ]

    This is particularly fun because we get to have video and writing archives. This may also be a good place to point out how some folks try to source the idea that “all I post is snarky tweets” and so forth. I spend a lot of time on social media, reading news, watching and reading how people are reacting, watching how comment sections are directed and misdirected either deliberately or out of sheer force of ignorance, and those activities often inspire content or help me provide a relatable real-world frame for what I ultimately hope is good storytelling in service if driving home greater truths.

    I know, the idea of speaking in parables and metaphors to make important points is pretty dumb, I don’t know what hippie came up with that crap. Surely nobody would take it seriously. Anyway.

    Originally recorded June 21, 2010 in Benton Harbor, MI in NTSC-HD/VHS-C. Trivia note: this is not the leather duster I have had since around 2012; if you look carefully this one’s WAY too small, but the effects and lighting and camera position help hide that so I don’t look like a goof. Well, more than usual anyway.

    In a weird bit of synchronicity, I discuss the value of the music business, which is a subject I ended up learning a great deal more about, years later, when I worked for Musician’s Friend. The number mentioned in this article doesn’t include instrument sales and a few other categories, some of which barely existed at the time if at all. The general point is still valid and stands, however.

    Below is the full text of the original post referenced in the description above.

    Oh, PPS: I legit haven’t spent one dime at a BP gas station since before this was filmed.

    Another one inspired by some idiot talking smack online and not knowing what the hell they’re talking about.  PLEASE pay attention to the disclaimer:  this video is by far the most aggressive and profanity-laden diatribe I’ve recorded thus far, and I’m absolutely certain it’s going to offend some people.

    I posted this video to YouTube several hours before I am now writing this blog entry.  In that time it’s been picked up and shared, and one of the very common responses I’m seeing is best illustrated by this polite, well-thought-out, and well-written comment, which I am leaving unattributed to avoid any inadvertent appearance of attacking or criticizing any person in my follow – up comments, which will comprise the bulk of this blog entry.

    I understand your outrage, but please remember that the ones who will suffer from a boycott will be the mom and pop owners of the franchise gas stations selling their products. Most of them have contracts with BP and cannot stop selling the product, even if they want to. I’m sickened by this whole thing, but I hate to see hard working people pay for what the corporation did. It’s a tough situation.

    There is nothing in the above response that I find objectionable, or disagreeable, or bad, or evil.  It’s obviously well-meant, self-less, and full of love for one’s fellow man.

    Unfortunately, it’s also a stark example of the sort of thinking that’s going to drive us to extinction in a big hurry if we don’t fix our thinking, NOW.

    “But JH,” you say, “How can you BE so heartless?!  How can you be so selfish and self-serving as to just throw Mom & Pop, those stalwarts of American Entrepreneurial Spirit, under a big oily bus like that?”

    Well, you know, I don’t like it any more than you.  And I’m not throwing anyone under a bus…I’m trying to end the practice of allowing them to throw themselves, and you and me along with them.

    In spite of the aggression volume of the video here, I don’t mean that in any bad sense.  I’m not accusing Mom and Pop of being genocidal greedy corporate bastards raping the planet for their own selfish gain.  They’re just trying to make a buck the best they can, just like all of us.

    But.

    Well, I’ll let my original response, as written, speak the rest of my thoughts on the matter.

    Hi.  I’m the guy who made the video.  Please indulge me for a few minutes, if you will, and let me see if I can explain this in terms that sound less like I’m about ready to hang Mom & Pop from the nearest yardarm with extreme prejudice.

    I don’t want to see working people pay for what the corporation did, either.

    I also don’t want to see us continue to be dependent on petrochemicals for every aspect of our daily lives from transportation to information to packaging to hygiene, because that dependency is killing us.

    The reality is this:

    The “working people,” including Mom & Pop, have paid.  And paid.  And paid.  And paid.  You’re paying right now, and so am I, and that’s nothing about the ongoing crisis – it’s just the side-effects of petroleum dependency.  Air pollution, water pollution, groundwater contamination, we all know the drill.

    What we’ve lost sight of is that the working people – including each one of us, including most explicitly yours truly – have allowed ourselves to be talked into remaining dependent on petroleum and its by-products…because it’s easier than taking the hit. 

    It’s easier than finding another way to do things. 

    An illustration, if I may…and again I know this is long and I apologize but I think it bears the time and effort to try to explain properly.

    I don’t know if this exists in other countries, but here in the US, there is this concept of the “rent-to-own” store where the baseline or poor person or family will go to a store and rather than paying a set, one-time price for a given item, they’ll pay a weekly fee for a set term, say a year.

    When you do the math on these places, it’s really a boneheaded, terrible thing.  A computer that might cost $800 at the local big-box store will cost you $40 at a rent-to-own…$40 PER WEEK, for 52 weeks.

    That’s about $2000.  For a computer that you could have paid less than half that for.  It’s a mortgage or a car loan stuffed into a _reducto ad absurdum_ argument that for once *isn’t* a logical fallacy.

    Stupid, right?  But it’s hugely successful and profitable.  All it requires is a complete lack of ethics on the part of the business owner, and a sense of desperation on the part of the buyer.

    It’s preying on the poor and the needy, and the poor and the needy are complicit…because hey, you GOTTA have a new TV, right?  Keeping up with the Joneses and all that.  Or even furniture.  You GOTTA have furniture.  Of course, you could go three weeks without the furniture, save up, and pay maybe $1000 and get the furniture new at retail…

    …or you can pay ONLY $50 RIGHT NOW…

    …and every week for the next two years.  Which of course adds up to FIVE thousand dollars rather than the thousand you would have paid if you’d taken the comfort hit for a few weeks and sat on boxes while saving up your money and eventually (far sooner than two years, I might add) buying it retail.  But then you gotta sit on boxes for a few weeks, or do without television, or what have you.

    (Note:  The math NEVER, EVER comes close to even being sane in these places, it’s ALWAYS a 100% markup on the base price PLUS like 150% interest).

    We’ve been doing the same thing with petroleum for DECADES.  We could have been running biofuels made from hemp fifty years ago or more…but it costs more than petroleum.

    Now this is important:

    It’s always GOING to cost more than petroleum.  The petroleum companies (and they’re not the only ones, but they’ve certainly done their part as have tobacco companies and cotton companies and so forth) have worked hard to build an image of hemp and cannabis as a “dangerous” thing, a technique that’s proven particularly effective in the US, but it works well enough anywhere.  Make people afraid of alternatives to your product; use political power gained by financial success to rig the laws such that alternatives are cost-prohibitive.  Then argue to the general public that the costs of alternatives are too high, and voila:  the purest definition of ‘captive audience.’

    Pretty soon, you’ll have the audience fighting each other to buy bigger and less fuel-efficient vehicles than they would ever possibly NEED for any reason, simply because they’re status symbols.

    And then the oil guys are happy little yachtsmen, and the silly little consumers – that’s you AND ME, I don’t mean in any way to condescend or suggest that I’m any less guilty than any one of you or anyone else – enjoy the smug self-satisfaction of exercising their “right” to kill the rest of us with 8-mile-per-gallon social status symbols.

    At some point, we’re ALL going to have to agree to take the hit.  Sorry, mom and pop, but you’re gonna have to find a different primary attractant (fuel is NEVER a profit center for gas stations, and outside of states where pricing below cost is prohibited by law it’s often a deliberate loss compensated for by the other things that fuel customers purchase).  Sorry, Mom and Pop, you’re gonna have to change your business model or get out of business, because we can no longer avoid the stark reality:

    Our sympathy for mom and pop, and the commercial inertia that goes with it, is killing us. 

    It’s no longer killing us invisibly and slowly; it’s killing us graphically and quickly.  I still don’t think we really understand just how BIG this mess is, and frankly I think we’re being encouraged to NOT understand it…because I think if we really did understand it, some of us would panic and then a REAL mess would start.

    Fine, we don’t need rioting in the streets.  But we also don’t need to continue to complacently accept the “fact” of oil dependence…because it’s only a fact to the extent that we have allowed it to become a fact, and we are allowing it to remain one every time we say “a boycott won’t work, what about the little guy, what about mom and pop?”

    This is one of the very few times in human history we can legitimately be said to be consciously standing on the edge of a change in paradigm.

    I say this without the least bit of condescension or condemnation, and with every full understanding that I have just as much burden of guilt as anybody and probably more than many:

    Isn’t this really our golden opportunity to take charge of our destiny as a species and finally, for once, make a conscious decision to do the more difficult thing because it’s also the RIGHT thing?

    We CAN reject oil, but it will require courage, and sacrifice, and the rejection of many realities that we have long accepted as immutable but which are really only inconvenient to change.

    Yes, I’m sorry for mom and pop and all the clerks and pump jockeys, but you know…I just bet if we put mom and pop into , mom and pop could make just as fine a living selling alternate fuels.  I bet mom and pop could make a GREAT living selling food to people who commute 20 or 30 miles to work in a human-powered, enclosed, personal vehicle.  There are thousands of ideas out there that fit the bill.  There are other ways to do this, if we want to find them.

    Maybe it’s time mom and pop got to work on solving THAT problem, instead of solving only the ultimately selfish problem of how to keep THEMSELVES taken care of in the manner they prefer, without regard to the effect they’re having on the rest of us.  I hate to say it, but “mom and pop” have smiled benignly and patted us on the back and pandered to our noble concern right up to the point where it’s about to wipe our asses right off the planet.

    I love my mom and pop…but I love my granddaughter too, and I’d like to think that this planet’s going to continue supporting human life long enough for her to love HER granddaughter.

    Thanks for your time, and please remember to share this as widely as possible.  There’s still time for us to “get it.”

    from archived original at https://web.archive.org/web/20100717012219/http://www.lowgenius.net/post/2010/06/21/Boycotting-Ignorance.aspx