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  • Morning Message 1.10

    (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.

    So let’s start with the basic facts:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plutonium_Files

    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!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advisory_Committee_on_Human_Radiation_Experiments

    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.”

    Advisory Committee On Human Radiation Experiments Final Report

    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.

  • AfterParty 1.5 (Advance)

    Hey everyone, welcome to another AfterParty, I’m your suave and debonair host, let’s chat a bit!

    In my last AP I talked about having been quite “up” mentally for a sustained period, which was nice, but it had sort of leveled off a bit. The day after that dropped. I had a few things hit me that brought me down pretty hard for a bit – primarily, the absolutely undeniable evidence that my long-held (and long-confirmed, but not concretely) suspicions about where so much of the ongoing pressure against me – which dates long before Facebook or this site, back to the late 90s for the most part – was coming from.

    I’d have rather been wrong, frankly, and the ensuing mental conversation really dragged me down for a few days, back in the ol’ depression soup of wondering whether any of this is worth doing in the first place, the usual drill. I was hoping it wouldn’t get that far at all, but as anyone who’s struggled with mental illness will testify you’re not always in as much control as you’d like to believe you are.

    The good news is I’m slowly pulling back up – in the end there’s nothing I can do about any of it anyway, all I can do is keep being me and moving forward as best as possible with the tools I’ve got. I figure if I was gonna be out for “revenge,” that’d be about the best version of it anyway. I’ve written elsewhere about this in more detail, and don’t want to get deeply into again, just offering it out as a way of apologizing for being rather unproductive over the last week, including being a day late on this newsletter.

    On the up side I got the renamed “Morning Message” out with proper video & podcast today, and hopefully my sleep schedule will start working backwards a bit so the whole “morning” thing doesn’t get too ironic. I suspect it will, but right now I’m still in that “I might just get caught up in something an then suddenly realize it’s 3am” mode so I don’t want to make too many promises, but I think I’m on the road back to at least baseline productivity.

    Also dropped a pretty significant Medium article a few days ago. I tripped over a huge botnet/psyop nest on facebook – because they kept shoveling it in front of me so I couldn’t ignore it! – and started trying to ignore it only to find it was EVERYWHERE. Millions of people following hundreds of pages spamming from dozens of websites, etc., all of it either anti-democratic propaganda of some kind or glurgey sappy nostaligia and “aww cute” and ‘WE LUV DA SOJERS’ stuff crafted to catch folks who maybe aren’t caught up on the way the world’s information has shifted in the last ten or twenty years, get ’em following, and then start pushing them a little at a time.

    “The good old days!” That pulls a bunch of people. “When women knew their place and other people weren’t so uppity!” that loses a bunch…but you know the ones who are left are well-primed to be receptive to manipulation through bigotry and ignorance and fear, and we’re off to the races and pretty soon we’re reposting leftist satire as right-wing news and people are falling for it like autumn leaves, working themselves up into a torches-and-pitchforks froth of xenophobia and bitterness, and pretty soon it’s that damned gub’mint and we oughta. So that whole story’s at Medium and needs daylight, it’s an obviously coordinated foreign influence op being given a rocket-fuel boost by our buddy Da Zuck.

    So.

    A few months ago I was living in a hotel room, day to day, all my stuff in bins, no vehicle, no escape, and little hope. Now I’m in a home with a room and a desk and a computer connection and at least a rudimentary work environment. How that happened is another one of those “holy crap, is this my life?” moments that have so famously followed me around over the years.

    I’ve told the story in the past of why I was never a Jack Daniels’ drinker, but it’s been a minute. One night when I was fifteen, I went out with some friends and laid hands on a fifth of jack and a three-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, and proceeded to slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it 1985 rock star style until I was absolutely beyond drunk. Only a couple of memories of the night at all – one of tooling down the road in front of Upjohn’s world HQ in my buddy’s Pinto wagon, one of continually trying to unbutton another friend’s shirt, but other than that the night is and has always been a blank.

    Since then I’ve not been able to stand the taste of any kind of whiskey or bourbon or scotch.

    Naturally as tends to happen that group of friends drifted apart, life went on, and so forth, and now I’m living in a hotel just one bare fingernail from falling off the cliff forever. I had at least had the presence of mind to join the chain’s rewards program, so I was building up loyalty points good for rewards like free or discounted room prices.

    It’s like a Tuesday afternoon, and I’m out of money with no sign of any coming in soon. I’d already had a miraculous amount of help – I stayed in that hotel for a month! – and the proverbial well appeared to be dry for the moment.

    I walk down to the hotel office to start the process of cashing in my points, and as I’m standing there talking to the hotel clerk I thought I barely heard someone say my name.

    There’s zero reason for this to happen. Nobody in this place even knows my name except the desk help, and they’ve likely not even noticed it. I glanced around, didn’t see anyone I recognized, and turned back to the clerk, set my arrangements, and started walking out…and I heard my name again.

    I turn around…and it’s the girl whose shirt I’d been trying to take off thirty-seven years ago. Hadn’t seen or talked to her since probably early 1987 at the latest.

    We get to talking, “what are you doing here” “what are YOU doing here” etc. Long story short: she was working on the side because she’s on disability with a terminal cancer diagnosis, stage four in lungs and brain. Super sad. But also, she lives alone and has a spare room and pretty much needs someone to be around to call 911 in case she collapses unexpectedly or something, and heck yeah it’d be a favor to me if you’d move in. Don’t even worry about rent, don’t worry about getting a job or any of the rest of that crap, do what you can, but I just need someone around like right now and it sounds like you’re a perfect candidate.

    Here’s the kicker. You hear “stage four terminal” and think oh, wow, that’s tragedy, aren’t you worried you’re like, taking advantage or something? Thing is, in terms of health she’s ridiculously fine. She had collapsed back in August and at that time the ER docs gave her like…weeks. I ran into her in March and wouldn’t have known any of that to look at her. Still don’t. And she’s one of those types that’s not gonna just sit around waiting to die just because someone said she was gonna.

    So now I’m living here, helping out around the house, being a friend, and finally being allowed, in good faith, to have the time and space I need to actually work, rather than the series of bad-faith attempts to exploit and leverage my powerlessness in one situation to gain further power over my in the guise of “helping” (but now you owe me). We’re not in any kind of relationship or any of that stuff, but our past history definitely helps overcome the gap between in terms of “knowing each other,” we’re both still the same people just older, so it’s a sort of neat combination of being friends and strangers.

    And that, assembled guests, is the deus ex machina that probably saved me from being on the streets. I had another day and that was it – no money, nowhere to go, no way to get there.

    That is why you’re seeing such a sharp spike in my work lately. Took some weeks to get my head adjusted and out of the horrible farce of existence I’d been in for two and a half years in that damn boarding house, but once that started lifting things started flowing and other than the bump last week really have been ever since.

    I’m still not by any means affluent, but I have a stable roof over my head (she owns the house), and her day gig (which she went back to out of boredom) is in industrial food service so even though I have almost no money I still eat. This is extra bonus because it allows me to focus on putting support from folks like you toward my work, rather than just toward trying to keep my dumb ass alive for another day! It’s still a struggle to keep up just the bills associated with the low level or work I’m doing now – Adobe, Microsoft Office, the autoposter for the websites, various other little bits and pieces. And of course my roommate’s diet is pretty limited so I’m eating a whole lot of chemo patient safe food, but on the bright side I’ve also lost almost forty pounds since I’ve been here, from the last time I weighed in at the doctor when I was at the old place. I was 253 there, I think, and right now I’m around 215. Supposedly 197 is optimal; we’ll see if I get that far and what it looks like.

    So that’s my little story for the week about how life’s going backstage here at JH Central I’m going to go ahead and set this public at the normal Tuesday Noon next week. For now as always my many thanks and unspeakable gratitude for your ongoing support, and keep an eye on the website and other platforms for ongoing new content including the newsletters plus more on the multi-part content I’ve already started and whatever comes up between now and next time!

    Oh, hey. Check out this old song that has absolutely no right being as awesome as it is! You can’t imagine how much this was my favorite song when I was like…three.

    Love y’all, see you soon.

  • Morning Message 1.9

    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.

  • Morning Mess, May 30 2023

    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!

  • JH AfterParty 1.4

    Hello Patrons and supporters and welcome to another edition of the JH AfterParty, exclusively available to you for one week before being released to the general public!

    Finally started seeing some balance to the unremitting upswing I’ve been on for the last couple of months. Last Thursday was pretty much a no-go for the day, just sat down and everything I picked up to work on my brain just went “mbleh” and refused to chug. So I gave it the day off and Friday was better, weekend okay, yesterday afternoon kinda meh, but still nothing like the major crashes I’ve experienced in less stable, more chaotic living situations in the last few years. Obviously that’s not to say that my depression is the fault of my living situation, but rather that those situations made it more difficult for me to manage. I’m not feeling any impending sense of a giant crash or anything, just learning to manage myself better generally so it’s not always full throttle or dead stop. That’s part of the reason I’m opening up new sections of the site, too – helps me feel less guilty for doing anything that doesn’t potentially generate income if I can use it to generate a little income.

    Got some stuff done over the weekend as well – the Substack newsletter of course, and a new Medium article about media disinformation, plus other bits of content and the new “Morning Me” newsletter. I’ve started that off being just a “hey it’s morning time here’s me” thing, but I’m now starting to morph it into more of a “here’s a news item or two and a few of my thoughts about it to get your day rolling with your brain engaged” groove, as I’m getting the routine tightened down and everything in place to make it a true production process much as I’ve done with this newsletter over the last four weeks.

    I know it’s tedious to watch sometimes, but hopefully at least a few people are actually interested in how I do all this and my thoughts in process. All of this back-end and infrastructure and template work is designed to make production smooth and efficient, so I don’t find myself suddenly overwhelmed trying to produce six newsletters, five video episodes, five podcast episodes, plus actual content every week.

    Oh, yeah. As of yesterday I’ve started doing the “Morning Me” as a video and podcast series in addition to the “print” version. That’ll be an ongoing thing. I’m considering doing the same with this but haven’t had time to look properly in to doing it with the supporter preview functionality protected – again, an issue that seems pretty petty and meaningless in this context but will be far easier to solve now than later down the road when it’s standing in the way of “real” content going out. But as of yesterday you can get your “Morning Me” as a video cast on my YouTube channel and as an audio podcast through any of the links on my site – it’ll still show up as “In My Room” in some players, for now – I will have to create an entire new infrastructure to properly handle podcasting again but this’ll get it out of the gate for now. There’s also be a download link on each newsletter so you can just snag the MP3 and listen to it however you want.

    I laughed way too hard at this:

    It’s an irrational function because it still runs on fossil fuels.

    That project management software (ProjeQtOr) that I mentioned last week has been working out really well, easily the best free solution I’ve ever found in terms of working the way I work and helping me stay organized and on task, plus I’m losing fewer ideas because when I have one I can just open a ticket and then it’s there and eventually I’ll remember it and get back to it. That’s part of what’s empowering these multi-part series I’m doing like the gaming history and national debt pieces – I can plan them better and it gives me time to think of things like NOT writing them all as a single enormous article because hardly anyone reads those anymore. Haven’t had time to look into a “public” facing reporting tool for supporters yet, but it’s on the agenda.

    Contributions are unfortunately way down, but that’s to be expected with no multimedia work going out. I’ve got a couple of pitch videos sketched out and some other stuff that’ll help that. Just reminds me how grateful I am to those of you who have been and/or are pitching in on the support; even though I’m in a much better place, I’m still way behind where I need to be to get this whole thing set up properly – right now I’m not even keeping up with my few basic bills, to say nothing of trying to help out the friend who’s putting me up and adding a ton of empowerment to all of this by doing so, and there’s a laundry list of expenses from gear to food to business licensing and taxes that needs handled.

    The way that happens is with your support and that of other folks like you who are committed to doing what you can to help nudge the battleship Humanity a quarter-degree or so in a more sane and sustainable direction. Please do keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming short video that will be framed specifically as a tool for those of you who have been supportive to reach out with and help add to that so we can get out of “hanging on” mode and get on with climbing upward, I should have that by the end of the week. We’ve been on a slow build. My end has picked up considerably in the last month and will continue to do so. Now it’s just a question of getting it out there so people can see it.

    And as I’m writing this I’m having dozens of notions of things I need to do fly through my head, so let me wrap it up and get back to work!

  • JH AfterParty 1.3

    How about a wall of text with no headings this week?

    Hey everyone and welcome to another JH AfterParty, I am of course your sartorially exquisite and finely honed host John Henry, let’s take a look at what’s up inside my world this week!

    The ongoing high-octane energy period continues. I have to admit this is kind of shaky ground for me, because this definitely isn’t an artifact of my mental illness (which it often is when I’m “up” like this – it’s called “manic depression” for a reason). I’ve been steady and strong for weeks now, and there’s no end in sight. My mind is sharper, my productivity is through the roof, and I’m literally hitting personal, internal goals that I’ve been picking at for twenty years or more.

    The implementation of ProjeQtOr project management software on a subdomain of JHUS is a great example of this. I’ve literally been playing with project management software trying to find something that would work for me and the way I do things AND not cost an arm and a leg or require an MCS for thirty years.

    Like Microsoft Project is pretty perfect – would be a better solution than this in fact – but it costs hundreds of dollars a year to maintain and unlike Adobe Creative Cloud (which also costs hundreds of dollars a year to maintain) it doesn’t produce an easily tangible result for the “customer,” which in my case is you in spite of my long-standing loathing for the idea that I am a “product” or the things I do are “commodities” or “services” to be “consumed.”

    Regardless of my own self-serving philosophizing, in the end people are giving me money because I do certain things, and that amounts to a customer service relationship. This isn’t a new idea to me, it’s just one I’ve always been loathe to speak out loud because it feels like I’m turning myself into a new gadget from Ron Popeil. I don’t like thinking and talking in corporate-speak and MBA terminology. I know the language, in fact I’m pretty fluent in it beyond not keeping up with the lastest stupid buzzwords for someone’s half-assed attempt at actually doing the things some of us have been doing and telling everyone else you should be for centuries.

    Watch the whole progression of the “Six Sigma” thing for an example. It doesn’t really mean anything at all other than “I’ve got a decent enough handle on how to do things that I can pass a little test and get a certificate that will make all the HR drones think I’m smart.” It’s just a big fancy bunch of marketable nonsense that comes down to “maximize production efficiency whenever possible.”

    Cultivate the ability – and make it a habit! – to avoid rushing, to the greatest extent you possibly can. When you’re rushing, you’re not thinking.

    – jh

    Much like “common core math,” in the end it represents an attempt by someone who doesn’t “get it” to communicate “it” to other people who “don’t get it,” while entirely locking out everyone who does “get it” from the conversation because the person who appears to “get it” gets paid so we’re back to the manifest individual tumors of the cancers of competition and capitalism.

    Common core math is an attempt to teach neurotypical people how geniuses math, predicated on the notion that if you do it like a genius, you’ll get genius results. It, and nearly every such endeavor, overlooks the part about you have to be a genius to understand how it works, and most of us aren’t geniuses.

    Six Sigma and pretty much every other trendy corporate buzzword is the same thing; it’s how someone figured out a way to package a good idea so people who are consistently averse to good ideas will accept it. Problem is in order to do that, half the time you have to compromise the idea until it’s no longer good.

    This circles back to my problem with project management and self management and software. I’ve seen it in plenty of other places, too, it’s not just me – you can get so caught up in the metastructure of what you’re doing that you forget to actually do the thing you set out to do.

    For instance about twenty-five years ago when I first started building websites, I started putting together a little section of my Geocities page for gaming…and then ended up in the weeds creating all the structure for the content until I got bored with it and never created the content. Now here I am a quarter-century later finally following through on it.

    I’m not talking about things that just don’t pan out like the Musk For A Minute project – that was a good solid swing and an unfortunate miss and that happens in life, it’s not even a “failure,” just didn’t go where I hoped it would. I’m talking about things where you start off thinking you’re going to arrange your music collection and end up building a database where you can keep notes, track lists, ID3 or other metainfo, and write an article for every single one of your 60K+ MP3s…and then when the database is done you do about twelve entries and find something else that attracts your attention and your energy and suddenly a good idea is abandoned and three years later you go “ohshit, I was gonna….rawr.”

    Meanwhile you’ve forgotten all about actually organizing your music collection.

    That is the kind of bad habit I’m breaking in myself right now, and for some reason it’s important to me to express how it really is the same problem as the compromise problem above (and the other one below). You get so wrapped up in trying to find ways to make the truth palatable to people who are violently opposed to hearing it (or in some extreme cases straight out incapable of processing it), you forget that the job is “tell the truth,” not “make it comfortable,” and pretty soon you’re not telling the truth at all anymore. You get so wrapped up in trying to find ways to make the process more efficient that you forget it has to actually be a working process and at some point you need to engage in it.

    See e.g. the entire “critical race theory” argument, whereby cowardly bigots insist that because the truth of how horrible white people in the US have been to people of color historically is not comfortable to white people, that truth should not be spoken at all.

    All three of those examples of broken thinking are rooted around the same fundamental (and dysfunctional) thought pattern, and you can probably tell by my rambling I’m having a little trouble nailing down precise verbiage for it. I know it’s not just a me thing, because there are those examples above. I just can’t find a common, readily understood phrase to describe it that does the concept proper service. I think the closest I ever came was something I said once that got memed and I’ve long since lost track of: People will happily pay $10 for a sideshow just to prove they didn’t get taken in by the $5 circus.

    Point is I’m in a really amazing place in my life right now, things are happening like crazy and moving ahead in big ways. All that stuff I was “gonna” over the years, I’m finally doing, and it feels really wonderful. (Okay, not all…but a lot more than I ever have at once before.)

    I wouldn’t be here without all of your help, and I wouldn’t be able to contemplate moving forward without knowing you all are here, and I appreciate you far more individually and constantly than you probably think…especially because interpersonal communication and followups like sending “thank you” notes when someone chucks me fifty bucks on PayPal tend to be first and foremost among those things that get lost in the dust when I’ve got other stuff happening.

    That’s part of the whole reason I’m doing this newsletter; to find SOME way to show folks that I’m thinking of you and that I never forget “who I’m working for,” without stepping over a big bright line I have where I think it’s pretty gross to lock information that everybody really needs behind a paywall so only people who can afford it, get it. That’s kind of one of the big problems I’m trying to solve, right – the whole inequity of access to critical needs, systems, and information. I can hardly be a credible agent of change in that regard if I refuse to risk letting go of the tactic myself because I’m afraid I won’t be able to eat or pay rent. Someone’s got to take that risk, and I happen to be pretty well geared to minimize the impact of it in a lot of ways that most people aren’t, so here I am.

    Anyway…I was going to say “I digress” but this entire newsletter is supposed to be a digression of sorts so I won’t. I will say that I’ve got a lot of great new content up at the site, much more coming, some really fantastic things happening in terms of my mental health and overall state of being, and I’m now in my groove and doing what I came here to do.

    And I’m all outta bubblegum 😉

    See y’all next week, please don’t forget those engagements! Some of y’all have been hearing me talk about “when I get to this point, it’s gonna be time to get serious about all of this for folks in the liking and sharing and commenting and subscribing and telling others department” for a decade or more.

    Well, now I’m at this point. It’s time. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

    Talk soon and don’t forget to subscribe to the Substack! (There’s a form in the sidebar if you’re reading this at JohnHenry.US. It’s below the content on vertical screens.) That’s the one way you know for sure you’re aware of everything I publish and create, and that’s the best way to know what you like and prefer to share and engage with 🙂

    OH! I almost forgot I’m doing an irregular-but-daily-ish new thing called “The Morning Me,” you should check that out (I’ll get a node page up for it soon) and also know ahead of time that there’s probably going to be something similar about the rest of the world coming along Real Soon Now™. And yes, rich media is on the horizon.

  • Morning Me 1.7 (23-May-23)

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

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

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

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

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

    – someone who apparently thinks police cars are autonomous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Morning Me 1.6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • What Is The National Debt, And Why Does It Matter? (Part 2)

    The Gold Standard

    In part one of our series on the National Debt, we discussed what “debt” is and why in spite of well-intended contradiction the fact is that the “national debt” is a real thing and it has real meaning, just not at all the meaning we’re sold in political rhetoric.

    We left off with a brief note about the gradual decoupling of the US dollar from the value of gold, beginning with FDR’s expansion of the dollar in 1933. Remember, our core purpose here is discussing debt, specifically the “national debt,” with additional necessary examination of concept of value and trade.

    I don’t want to get into the weeds on side details or a bulleted list of dates, but once upon a time the US dollar was backed – that is to say, its value was derived from – a quantity of gold bullion held, physically, by the United States Government. That’s why the legendary vault at Fort Knox exists. This was known as the “gold standard,” and for centuries was the basis of money everywhere – how much gold (and other precious metals like silver and copper) did the issuer of the money have on hand?

    Moving off the gold standard unfortunately started making the picture of what money “is” less clear to the average person, because the dollar was no longer backed by a tangible object. “But,” you exclaim, “it must be backed by something!” You are both right, and wrong. An important part of the wrongness is the belief that “it must be backed by something real, tangible, and with uniquely and objectively identifiable intrinsic value.“

    Modern currency is backed by “the full faith and credit” of the issuer. In the US (and with some variability in any other sovereign currency system) that amounts to our GDP (gross domestic product: the sum total of value of all the holdings, goods, services, labor force, etc. created or held by a nation during a given period; if no period is given this is typically one year) plus whatever value is attached to expectations of future stability and growth.

    You’re not imagining things: this is a highly speculative and complicated series of educated guesses derived from abstruse calculations of arcane data to the point some would say it’s entirely made up

    They wouldn’t be wrong, but you’re also getting out of economics and into metaphysics at that point because the intrinsic value of gold is also “made up,” in the sense that human beings designated it valuable due to its properties which are useful to humans, e.g. not being prone to deteriorating through oxidation the way iron is, being easy to alloy, and being both malleable and attractive enough to work into fine art including coinage. Best not to let yourself get too deep in the weeds on what’s “made up” when you’re talking money. (If you think coinage isn’t fine art, take a good look at a nice new one through a jeweler’s loupe sometime.)

    The simple fact is, all modern money is created in this way: out of thin air, at will, by the owner of that currency denomination – US dollars, British pounds, Japanese Yen, etc. Nothing more than the individual integrity of the people running the systems stops any sovereign currency issuer from simply printing the money to pay off their debts.

    What induces them to maintain integrity is the impact that would have on the value of their currency and the trust placed in them by international trading partners who would be loathe to exchange goods and services with a partner known for either refusing to pay their debts or intentionally doing so in such a way that the essential value of the debt is seriously lowered. If I agree to buy your EU beef for $10US when $1 = 1 euro, but then when I pay you off $1 = .5 euro because I (as the US) arbitrarily decided to double my dollar supply thereby devaluing each dollar by half but not changing the dollar amount of our contract, you’ve lost half the EU money you thought you were going to have even though you have the same amount of dollars you expected. That’s dumb business, nobody wants to risk that.

    The Eurozone

    A Different Feather Of Fish

    The Eurozone is a bit of a strange duck that I frankly don’t have my head entirely around yet, but as nearly as I can tell for lay purposes one may think of the European Central Bank as being analogous to our Federal Reserve, with member EU states being similar to US states albeit with more sovereign power due to the EU being a confederation of previously existing nation-states rather than one large nation consisting of new subdivision states as US history imagines to be its own case. (In reality of course there were dozens of existing nation-states on the continent before Europeans arrived, and they were subjugated and dislocated by the Europeans for the sake of American expansion westward.)

    “Germany” doesn’t print its own money but “Europe” does, and “Germany” is a participating constituent part of “Europe.” I frankly don’t know how this works out in the interplay of how “your taxpayer euros are spent” – in the US at the federal level that’s a null string because “your taxpayer dollars” are never “spent,” they’re destroyed. I assume the Eurozone has a similar overarching taxation system for the same purposes of pulling Euros back out of the system, but I don’t know how that breaks down into e.g. federal infrastructure funding in the Netherlands.

    The Guardrails

    Each sovereign system has its own checks and balances to forestall bad actors. In the US, for instance, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

    For the record, yes this means the entire concept of a debt ceiling is unconstitutional the moment that ceiling attempts to deny the validity of a public debt, which it does the moment it refuses to account for and settle any given debt. As that is precisely the purpose of a “debt ceiling,” it simply can’t exist constitutionally, but it does because it was originally implemented in 1917 and we didn’t have the proper information and experience to say “hey wait a minute, isn’t this the whole reason we’ve got a set of rules about these things? These rules, right here, the ones you’re egregiously violating?” The purpose of the debt ceiling as conceived is entirely obsolete and shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.

    Additionally, it means all the games the Republicans play with refusing to sign off on the funding to pay the debt until they get the draconian social program cuts they want are also unconstitutional; they legally don’t have a chip on the felt. Yet this has been the operating dynamic of federal budget negotiations for at least half a century, long after the reasons for the original creation of a “debt ceiling” in 1917 were obsolete by our decoupling completely from gold in 1971 (Richard Nixon finalized what FDR started).

    Thus the underlying purpose of this series: to help you understand the extent to which this entire “debt ceiling” argument is nonsense, but also to fill that vacuum created in your fact library by the removal of that nonsense with information that’s accurate and useful instead.

    Also accurate and useful, ridding yourself of the notion that “central bankers” and “capitalists” are the same creatures. Believe it or not, the space most “central bankers” inhabit is at a computer staring at miles of data and doing their honest best to make sense of it, not some cigar-chomping back room where odious industrialists plot ways to rob people of their labor and freedom.

    That’s not to say such rooms don’t exist, but that’s not generally where you find a central banker; you find them poring over spreadsheets trying to figure out exactly what percentage of the currency we’ve sent out needs to come back in order to avoid devaluation while also ensuring there’s enough money circulating for people to live and do business.

    The influences of capitalism and corruption tend to be external; economists and macroeconomists (for the most part *cough* Friedman) love math and numbers and statistical trends, and tend to keep their ideology and work separated to avoid one unduly influencing the other. That’s not to say they don’t have beliefs, but like a doctor (a real one, not one in Florida) or journalist as a professional matter they must be able to set those beliefs aside and deal with manifest facts which contradict those beliefs, when such facts arise.

    It’s a science, speculative and diaphanous as it may seem from the outside…and the numbers work the same regardless of whether the dollars are capitalist dollars or communist rubles or anything else; sovereign currencies have observable behavioral tendencies which are predictable and are only reliant on ideological influence to the extent that influencers motivated by ideology attempt to disrupt the existing “natural” tendencies of money flow.

    This all adds up to a picture of modern economics in which a great deal of energy is expended determining just what the fair value of the “full faith and credit” of a nation really is, when denominated in currency, and those calculations, performed internally and reflecting among other things similar calculations based on known data relevant to other currencies from an “external” standpoint, constitute the guideposts for a central bank as to how much money they can safely create without risking devaluation (or having to raise taxes to avoid that risk) which functionally translates into inflation.

    All of this, balanced against the behavior and predictability and stability of several dozen other currencies all denominating the same core “values” (e.g. “the consumer price of a loaf of bread”) in ways that are culturally localized.

    It’s an act of juggling cats balanced on crystal wine glasses. A third of the cats are invisible and may be made of razor blades, a couple of them are marmosets, one appears to be a previously undocumented mating of a dachshund and a mountain goat, and you have an eyepatch on one side and the opposite hand tied behind your back.

    That, my beloved assembled guests, is what we call “macroeconomics.”

    In Part 3, we’ll talk more about that phrase “full faith and credit” and the nature of those cats!

  • Morning Me, May 19 ’23

    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.

    Love y’all. Don’t forget I’m crowdfunded 🙂