Hey there everyone I’m intrepid ace reporter John Henry beaming you this encoded message from my undisclosed secret hideaway somewhere underneath the Mojave desert, and welcome to today’s Morning Message!
I’ve talked a lot over the years about the inherent conflicts of interest that exist in capitalism. The minute you start chasing profit or focusing on making money, you are compromising whatever it was you started off doing.
Time and again we’ve seen it – in criminal justice, in education, in journalism…and in health care. A couple of days ago MLive.Com published an investigative report about the profits generated by several hospital networks in the state, including one of the two major hospitals in my city.
Analyzing the records of a handful of non-profits (which are public by law) the investigation found significant profit increases during the pandemic. This isn’t entirely surprising, but does stand in stark contrast to the claims of massive losses by hospitals early on.
The story at Bronson Healthcare based in Kalamazoo and McLaren Health Care headquartered in Grand Blanc is similar to many stories in many sectors over the last few years. Corporations take in millions or billions of dollars, executive pay and bonuses skyrocket, prices go up, government subsidies are leveraged, etc.
It’s interesting to me that the story focuses on these two networks when they weren’t even the most profitable. I feel like the reporters are putting a lot of weight on the idea of non-profit status as though that magically means money isn’t necessary, and focusing on the $455m in profit growth from 2019-2022 at Bronson while not mentioning the $880 gained fifty miles up US-131 at Metropolitan Hospital in Grand Rapids strikes me as rather strange.
Mostly what’s interesting is that at no point do the reporters ask why we’ve allowed health care to become a thing that is money-dependent in the first place.
Focusing on the frankly exorbitant executive compensation packages and profit margins during an unprecedented and unpredictable moment in history seems to me to entirely miss the point. They edge closer in pointing out how many of these executives are specifically skilled in business and marketing rather than health care. It absolutely is important to know that public funds are in play and what’s being done with them.
Somehow lost in all of this is the basic question: why would we expect any other result in a system based on profit and capitalism? This is what money does to systems, regardless of whether they’re “non-profit” or not. If you have to focus on money, you’re not focusing on health care or education or whatever else.
Every other point of failure in this story starts there, but the reporters didn’t touch it. Instead they chose to recite a laundry list of offenses by these two systems while basically ignoring the rest – the only place in the article that the profits of other systems is discussed directly is an embedded map showing hospitals in the state and their profit growth or loss between 2019-2022. Similarly, the sheer reality that the real resources sufficient for a quality public health system do not exist was overlooked with only passing mention of staffing shortages during the peak of Covid.
We don’t have the personnel and material for a proper health care system in this country…because it’s all being done for money, and how do we save money or how do we make money or how do we pay more money for this hotshot executive or that one to come in and rearrange a few things to generate more money?
That’s the real story here, and it’s being overlooked in favor of a more sensational but less meaningful examination of two hospital networks’ finances…because that generates more interest, and therefore more eyeballs, and therefore more money. Again: the compromise.
Today’s morning message is simply this: whenever there’s money involved, all other core goals are compromised to some degree. It can’t be avoided. Keeping your eyes open to that can help you make better informed and more effective decisions when you’re asked to make that compromise.
That’s it for me, speaking of money please don’t forget that I’m entirely crowdfunded here so please do help out if you can via PayPal, Patreon, CashApp, lots of other options available and those are all linked at johnhenry.us/money, and as always the best support is your engagement so please do like, share, subscribe, and comment, and I will see you tomorrow with another Morning Message!
Hey there everyone, welcome to Wednesday and the morning message I’m your unflappably consistent and predictable host John Henry, let’s get right to it.
I want to talk a minute about this thing in Florida with Ron DeSantis ordering migrant refugees to be shipped around the country as political tokens to be used.
Look, it’s real simple: this is f**king disgusting. It is absolutely beyond the pale for anyone to use human beings like this, or even for us to allow it to happen.
I said back in September of last year when DeSantis sent Florida officials to San Antonio, Texas to round up immigrants to be then flown to Massachusetts, all in service of somehow “owning the libs,” that it sounded like kidnapping to me. Apparently the sheriff of Bexar County, Texas agrees as he filed a criminal complaint of “several” counts including both misdemeanor and felony charges of unlawful restraint. (The five felony charges related to the minors who were kidnapped and relocated by Ron DeSantis’ private schutzstaffel.)
The thinking – and I use that word very loosely – here is that since it’s the “libs” who are “inviting” “these people” to Our Great Nation, then the “libs” can take care of them, we’ll just drop ’em off where all the rich “libs” are! That’ll larn ’em hyuk hyuk. And it’s such a problem in Florida that they had to go to San Antonio, Texas to find some brown people to abuse.
Meanwhile they’ve done it again, this time shipping a bunch of people to Sacramento where California governor Gavin Newsom continues making empty, performative threats about it. Fascist lapdog and odious caricature of humanity Alecia Collins (communication director for the Florida Department of Emergency Management) was quoted as sneering, “From left-leaning mayors in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, Colorado, the relocation of those illegally crossing the United States border is not new but suddenly when Florida sends illegal aliens to a sanctuary city it’s false imprisonment and kidnapping.” I could spend another twenty minutes deconstructing all the racist, fascist, classist, bigoted, stupid, malicious dogwhistles in just that sentence, but neither it nor the festering pustule who spewed it merits that level of validation.
We are being governed by five year olds. Ron DeSantis is fascist garbage, and the only two things stopping me from kicking him square in the ass are the law and the fact that I can’t afford to burn a perfectly good pair of shoes afterwards, bury them, then salt the earth to ensure his odious infection of stupidity and malice doesn’t spread.
It’s not just him, either. Trump, McConnell, Christie, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley. The entire Republican Party has gone 100% fascist. They’re not even trying to hide it anymore. They don’t care if you know, because we’ve spent the last half-century shrugging our shoulders and pretending we don’t see it because we don’t want the holidays to be uncomfortable. Even my state rep is a galumphing, gelatinous assembly of empty hostilities and vague handwaving accusations with no substance and no attempt at it.
Meanwhile, humans are being used as political props for sick, malicious pigs like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. All they do is lie through their teeth, say a bunch of angry words and point their marks in a direction, and ride it straight to the bank.
We must stop being afraid to call a fascist a fascist. We have to stop allowing ourselves to be conned into cutting corners and making compromises and “reaching across the aisle” just to shove our hands in a meat grinder.
Enough. The entire Republican presidential field is a sick joke and it can’t possibly be anything but. I don’t see trying to beat Biden from the left as a winning strategy in ’24 – people like stability too much and he’s bringing that – but certainly we can beat fascism from the left, right now.
We start doing that by admitting out loud that’s what we have to do.
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.
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.
(Note: today’s MM is not good content for video/audio, so text only today.)
Good morning everyone, welcome to the Morning Message, and let’s start today with yet another douchebag who wants you to think he’s like me. He isn’t. I’m not a clickbaiting douchebag.
This is “Brad The Rambler”
And like any ass, he is very much full of crap.
For those of you on audio, we have a screenshot of Brad – a guy who very much looks like the kinds of people who decided to start wearing flannel and growing goatees right about the same time he heard of grunge music, that is to say two weeks ago. Which pisses me off because all of those people try way to hard to look like I’ve looked since about 1988, and then people think I’m one of them, and that sucks. He’s lip-syncing terribly over a currently popular sound clip that says “Remember kids, the next time somebody says your government wouldn’t do that, oh yes they would!” Then they wrap it around half-assed BS like this, it gets nuked or muted by the algorithm because it’s disinformation, and now the WAKED UP SHEEPLE get to claim they’re being censored.
WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!! EMBRACE THE TINFOIL HAT BECAUSE THAT MEANS YER AN INDEPENDENT THINKUR!
No, it means you’re an arrogant mark for yourself.
Anyway, I wanted to talk about his little bit of BS up there and get the truth of it out into the world. Not only is that truth worth understanding, but understanding how half-asses like this troll your attention away from people who actually bother knowing what the hell they’re talking about before they talk is also very much worth the effort.
For the benefit of the visually restricted, the caption on the video reads as follows: At the top, overtext reads “Did you know that Quaker Oats in collaboration with the US gov. and MIT fed radioactive oatmeal to mentally challenged kids while telling them they were part of a science club? They won a settlement of 1.85 million in 1998. Loyal to the foil.” Then the caption says “Remember the Fernald school and their part in the eugenics movement along with these terrible experiments that were done under the approval of the GOV…” and a bunch of clickbaity hashtags targeting the easily manipulated and not terribly bright.
This is one of those cases where someone is taking a kernel of truth, conflating it with a bunch of other kernels, and coming up with vapid clickbait bullshit that serves primarily to trivialize and humorize the thing they’re pretending to be angry about while also pandering to the literal tinfoil hat set.
Side note: If it’s supposed to be satire, it sucks, but I don’t think it is. When your “satire” is indistinguishable from actual kookery, it’s not satire anymore; it’s kookery. I suspect it’s supposed to be satire somehow because who seriously wears a tinfoil hat? But man…you sure can’t tell from the content.
There’s a clear, bright line between the mass of dumb clickbait like this and what I and other good-faith writers do, and that line is precisely the difference between acting in the interest of public knowledge and disclosure, and acting in the interests of stroking your own ego with bullshit while putting yourself off to other people just as gullible as you are for profit and social attention.
There’s no question that the US government engaged in non-consensual testing of radioactive material on various human subjects over a period of decades, and that it was ethically obnoxious and tended to mostly target the poor, minorities, and those institutionalized with mental health disorders.
That said, this is not some groundbreaking revelation of government malfeasance. This is a clickbaiting douchebag jumping on a trendy tiktok audio with a half-assed lip-synch and a misrepresented bit of unpleasant historical trivia because he thinks he’s cool and smart but he’s really just another attention-mongering twat on TikTok who can’t get his facts right and doesn’t care what polluting the information stream with feces does to discourse.
He’s also got way more money in tinfoil than any reasonable person ought to.
First, the specific event he’s speaking of happened during WWII. That’s not an excuse for the horrible ethics involved, but it also tells us that this happened in a context when such things were normal and even considered laudible by the mainstream of science, medicine, and government at the time. Horrible? Absolutely. Relevant to anything in 2023? Not in the least. Certainly there’s no action or demand to be made of GOV or “Quaker Oats” here, and again it’s not a historical secret or something that’s just been sitting around unknown until Chad The Scruffy Dudebro ferreted it out.
Certainly the US government has done far worse before and since. One example that comes immediately to mind which first surfaced as conspiracy theory and proved true was the illegal, clandestine, non-consensual dosing of US citizens and military personnel with LSD and other substances under the MKUltra program, which ran from 1953 to 1973. The Tuskeegee Syphilis murders were conducted for another 25 years after the Fernald School experiments ended. In the Fernald case the radioactive material was “tracer” material – basically inert, like barium before an x-ray or that stuff they put in you for an MRI that makes you feel like you’re wetting your pants. They give someone a tiny bit of radioactive calcium via injection or in their food, then study their bodies to find out how human beings process radiation, how long it takes to leave the body, etc.
Now I want to be clear that we are talking about non-consensual human medical experimentation, which is unquestionably horrible. Problem with this asshat trying to make money and attention from it is that we knew about all of this thirty years ago. Two entire whole-ass congressional committees were assembled to look at the whole question, reports were issued, condemnations sent forth, and compensation made in many cases (but not all). The problem of medical experimentation without informed consent not only isn’t secret, it’s been an ongoing high-profile conversation for half a century.
Another problem is that in his arrogance-besotted rush to be Mr. Social Media Star he overlooks a ton of information about this case that is far more contemporary and problematic. For instance, the fact that ostensibly progressive and leftist governor Deval Patrick forced the closure of the Fernald facility against the explicit wishes of patients and their families (after two decades of high-quality reform). The reason given for this was that it was “too expensive,” which is disgusting to me. There’s no such thing as “too expensive” to keep innocent people who are institutionalized living with dignity. The 1993 class action suit resolution explicitly specified that the facility was to remain open and a “guaranteed level of care” provided “regardless of cost,” Patrick’s administration fought this order and continued working to close the facility, refusing to negotiate with patient families and advocates, in order to save money. That’s ugly and wrong.
To me, that is the real story here: that yet another progressive champion, when faced with a question of putting people over profits, chose profits. That “the government,” when called to account, passed the buck and protected its own while throwing its minor minions under a bus.
But our boy didn’t get that far, or even close to it, because he’s worried about attracting the attention of credulous, easily manipulated rubes with anti-government agitation and the pretense of some kind of insider knowledge of a big secret conspiracy. Another aspect of the story that Detective Holmes here overlooked is that while Quaker Oats and MIT were ordered to pay $1.8M in restitution, the government agencies and programs that drove the experimentation weren’t held liable at all and suffered no sanction.
This of course just feeds in to the idea that this was some kind of corporate experiment done with the clandestine cooperation of rogue elements within the government, rather than the truth: it was a federal program in which a single individual commissioned by Quaker was involved, along with a couple of students and professors at MIT. That they were involved is absolutely problematic; that they’re the only ones held responsible is stupid and deceitful.
That this chode is trying to drum this up like it’s something relevant today beyond being a footnote in the long history of covert power abuse by the US government in the 20th century remains the most problematic part of this.
What convinced me to deconstruct this is that it’s a bit more nuanced than the usual handwaving “GUBMINT EVUL” clickbait. It’s not that it didn’t happen per se but rather a) it didn’t happen in at all the way this dork is claiming and b) it’s been revealed, examined in great depth, publicized, and dealt with for three decades now. There’s a PBS documentary about it that’s old enough to vote, although regrettably it’s inaccessible online unless you’re affiliated with a college or want to pay $200+ for it…which seems rather exploitative itself, to me.
This is the equivalent of a TikTok video breathlessly exclaiming that OH MY GOT THE GUY WHO SHOT KENNEDY USED TO BE A MARINE! SURELY THIS NEWS MUST BREAK THE INTERNET!
That’s the result – a congressional investigation in 1994 complete with condemning final report, and that investigation was ignited by the awarding of a Pulitzer prize to the reporter, Eileen Welsome, who first uncovered the information that led to the disclosure of condemning details related to the program. It was first exposed in a science newsletter in 1976, and Mother Jones ran a story about it by Howard Rosenberg in 1981 which led to an even earlier congressional investigation and report, driven largely by congressman Ed Markey and resulting in congressional hearings in 1986. However at that time the Reagan administration refused to cooperate with the investigation.
The problem here is this chump is trying to further exploit and abuse these people by blowing it up into “eugenics,” which was never the purpose of the experiments, and by appealing to vapid, stupid “waah government” garbage that I’ve discussed the problems with many, many times in the past – primarily that it acts as a smokescreen to prevent us from asking whose government that was, who elected them, who trusted them, and who failed to raise an objection when the abuse was happening.
That tends to piss me off because now in order to get the facts right my dumb ass has to look like I’m defending non-consensual medical experimentation, which I’m not. It’s absolutely abhorrent that we as humans ever looked at one another as suitable for non-consensual experimentation because we were “other” – in the case of the Fernald school (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_E._Fernald_Developmental_Center), children with mental or behavioral dysfunctions. While it’s indisputible that the school’s namesake was a eugenicist, it’s very much disputable that this was in any way the purpose of the experiments conducted on their students given that the man had already been dead for a quarter-century by then.
The sensationalized implication of Quaker Oats amounts to their sponsorship of a single research fellow in all of this. This Hermoine-headed bloviating dumbass turns that into Quaker Oats just woke up one day and said “hey let’s inject a bunch of mentally challenged kids with deadly radiation for funsies! We’ll get the GOV in on it, they just love turning people into glowing green soup for no reason!”
I find the summary of the ACHRE to stand sufficient for a level-headed, non clickbait analysis:
“In 1946, one study exposed seventeen subjects to radioactive iron. The second study, which involved a series of seventeen related subexperiments, exposed fifty-seven subjects to radioactive calcium between 1950 and 1953. It is clear that the doses involved were low and that it is extremely unlikely that any of the children who were used as subjects were harmed as a consequence. These studies remain morally troubling, however, for several reasons. First, although parents or guardians were asked for their permission to have their children involved in the research, the available evidence suggests that the information provided was, at best, incomplete. Second, there is the question of the fairness of selecting institutionalized children at all, children whose life circumstances were by any standard already heavily burdened.”
The Wiki points out elsewhere that by “low” they mean “less than the annual background radiation absorbed by a typical resident of Denver, Colorado.” – 330 millirems (3.3 millisieverts), for those keeping score at home. That’s about 3/4 of the exposure from a single mammogram.
If homey wasn’t trying to BS his way into cheap clickbait traffic he’d have done five minutes of work and found the REALLY outrageous stuff, like the case of Ebb Cade or the systemic forced sterilization – mostly but not entirely of poor, Black, women – conducted under the aegis of law in North Carolina. That was still happening until 1977, the laws empowering it weren’t repealed from NC law until 2003, and it had a hell of a lot more to do directly with eugenics than anything related to the Fernald School experiments.
So now instead of some shocking revelation of government abuse, what we’ve got is some sketchy dudebro telling the world what a genius he is because he stumbled over a Wikipedia article about some things that happened before most us and indeed most of our parents were even born, and he’s desperate for traffic so he’s gonna act like it’s any cooler for him to exploit these people by using them to troll for internet traffic than it was to exploit them by testing them to find out how the human body handles radiation.
Plus we’ve got a couple of added bonuses: by shifting focus away from the far more obnoxious practices in the South to these events in Massachusetts, we deflect the problem of racism – which was a key component of eugenics laws – completely out of the picture. Can’t imagine why a white guy would want to do that! It’s also a subtle play into the typical hyperdefensive line of “the North is more bigoted than the South” games played by southern bigots to minimize the intensely disgusting nature of their bigotry, and of course distracts from other issues as previously discussed.
LOOKIT MEEE I’M SOOOO SMRT N CLEVUR I FOUND THE BIG SECRET! No, chump, no you didn’t. What you did is find a seventy year old crime that was federally investigated thirty years ago and the victims compensated, and now you’re blowing it up because it’s obscure and you think it’ll draw attention to you as some deeply thoughtful and well-researched anti-authoritarian warrior because it’s not one of the more widely known abuses of government power in US history.
This is hubris on the level of Columbus “discovering” the Americas.
The reason for that is that all things considered it was about the least abusive and obnoxious of the abuses committed by the US government against their people in the mid-20th century. No injuries, no long-term damage found, no resulting health problems. The kids weren’t beaten or forced to grow tumors or forcibly sterilized against their will.
Certainly there’s nothing here that merits trying to validate a broad-stroke “anti-government” message in 2023, thirty years after the legal system already addressed the issue and fifty years after that process began, against a background of far more egregious and troubling abuses including some related directly to this incident that the clickbaiter doesn’t even touch.
It was a crime. That crime was punished and the victims compensated. One may certainly argue the value and propriety of that compensation, but acting like this whole thing is some deep dark secret that nobody knew about and now ol’ Inspector Bradget here is gonna tell you who’s behind the curtain is just the most outrageously self-serving bunch of bullshit ever.
This guy doesn’t give the first damn about abuse of power, institutionalized kids being abused, or revealing dark secrets of our culture; what he gives a damn about is whether he can con some freshman sorority pledge into sleeping with him because he’s oh so edgy and counterculture. It’s written all over his face and attitude, and mostly it’s written in the way he’s taken what could be a pretty decent story that encourages people to look more closely at their government and how they make political decisions, and turned it into a covert dating advertisement.
As a sidebar it’s a pretty good example of why it wouldn’t bother me in the least if TikTok and its analogs disappeared from the ‘net entirely. Issues like this aren’t made for 30-second explanations.
All of this took me about fifteen minutes to ferret out in Google searches enriched by prior education and reasonably well-developed critical thinking skills…and that tells me that rather than a substantive and meaningful effort to bring attention to an obscure violation of human rights, this author’s primary purpose is drawing attention to themselves, and that’s no more ethical, honorable, or even useful than the crimes they claim to be revealing.
Always check. Even my work – I’m not infallible either.
Hey everyone, I’m your ridiculously photogenic host John Henry and this is the Morning Message!
This person is not your friend. This person is someone who is seeding arguments against the left while pretending to be ON the left, agitating for unnecessary and cruel compromises that leave millions of Americans in the lurch in the name of “bipartisanship.”
From a progressive perspective there is no reason for a “deal” because we’re not putting anything remotely radical or controversial on the table (aside from the saccharine controversy stirred up by the fascists).
If the power core of the Democratic Party had your best interests in mind they’d be fighting tooth and nail for everything we need – student loan forgiveness, publicly funded health care and higher education, hell put a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage as the top line in the budget just so the GOP has to waste time arguing about that and the rest of it goes through unchallenged. There is ZERO reason to compromise with the fascists here, other than that power core’s unwillingness to push for the spending we actually need.
This tweet is from someone trying to gaslight the progressive left out of pushing for substantive reform and improvement of our systems. Whether they know that’s what they’re doing is not relevant. It’s what they’re doing. Call them out and don’t let them normalize the idea that effective social programs are a “pipe dream.”
Fascist Followup
Over the weekend I published a new article at Medium (disclosure – I may make a few cents from people reading it, but it’s not paywalled) which provides a broad, survey-level examination of a huge network of anti-western social media and web pages trolling super-hard for traffic in a variety of ways targeting folks who may be particularly vulnerable to disinformation and manipulation including boomers and US military personnel and their families with fascist propaganda.
I’ve now followed up on that “officially” by doing what I could to get it in front of the face of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. We’ll see what they do with it.
My approach would be to rip the mask off the whole thing and now let’s sit down and talk about why Americans are so extraordinarily vulnerable to fascist propaganda, and do something to address that problem directly with the American people…and I mean like a two-hour network broadcast interruption for a national class on information literacy followed by an all-out comprehensive initiative to inoculate the American people against the viruses of hate and autocracy just as we do against any others…and expecting, of course, the same pushback from the same tragically benighted folks who refuse to vaccinate or mask up in response to Covid.
Remember, folks: just because they’re wearing your colors or look like you doesn’t mean they’re on your team.
Hey there kids, after a bit of a mental health break I’m back and at it.
Me Stuff
I’ve changed the title of this newsletter to reflect the shift in focus away from me and more toward news and comment. Necessary URLs will be set up with redirects so old links continue working.
You can skip to the next header if you don’t care about internet drama.
I’m not going to go on about this too much because it just feeds the beast, but this is once again a pattern that I’ve been observing for a long time.
Close friends with whom I’ve discussed it over the years know that I’ve suspected the source for well over a decade, but they finally slipped and outed themselves beyond any reasonable doubt when trying to recruit yet another troll to do their dirty work last week.
This person’s behavior is rooted in whisper campaigns and back-room antics, ingratiating themselves to the clickbait crowd or not realizing they outed themselves many, many times over the years.
It includes calling my new roommate – within literal hours of my changing my address on my voter registration and domains, who I’ve mentioned previously has a terminal stage four cancer diagnosis so that’s totally on-brand for le stalker, they did the same to my parents’ last years – to harass them with similar lies, which was pointless.
It’s gross, sick, and obsessive. The person responsible has been involuntarily committed to psychiatric confinement in the past, and has tried repeatedly to con me into committing myself…often in response to some emotional distress I’m experiencing that they actually inflicted.
Going into the ugly details of that person is more attention than they deserve. Unfortunately I have a triggerable mental illness and they know it and they know my triggers because they’ve been trying to cuddle up to me for a quarter-century so it has to be spoken about a little.
The evidence is sufficient for me, but not likely to be enough to take to court and get a restraining order that wouldn’t do any good anyway.
Eventually they’ll crash and burn and end up back in the nice white room with the soft walls, the only reason they’re not there now is they’re predatory as hell and keep attaching themselves to insecure women with lots of money (this isn’t speculation; more than one of his partners has asked me to get him to stop in the past, as though that’s within my power). Their endgame for me is to leave me with nowhere else to turn so they can play hero, like a fire-fighter who sets the fires themselves so they can get the praise for putting them out.
The bottom line is this person has been trying to push me over the edge of suicide for about twenty-five years because they resent me talking them out of their own (and leaving them no honorable way to rationalize it), and every time it doesn’t work they escalate with a new low. In the end there’s no punishment worse for that person than having to wake up every day being who they are and knowing they’re too weak of character to ever be anything else.
So now, I’m still quite down and not feeling greatly motivated but I’m forcing myself to get back on the ol’ horse and keep riding now because if I let this keep me idle much longer it’s only going to further damage my work and reputation. Enough of the personal drama, let’s get on with it.
The (Actual, Very Late) Morning Message
Two stories I want to look at quickly today.
The first is the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton in Texas, which is doing a great job of getting the “capitalist, let’s keep up appearances” fascists arguing with the “we’ve won so let’s stop pretending this is about anything but gaining power” fascists.
To be clear, Paxton’s behavior being illegal and unethical isn’t what’s driving this. What’s driving it is the risk that allowing him to get away with it anymore will tend to tip off the marks and people will start looking more closely at how the GOP does business. As a sidebar it helps get lefties cheerleading part of the GOP and attempts to create a narrative that the whole party isn’t completely off the rails into full blown fascism, which of course is not true.
Keep your eye on this situation and watch for one GOP faction to try leveraging it as a redemption tour, “see, we’re not all bad!” They are.
The other story is the launching and subsequent detection of a massive new fascist disinformation/propaganda campaign designed to troll people susceptible to such things into outing themselves and following fascist agitprop pages.
Particularly insidious about this run is that the majority of it is couched in appeals to nostalgia and military worship in the US, including active duty personnel and their families. Pages with names like like “I Love US Military” interspersed with “cute animals” and “hey old people who aren’t real good with computer literacy, don’t you long for the good old days?” bait to reel people in, then they start seeding fascist messaging to see who drops, knowing what whoever’s left is a prime target for their work. Probably the most important story I’ve ever written, and probably going to be ignored until some lone-wolf stochastic terror attack leads back to one of them.
Sorry it’s a little short and boring today, but there it is. We’ll see you in the actual morning tomorrow, hopefully!
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.
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!
Hey there folks and welcome to another Morning Me, I’m your host and let’s get right into it.
Experienced a bit of a setback yesterday as the tickling sensation of rising depression in the back of my head took over and everything went “meh.” Even while I was writing the MM I was like “nah, I’m fine,” and then as soon as it went out my motivation collapsed like a balloon with all the air let out. (NB: I also forgot to schedule it properly so it went out last night to some places, and this morning to LinkedIn. Harumph.)
No matter what I tried to pick up and do, it felt like a useless waste of time that nobody would care about and I just shouldn’t bother…and that’s depression, for me. Unfortunately I’ve learned the hard way over the years that all I can do is “walk it off.” Trying to force my brain to cooperate when it doesn’t want to, just makes it cooperate less…and yes, I sometimes have to think of my own mind as something separate from me just to be able to get a good look at it.
“Normally” there’s a voice track like that in my head at all times, just a constant muttering subtext of all the most negative fears and anxieties I can imagine cavorting around and insisting they’re reality. A year or so on a low dosage of lithium gave me time to develop some internal tools to sort of turn the volume down on that track of my brain so it’s not obtrusive, but those tools can get less reliable when I’m tired or pushing myself hard, and I have definitely been pushing myself hard for the last few weeks. To say nothing of the lingering effects of having terminated nearly every toxic relationship in my life over the last two and a half years, a loss that is fundamentally good for me and everyone around me but still hurts and always will because a lot of those folks should’ve been gone a long time ago and I really hoped they’d get it together and learn some things about how to act before it came to the point I had to walk away. I don’t want to go on about that crap though, it’s the past and it’s going to stay there; dwelling on that stuff definitely will send me into a spiraling depression, and no.
Energy Boost
Plus I’ve felt better mentally (as I’ve mentioned) than I have in YEARS. And even now I don’t have any sense that I’m going to be out days or weeks in a depressive paralysis, just feeling that weight crush a little harder than it should be, due to me going full throttle with little in the way of rest or break for about three weeks straight now. So I was kind of expecting this to happen, and honestly have been surprised that it didn’t happen sooner, but fortunately after fifty years of living in this brain I’m starting to get a handle on it a little bit. Indeed, part of the reason I’m doing all this infrastructure stuff and working on the guts of the site and the project management tools and all that is to help mitigate the impact of depression; have something in the bank for those days when it’s just not there for me. Because sometimes, it isn’t. I think mostly it’s just my brain saying hey let’s take five I’m kinda tired from all this running. That and I haven’t had any kind of income for six days, am broke, and have some bills coming up in the next two or three days (autoposter and something else) so that adds anxiety and tension and is probably a contributor as well.
At any rate, the brain decided to call in yesterday so not much got done in terms of public-facing work, although I did pick at some bits and pieces. Mostly I spent the day trying to be outside in the sunshine, do some walking, get some air, and stave off a deeper dive because not only can’t I afford it, it sucks and I just don’t want to go there anymore so I’m doing all I can to avoid it, including making myself get out of bed when I woke up this morning instead of going back to sleep, and not skipping this newsletter 🙂 I know I have a habit of going all out into things and then burning out fast, so overall behind everything going on right now I’m also trying to be extra super mindful of my mental state and how my mind and body are communicating with me, so maybe I can gain understanding how not to trigger depression to whatever extent that’s in my control.
Yesterday I made the choice (barely a choice, really, but it was) to let my brain have its way and take a day off. Today I’m making the other choice and forcing myself to get some things done because another part of depression for me is that it’s self-reinforcing; I get depressed and let something slip, then I get MORE depressed ABOUT letting something slip, then I (usually metaphorically) curl up in a ball for a few weeks and everything slips, and I’m just not doing that crap this time. I can’t afford it and I’m sick of allowing the broken parts of my mind have unchallenged veto power over the parts that aren’t. So I’m trying to find ways to take some of that power while balancing it with whatever legitimate needs (like rest and food) my brain is dysfunctionally trying to communicate to me when it decides to go south.
Yes, your suspicions are correct, writing this newsletter and putting these thoughts into it is part of how I work that out. It’s important that I say out loud that I’m making choices, that I reinforce to myself the idea that I really am in control of my own mind now matter how confusing and alien it sometimes seems, and I really do have the power and strength to keep myself moving forward even when my own mind is trying to push me back, and it’s okay to temper that power and strength with the wisdom and humility to recognize when my mind is telling me that it’s hit a limit.
Let me shoot this out and get back on that debt piece, it’s already almost entirely written, just needs some additional fleshing out and editing, not sure yet if it’s gonna stop at two parts or go to three, but I’ll get at least one out before COB today…and if I can sit down and focus properly, depending on the cooperation level of my brain, I ought to be able to get something out before noon.
NB: All of this does play back in what I was saying yesterday about switching gears a bit and moving back into more production than structure for a while as I could feel my brain getting bored with all the fiddling and tweaking on the back end. Lots more to do, but nothing that I can’t let myself set aside in favor of content work for a bit.
