This video is pretty special to me for a number of reasons. First, it’s the first really decent thing I did in Adobe Premiere, even though now, sixteen years later, it doesn’t look all that decent.
Second, this video was created as part of my daughter’s summer project for one of her classes in high school. We went to see the film Fahrenheit 9/11, and put together a presentation about eight minutes long. Unfortunately the first four minutes were lost, but what remains is good enough that I’ve considered recreating it just because I like it that much.
She got a 99 on the project – in part because she proved that she actually participated in it and it wasn’t just “dad’s project” – and the whole experience is definitely among my more cherished memories of fatherhood.
As I write this in 2021, I’ve cycled through a lot of “new audiences” who don’t realize that I’m not new at this. It’s nice to have artifacts.
This is one of my shorter videos, shot after I heard about a big party and a bunch of arrests over spring break near the campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.
A couple of interesting/fun/funny points here. First, about six months after this I became a student at Western. Second, I’m the spot I’m standing on is part of the Hunter’s Ridge apartment complex on West Michigan Ave. In 2019, I ended up working for them as a “porter” (and destroyed my feet doing it, but that’s not their fault at all – age, little diabetes, little poor nutrition, etc.).
Anyway, yeah. Another entry in my sporadic and ongoing series of “don’t be a dumbass” media tutorials.
Recorded at Bronson Park in Kalamazoo, Michigan during the same session as “Holiday Rant (2009),” this piece builds on a couple of specific points in that show related to racism and bigotry. Essentially, a restatement and analysis of Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, but about eleven years before it became popularly known as that. As always, keep your eyes and ears out for themes and bullet points that I continue to hit today, including pokes at various facets of “big picture/root problem” issues that I believe we have now begun the process of truly evolving away from.
Also notable for being one of the few times I’ve ever used the n-word in a piece that wasn’t specifically about that word, and for being the first time I discussed the fact that I’m part black in public.
In this video holiday rant from December of 2009, JH goes off on racism, materialism, hypocrisy, and much more. Shot at Bronson Park in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
I’ve been saying for a long time that the education system in our country is broken. It was never in tip top condition, but it was headed the right direction through most of the fifties through the seventies.
Then with the rise of the Reagan era, public education started being propagandized as a burdensome cost on society, rather than an obligation of self-interest.
This is another of the videos I cut in Winters, CA, in June of 2009. Again, you’ll find some themes that I’d already been pounding on for decades when this video was shot, and I continue to press today. This is how I was thinking about it in 2009 – how do you think it compares to the things I’ve said more recently? Do you think it holds up to reality now? I notice that the way I framed the video, starting off with criticism of “liberalism” and “political correctness,” isn’t necessarily the same as I would now – the points are valid but misdirected, and the labels themselves have a very different sort of valence in 2022 than they did in 2009.
This is one of the first video rants I ever cut It’s very rough and honestly kind of sucks in retrospect – the subject isn’t of any great value (oooh, mtv doesn’t play enough music, standup comedians didn’t get enough mileage out of that by 1902 or anything). Still, it’s unquestionably me and my attitude, and of course by this point, in 2009, I’d been in and out of working in the wrestling business and the theater already, so cutting a promo wasn’t hard.
I miss my hair 😛
This was shot in Winters, California in June, 2009, on a VHS-C camcorder. I don’t believe I have the original footage anymore; I haven’t gone looking for it since I lost everything in Salt Lake City in 2018, but it may have ended up on the hard drive I lost then.
That shirt is my favorite and has its own funny story that I’ll tell some other time. It was a gift from my daughter when she was in high school. The irony that B&B is not, in fact, music is not lost on me.
Every six months or so, there’s another wave of clickbait and memes talking about “restore the Fairness Doctrine.” From this, one can reasonably conclude that there’s widespread support for this doctrine, and the public believes it should be “restored.” Even opportunistic politicians who know better will jump on this to give the impression they’re on the side of the people.
The public is wrong, and today we’re going to explore why.
“Wait,” some of you are thinking, “how can you possibly be against fairness?” That’s not what this is about, at all. Indeed, it’s the inherent lack of fairness that caused the thing to stop being enforced in the first place.
From the earliest days of broadcast media in the US, the FCC has had control over the “public airwaves,” ostensibly in the public interest. As part of this control, they developed and implemented the Fairness Doctrine. The airwaves were seen as a public resource, and the legal logic determined that the federal government, acting as the defender of the people’s interests, therefore had a right to regulate the content broadcast on those airwaves.
The wikipedia entry on FD summarizes it as well as I could: by the time it was implemented as a formal doctrine by the FCC in 1949, FD was “a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was—in the FCC’s view—honest, equitable, and balanced.”
The important phrase in that summary is “holders of broadcast licenses.” In the pre-cable era, all radio and television stations as well as the three major TV networks were required to purchase a license allowing them to broadcast on a given frequency. Adherence to FD was a contingency of that license, and if a broadcaster violated FD they were at risk of losing their broadcast license.
In the modern era, however, the majority of media is satellite radio, and cable and satellite television, and broadband internet. These media do not hold FCC broadcast licenses. You can’t revoke Fox News’ broadcast license (another empty pseudo-activist cry you’ll often see on social media), because they don’t have one. Instead they literally purchase specific bandwidth from the federal government, and they are then considered the owners of that bandwidth. It’s no longer “public airwaves,” but privately owned. This is more obvious in the case of cable television, but does also apply to satellite service – indeed, it’s probably fair to say that from a legal standpoint there’s no difference between the two, assuming both are privately owned rather than being owned and/or operated by the government (i.e. publicly).
Consequently, the FCC has exactly zero direct regulatory over content on these privately owned networks, and you do not want them to have that control. This concept is why you can see nudity on HBO, why you can order pornography from your local cable station, and why you can see other forms of “adult content,” be it sexually explicit or explicit violence, on your cable TV channels. It’s also what prevents the government from deciding that a Michael Moore documentary or a satire depicting national leaders in a bad light or a production of “1984” can’t be broadcast.
Digging Deeper: Why & How
The idea of protecting the “public airwaves” is based on the idea that, because that space is “public,” anyone with an operating receiver can access it, including children, with no further payment or access mechanism needed. The idea of not protecting private media in this way is based on the simple reality that you have to make a deliberate effort, and usually pay money, to access that content; your ten year old is not going to “accidentally” run into pornos on terrestrial radio or traditional television. Once you’ve paid for the service, the thinking goes, it’s up to you – not the service provider – to take the steps to ensure your kids (or you, or whomever) can’t access objectionable content. As an adult, you can choose to avoid that content; as a parent, you can employ an endless range of techniques to prevent your children from doing so.
It’s also well worth pointing out that the illegality of, for instance, child pornography or “snuff films” is not a function of FCC regulation but rather of other, existing laws. Those things are illegal outside the jurisdiction of the federal communication commission, therefore there’s no need for the FCC to create additional regulation forbidding them.
The FCC has no power at all to regulate the content on privately owned networks. They can’t tell HBO to not show boobs, they can’t tell your cable operator they’re not allowed to offer you “Resperm Of The Jedi.” That would be an egregious violation of the First Amendment; constitutionally, you have a right to create that content, and to view it, whether anyone else thinks it’s worthwhile or not, as long as other laws aren’t being violated in the process.
This brings us to the difficult reality of fairness doctrine: if you give the federal government the power to say Fox News can’t lie, you’re also giving them the power to say HBO can’t show nudity, or that I can’t criticize them on this website. Constitutionally there’s no way to have one regulation without making the other possible.
While we’re shutting down misunderstandings, the Fairness Doctrine was not “repealed by Reagan.” The FCC stopped enforcing it during the Reagan administration because it was patently unfair to terrestrial broadcasters; their ability to speak would be limited, but someone with enough money to make their own cable TV station (like Ted Turner and his then-emerging CNN) wouldn’t. Now you’ve created a money = freedom paradigm, and that can’t work in a free country. Any FCC rule created to regulate political speech would only apply to broadcast media – terrestrial radio and television, and the three “real” networks who actually own stations and distribute content to them. It would remain a free-for-all for everyone else.
The Fairness Doctrine was formally repealed by the Obama administration, because it was archaic, useless, and out of date.
If Not The Fairness Doctrine, Then What?
The solution is making the personal effort to become genuinely literate in media and information; to equip yourself with the tools to “think back” at misinformation and disinformation, to train your own mind not to simply accept a statement as true because it appeals to your biases, nor to reject it simply because it doesn’t.
Until we get our public education system back in working order so that this vital life skill is taught to all of us from the earliest age possible (for instance, we could start by teaching kids how to resist all the advertising aimed at them), the burden of that education is on each of us as individuals, and that can be a daunting task. It means breaking ourselves of the habit of trying to find push-button solutions to complex and difficult problems. It means admitting our fallibility and doing the hard work of setting aside our egos and pride, and it means spending a lot of time unlearning old falsehoods and re-learning some of the things we missed.
Modern Monetary Theory provides an excellent example for illustration. Most of us learned in middle school that Congress appropriates funding for all federal spending, but the reality that reveals went right past us. We still think of federal spending in terms of “my tax dollars,” but federal tax revenue doesn’t fund federal spending. Congress does. We know this, but we’re taught to avoid putting the pieces together to make a whole picture. We want to think of “our tax dollars” because we’re taught to believe that’s what gives us agency in government; that if we don’t pay taxes, we have no right to a voice. Problem is, that’s not true. Not only isn’t that true, but nothing that flows from that basic “spending my tax dollars” thinking is true. It’s not necessary to lay a heavy tax on the ultra-wealthy “to pay for” anything; the reason for progressive taxation is to stop too much money, and the power that goes with it, into too few hands. It doesn’t pay for anything; things are paid for when Congress says “pay for this,” and then the proper keystrokes are entered into the proper spreadsheets to create the dollars to “pay for this.”
It’s not the purpose of this article to get deep into MMT, but it does provide an example of the problems at hand, and their solutions. The primary problem at hand is we’ve been taught to think incorrectly; the primary solution at hand is to accept that reality and then do the work necessary to learn how to think correctly – to do the research, to be willing to admit to ourselves that we’ve been misled and misdirected, and to attain the knowledge necessary to fix it.
Fortunately, there are some excellent tools to help you achieve this. There are many, many books and websites out there dedicated to giving us those tools, but if I were to pick only one critical resource it would be a book by Robert Cialdini titled “Influence: Science and Practice. (disclosure: affiliate link)” This book not only gives an excellent foundation for identifying and neutralizing the compliance-gaining tactics employed by those who deliberately mislead, it’s also well-written to appeal to the casual reader as well as the academic, and the citations contained therein will take you through other important writing and writers like Korzybski’s theories of general semantics (a separate thing from basic semantics, the “meaning of meaning”), the theory of linguistic relativity (“communication creates reality”), and the work of philosophers and influencers like Edward Bernays (aka “the father of public relations.”)
If you visit and make studied use of the links in the above paragraph, you will develop the tools necessary to successfully resist attempts to disinform and misinform you, not in the sense that so many internet know-it-alls who get sucked in to ridiculous nonsense like QAnon and other conspiracy theories, but in a genuine, powerful way that will have a profound positive impact on how you process the information you consume.
That’s the solution to all of this, and it’s in your hands. Use it, and you’ll quickly stop relying on empty and unworkable but seductive “quick fix” ideas like restoring the fairness doctrine, and start vaccinating yourself against the overwhelming flow of disinformation that surrounds us all in the modern world.
Everybody wants the rewards of hard work and due diligence, but most people only want the rewards, without doing the hard work and due diligence.
This is reflected in non-solutions to political problems like term limits (it’s called VOTING; term limits only serve to ensure that if you do get a decent person in office they can’t stay there long enough to get much done), and specious “solutions” to avoidable problems, like expanding the Supreme Court to counter-act the impact of a bad appointment. The proper way to have dealt with that was years ago, by not electing someone who’s going to make bad appointments. The proper way to have dealt with THAT was to not put up with the so-called Democratic party shoving a status quo token candidate down our throats in the face of overwhelming support for a progressive reformist platform. That means you stop jumping on the bandwagon you’re told and worrying about whose “turn” it is, and start taking issue with your “democracy” being dictated from the top down.
America has a bad habit of not bothering to try to do things right and then complaining and trying to find shortcut solutions when things go wrong, and that never has worked and never will. We have proven once that “just do what you’re told or else the eviler will win” ends up with the eviler winning anyway, and I have a bad feeling we’re about to do it again. I hope not, but I suspect this race is going to be close enough for Trump to try to throw it to the Supremes, counting on the result being in his favor because he’s effectively turned the Supreme Court into a partisan weapon. And still, you hear “but Hillary won by three million votes.” Horse hockey. She lost. She and her team know how the electoral college works just like Trump and his team did, and she got cocky and arrogant and so did a whole lot of her voters, who were expecting a coronation and got a coup. Ralph Malph could have beat Trump by three million votes; the spread should have been five times that at least, and you should have had an energized, progressive ticket all the way down to your county commissioners and mayoralities.
[do_widget id=text-2]
I’m sorry that’s not an easy pill to swallow, but this nonsense of waiting to get angry and do something until the damage has already happened is just that, nonsense. Hillary Clinton was a lazy, arrogant candidate who assumed right up until the returns started coming in on election night that she had everything in the bag, and that’s what cost her the election. Many of us KNEW that’s how it would play out, but the majority just did what they were told, didn’t ask questions when the primary was obviously rigged and public opinion manipulated to gain post-hoc validation for the DNC-sponsored pillory of Sanders, the more popular candidate *by far*. They deliberately disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of people, telegraphed far ahead of time that they were going to do what they wanted so there was no point in voting anyway, and then blamed the very people whose voices they silenced for their own incompetence, ineptitude, and hubris.
We let them do the same in 2020, and it’ll be nothing but a miracle if things don’t play out more or less the same way, handing the country over to Trump for another four years, and thereby effectively ending American Democracy.
We have got to learn to stand up when it matters. Why do black people have to die before the masses listen to what many of us have been saying for decades about the militarization and authoritarian over-reach of local police? Why do we have to wait until millions are facing eviction before we start railing against the whole stupid system that’s created six times as many empty houses as homeless people but we still find a way to convince ourselves the homeless deserve it? Why do we have to wait until millions are infected with a deadly and crippling virus before we get serious about reforming our broken, cruel, and ineffective for-profit health care system?
[do_widget id=text-3]
We humans love our comfort, and our addiction to it – to the point that we’ve damn near sacrificed our very existence just for the illusion of comfort – is killing us. That is how we got to the point that a single 87 year old woman is nearly all that stands between us and totalitarianism.
That is why I’m not always polite and smooth-talking about these things. My readers are unquestionably of a higher intellectual and ethical caliber than the majority, but it’s still up to you guys to keep the word spreading, to take the chance on hurting your nazi grandma’s feelings or telling your drunk Uncle Bob who thinks OAN is a news source to shut the hell up, and to make the realities unavoidably clear to those who continue trying to avoid them.
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…
[do_widget id=text-3]
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 innocentpeople. 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.
[do_widget id=text-2]
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.
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.
