JHUS Staging

Tag: activism

  • True Left

    True Left

    The Search For Direction

    (Introductory note: This began as a social media status that got so long it should be an article, which got so long it needed to go into the book – most people aren’t interested in reading online articles longer than 1500 words or so. This is now an edited-down version of what will be that section of the book.)

    There’s a long-standing observation about politics in the United States that we have no “true left” in our country.

    This is demonstrably untrue; there are any number of individuals, events, situations, and entities proving otherwise every day, including your present author.

    The underlying point of the observation – that the left we do have tends to be much closer to the center and less likely to resist or reject the prerogatives of capitalist power than in the rest of the world – has some merit. Unfortunately, that merit tends to be obscured by the gaping logical holes in the statement.

    Also unfortunate is that while the observation has merit, there’s no chance of addressing it effectively head-on without first addressing the reasons it happens.

    There is a much larger problem here that we seem to be refusing to see because it’s uncomfortable.

    Not Looking For Harris’ Flaws

    First I want to talk about Biden and Harris. I was against Biden dropping before he did it. When he did and endorsed Vice-President Harris my immediate response was “this is who we’ve got to beat Trump with, so let’s do it.”

    My reasoning for this is simple: there’s absolutely nothing positive to be gained from opposing or even energetically criticizing her at this point. Of course Harris isn’t perfect or flawless, but she’s literally the only thing standing between us and absolute catastrophe – historical, global, catastrophe – in November.

    I will not be so thirsty for traffic – or ersatz “street cred” among performative “leftists” – that I feed narratives to the GOP and the right wing by airing criticism here and now. The only purpose would be to draw attention to myself, and if my intentions were honorable and presented in good faith and I was successful in them by raising criticism of and opposition to Harris in public discourse, Trump would win the presidency.

    Ergo, I won’t be doing that. She needs to win. There is nobody else and it’s years past when we should’ve been thinking about it if we’re going to lay credible and serious claim to thinking about it now.

    Yet still, some of my friends and readers and supporters and colleagues on the left persist in discussing how Harris isn’t a true leftist and we must instead find a real progressive option and get behind them if we’re ever going to progress in this country.

    All of those statements taken individually are true, but at the same time taken as an integrated part of reality they don’t change the basic equation. Harris must win this election. There is no other option.

    Good Cop, It’s All Rigged, Blah Blah Blah

    Is that frustrating to me? Yes. I’ve been saying – publicly – for decades, since I was in middle and high school in the Reagan 80’s, that if we continued allowing it to be okay for our presidential choices to be reduced to the worst idea imaginable versus the second-worst, eventually we would end up in exactly this situation.

    Things could be much worse. There could have been a contested primary, or the DNC could have decided in some internal power struggle to go with a much worse candidate.

    In circumstances where we’re lucky to have a viable opposing at all, we’re beyond fortunate to have Harris as that candidate whether I agree with her on everything or not. She’s good at her job, she’s proven already to be a great candidate who is extraordinarily popular, and in a matter of a few weeks she’s turned the entire mood of this country around.

    That’s the thing that’s bugging me a ton right now about all these self-appointed experts and analysts and activists and pundits and thought leaders and influencers trying to find some way to generate traffic by criticizing Harris.

    Harris and her campaign, from the minute Biden dropped out to the minute I’m writing this sentence, have done things about as perfectly as they possibly could be from a standpoint of both the merits of their positions and the results. They’ve not dropped a single ball one time nor even looked wobbly, and I’m not sure they’re going to.

    Better Than Merely Lesser Evil

    We’re in a very complex moment where a population that fundamentally craves stability and consistency has no stable and consistent direction to turn, and there are radical changes at hand that must be addressed and not resisted, because they benefit all of us in the end.

    By the evidence to date Harris and her team are very much tuned in to all of these realities and are doing a masterful job of navigating them. That by itself is a display of leadership far superior to anything of which any Republican or most Democrats are capable.

    The “official” voice in my head is thinking 300-ish electoral votes would be a good, solid finish.

    The unofficial voice is increasingly convinced we could see a genuine landslide in Harris’ favor in November.

    It all depends on whether we show up, which is why I’m not celebrating a lot of positive poll numbers. The only poll that matters, happens on election day, and we have to make absolutely certain the victory is so iron-clad and unambiguous that it’s simply not subject to credible challenge at any level.

    Fortunately, we have a solid candidate to get behind and not just a “better than pure evil” placeholder or puppet.

    Yet some persist in imposing ideological purity tests on Harris while utterly ignoring her opponent’s catastrophically evil flaws.

    Right there is where that much larger problem that we’re not ready or willing to talk about has consequences, and it’s time we did the talking.

    Ready for it? Here it goes:

    True Left

    Here is the reality of the “true left” in the United States of America in August, 2024.

    First: A true leftist option isn’t going to do us any good if we’re no longer allowed to vote, or our system is retooled into a despotic facade of democratic process.

    Second: This sort of ideological purity test is more often egotistical virtue signaling on the part of the speaker than it is any grounded and coherent objection worthy of the attention being asked of it.

    Third: We tend to crap on true leftist options in this country.

    How all that shakes out as a set of values when you filter it through a hundred or two hundred million voters doesn’t make us look very good in aggregate in terms of our national character and “who we really are.”

    We’ve elected some real losers in this country and allowed plenty of others to hold power simply because we were high on our own flatulence and they kept feeding us raw vegetables.

    I think until we take a hard look at that, a true leftist option isn’t going to do us any good, because the problem isn’t about a lack of truly leftist or progressive options.

    It’s about our failure to live up to the world we say we want to live in.

    It’s about our refusal to work genuinely to create that world to any extent beyond that which is convenient to our existing interests and privileges – and that includes social approval and the material benefits that come with it.

    It’s about our willingness to be misled when it appeals to our egos, emotions, or sense of entitlement.

    I know that’s not easy to hear or accept, and I’m genuinely sorry for that.

    But this is the reality of our time, and we have to face it and address it because if we don’t, we’re just going to keep cycling through flirtations with autocracy until eventually one of them works and we spend a few hundred years with the human population largely impoverished and enslaved until we fight our way back to a more moral social structure.

    We have to stop falling for appeals to our lesser impulses.

    Baiting The Hook

    That’s how they catch us, every time. “They” being the power class in any socioeconomic system and “us” being those not holding significant power. They appeal to our egos and our conviction that if we just “play ball” the right way, we too will be part of the ownership class, but we never really are. Not most of us. The things we think of as “ours,” the cars and homes and all of that stuff, they’re not really ours until we’re done making payments on them.

    For most of us that day never comes.

    Most of us, one way or the other, continue to both tolerate and fall for this con because we believe that by successfully participating in the con we’ve earned a share of the ill-gotten gains of the con.

    Sometimes it even works. Sometimes people really do make out pretty well by being absolute bastards to other people and accruing wealth and power all their lives and dying wealthy and powerful. Not very often though; usually people who die wealthy were born that way.

    They’re the ones who keep all this mess going, and they do it because the mess preserves their privileges. They don’t care about the long-term cost or the sustainability or whether someone else or thousand of other humans are being relentlessly exploited to ensure those privileges.

    They encourage the rest of us to think in the same terms, making us all complicit and making it more difficult for us to change our own behavior due to feelings of guilt and shame when we look at ourselves honestly in the middle of the night.

    A certain percentage of the population always seems susceptible to this notion that if they’re willing to turn a blind eye to exploitation, they’re allowed to reap the benefits of that exploitation with a clear conscience. So long as they’re not holding the whip, their hands are clean.

    They con us into thinking like that, and we fall for it because we all want to be comfortable and have some power in our lives and the world around us, and we’re surrounded from birth by constant messaging that surrendering to the machine by becoming part of it is the only way to achieve that comfort and power.

    They sell us on the idea that there’s no way out of the hole except by climbing over someone else at a disadvantage compared to us, they lead us to believe this is the only way to do things, and then use our guilt and shame over doing what we believe we must to survive, to keep us doing it when we realize we don’t have to.

    They do it to preserve their power, and we let them do it because we believe that our cooperation will give us access to that power.

    Until we fix THAT problem, all the true leftists in the world aren’t going to help.

    Until we fix that problem we aren’t true leftists ourselves.

  • Omar Rivero Conversation

    Among the large-scale scammers, grifters, harassers, trolls, and losers who have been trying to drag me down, play me against my allies, and sabotage my work over the years is Omar Rivero, founder of Occupy Democrats. (Incidentally he had exactly nothing to do with the Occupy movement, he just co-opted the name as a marketing strategy.)

    A few days ago another of these big pages ripped off some content from me, so I wrote about it – loudly. One of the things I wrote was this article on Medium. While doing my normal maintenance I noticed a new comment on that article, and of course it’s a newly-created sockpuppet account repeating the same old stupid lies trying to con people into believing that the guy whose annual income has been less than 10K for years is the grifter and it’s really the guy paying himself hundreds of thousands a year to clickbait the left who’s on the up-and-up.

    I have been holding this conversation in an archive since 2015. I’ve mentioned it before and even posted a couple of screenshots with information redacted. And of course it gets ignored because by and large people (including you, and for that matter me) are egomaniacs and hate finding out they’ve been conned, so when faced with the evidence of the con they ignore it and get mad at whoever showed it to them. We probably ought to break that habit, since it’s literally killing us, but that’s a different article.

    Anyway with all that backstory in mind and remembering that the latest sockpuppet’s claim was that “Omar Rivero doesn’t know who [I am],” here’s the ENTIRE conversation in which Rivero attempts to stir up contention, bait me into throwing popular leftist Manny Schewitz under the proverbial bus, and make all kinds of logically broken and entirely baseless accusations.

    If Omar’s got a problem with that, he can sue me for defamation and we can go to court and he can tell the judge these screenies are fake, at which point I’ll just pull up the archived conversation on my FB account and win the countersuit. But he won’t do that. What he will do, on the off chance this gets any visibility, is make a bunch of excuses how it was 2015, he didn’t know any better, he’s not the same person he was then…but if that was true, he’d have ended the blackballing of my content, and he hasn’t. He’d have stopped the grift, and he hasn’t. What he has done is continue sucking up to the center-right power core of the DNC in the hopes of furthering his political “career.”

    These people are lying, grifting scum – Occupy Dems, Other 98, Being Liberal, Addicting Info, and EVERYONE in their sphere. The only reason anyone would work with any of them is because either that person/entity is unaware of all this garbage, or they’re part of the problem. Either way, enough is enough. If we’re ever going to have a real left wing in this country, we must flush our commode and get these floaters down the drain so they stop stinking up the place.

    Let me be clear: no genuine progressive, nobody who respects independent activism or progressive values or leftist values or anything else they’re pimping for bucks would ever have engaged in any of the behavior I’ve been subject to by them over the years. If you are following these people, if you are sharing their content, if you think they are in any way liberal (in the colloquial sense used as a synonym for “left wing,” the real definition is an entirely different matter), leftist, or progressive, you are the victim of a long, deep, con game that has extracted millions of dollars from the real left and deliberately neutered left-wing social media for the explicit purpose of co-opting grassroots leftist energy to direct it at fakes, frauds, sockpuppets, astroturfers, liars, and thieves. I know that’s hard to hear. I know plenty of folks will just hate me for saying it out loud, and frankly those people are no more “progressive” than the people they’re following – they’re pretending to be progressive for social approval and/or profit, and they will absolutely abandon any genuine leftist principle in a heartbeat if it becomes too inconvenient, expensive or socially challenging to uphold.

    I thank you for your time. And yes, I’ve verified this is legitimate THAT Omar – not a sockpuppet, not a fake account, not a troll that’s pretending.

    “A lot of people” = “nobody, I went googling a new site that was set up to be the antidote to my bullshit, now I’m gonna try to troll you with this random auto-scraped entry that means exactly nothing” First off, people working above board don’t play this backchannel crap.
    The explanation is you don’t know how Zoominfo words and you’re a creepy little stalker.
    OMG THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!
    Hahaha isn’t anti-Semitism funny? Your “leftist” hero. Your “liberal” standard-bearer. Your “progressive” warrior. Your buddy of Elizabeth Warren.
    For the record, he never sent me jack shit. But ask yourselves what kind of progressive or leftist or liberal engages in poverty shaming and ridiculing people who have to eat ramen.
    “If you have to cheat to win…” “We make mistakes.” See the gaslight there? Also the obviously backhanded, snotty remarks about “nobody watches” and “nobody reads.” “They hate me because I’m successful (defined as ‘making money by bullshitting people’)” – another common refrain of the plutocracy. The only thing left about this clown is he should’ve left the political activism to people who live their values and believe in progressive ideals.
    Incidentally that article remained on the site, uncorrected until sometime between Sept 2020 and April 2022. At the time of writing this article AI appears to have gone 404. Ironically it was stolen from Raw Story, which is probably what Matt Desmond didn’t want people to notice and that’s what set him off like a coke freak on a four-day bender.
    This me explaining to a guy I know is part of the problem why he’s part of the problem, while pretending I believe he’s acting in good faith. That’s my way of making sure “I didn’t know” isn’t a plausible excuse anymore. He knows. I told him. He doesn’t care because grifting makes him money.
    “Just news blogs.” More gaslighting. This is also how they rationalize themselves. It’s “just a mistake.” Then they find someone like me making an honest mistake and scream SEE YOU DO IT TOO! Nobody is so stupid as to not understand the difference, but the pretense gives them plausible deniability. Now who else can I think of that’s staked the whole game on pretending they really believe their own bullshit? Clue, it rhymes with Trump.
    How many progressives do you know who think maintaining ethics in their sphere is “beneath them?”
    Another gaslight – diversion tactic. The fact we were exploiting a sensationalized story about a murder wasn’t really exploitation because there was a minor factual error in the website we copied and pasted the story from before applying a fourth-grade rewrite to avoid obvious copyright infringement. God these people are scum.
    “Yeah dude I’m a nobody,” but a few panels up he’s bragging about five million visitors a month to his website. False modesty that he clearly doesn’t believe; it’s a show of ersatz humility leveraging the human tendency to feel bad about distrusting people who act humble. I’m not saying he’s not VERY GOOD at being a lying manipulator. If he wasn’t he wouldn’t have made so much money doing it.
    “So are you saying that…[insert attempt to go back to the narrative you’re trying to control]” Pure manipulation.
    Just in case anyone thinks I’m afraid to “say that to his face,” this is me telling him to his face he’s a sleazy self-aggrandizing money-grubbing dick pretending to be a political activist, to his face. Small woncer the conversation ends immediately after.

    That’s the entire conversation. The discerning reader will clearly see the attempts at manipulation, the plays to plausible deniability, the fake “oh I’m not important” modesty performance, etc. ad nauseam.

    THIS is the attitude that has been “informing” left-wing politics for the last decade or so, I’ve told you and told you and told you what was happening, and nobody wants to hear it. I’ve resisted putting this out for nearly a decade because I just don’t need the BS, but you know what? I’ve got the BS anyway. I’ve spent the majority of the time since this conversation happened destitute, desperate, begging to survive, and STILL doing more in any give series of random grunts than these scamming pigs have done for the left in their entire lives, collectively.

    I’m done playing.

    https://www.facebook.com/JohnHenryUS/videos/805871634614882/ Livestream where I establish beyond question that these messages came from the real Omar. (Don’t forget to like my page – unlike Omar, I need an audience that appreciates being respected. You can also use the widget on this page if you don’t have it blocked somehow.) If it disappears I’ll upload the archive to YouTube…and if THAT disappears I’ll just host it myself.

    I’ve been trying to tell people for over a decade that these bad actors were bad actors, and they’re damaging our hope for a progressive and successful future. I’ve been largely ignored. It’s time to stop hiding your heads in the sand and face reality: if you’re on board with these pages, you’ve been had, and it’s cost the left and by extension all of us far, far too much.

  • Morning Me, May 18 ’23

    Good morning folks it’s time again for the “Morning Me!” Let’s take a look around at what’s happening in JH’s world today…

    Item: Prestidigitation: Brett Favre is catching headlines all over the place today for saying the country was in better shape under TFG.

    Those headlines are conveniently crowding out the headlines about Brett Favre filing paperwork yesterday to be dismissed from the gigantic welfare fraud lawsuit he’s part of for taking millions of dollars intended to help needy families in exchange for speaking fees and other perks.

    Guess what we’re not gonna be talking about today?

    Item: Legendary professional wrestler Superstar Billy Graham passed away. It remains to be seen whether Jesse Ventura or Hulk Hogan will take the opportunity to also pass away and then claim they did it first. Without the Superstar, half the wrestling business would have never existed.

    Item: the rest of this is pretty dark so here’s something upbeat to dull the edge. Since we were talking about prestidigitation above…here’s Randy Savage surprising you with a little magic from “the cream of the crop” in one of the all-time classic wrestling promos, this one from the lead-up to Wrestlemania III. Just watch it – and watch Savage artfully cover his own flubs without a hitch. There’s a reason I respect the hell out of old-school wrestlers, those cats would come out and cut these promos off the tops of their heads, maybe a little back-planning like the creamers here, and just GO, and I love that. From my own work I know that may not always be how you get the cleanest and shiniest cuts, but it is how you get to the real emotion you need to project for a quality performance…even if it’s something as “goofy” as a professional wrestling match.

    Item: I’m thinking today about how this guy in NYC who murdered Jordan Neely on the subway has already raised $2+ million for his defense fund. I’m thinking about it because over on LinkedIn, I’m seeing a lot of things like people saying they find it “troubling” that this happens.

    I find it troubling every time this happens, and it happens often one way or another. Here’s why it happens:

    The simple reality is fascists, bigots, racists and other bullies support their heroes passionately, enthusiastically, and with LOTS of money, and “we” – “we” being “everyone who isn’t a fascist, bigot, racist, or bully” – don’t.

    They send their kids deliberately to infiltate and take ownership of our systems and processes. We don’t.

    They throw money at people who are out actually doing the things they want done, like murdering Black people and anti-capitalist/anti-fascist protesters. We don’t.

    We refuse.

    Our people – whatever the melanin content of their skin or inclinations of their sexuality or genetics of their gender – who are out doing it starve in the streets while being harangued online as “beggars” and “grifters” while we all sit around telling each other how smart and clever we are for getting on this hot new Doterra or Crossfit trend.

    Our people have to beg for ramen on the internet and half the time can’t even get that.

    Our people are left to couch surf and desperately beg for subsistence while also desperately begging us to pull our heads out of our asses.

    Our people who are really doing the work get ignored while “Occupy Democrats” and “Worldstar Hip Hop” and “TMZ” rake in millions by appealing to our egos.

    Until that changes, you’re gonna keep seeing this happen. Why wouldn’t it? It’s rewarding.

    When someone like me – and I mean “like me,” not some prefab instapundit who made one viral tweet and immediately sold out to the DNC or who’s actually working FOR the DNC while pretending to be an “independent voice” like JoJoFromJerz or BrooklynDadDefiant, the only difference between them and Rittenhouse is the gun – makes $2.5 million dollars for saying that murdering black people and anti-fascists is wrong, and Kyle Rittenhouse needs a public defender because nobody cares to support a murderer, maybe we’ll be getting somewhere. Right now the evidence is clear: the fascists want to fash far more than the anti-fascists want them to stop.

    That’s a big, big problem everywhere, and not just because I’m bitter and angry about the paltry rewards of a life of public service that *isn’t* prefabricated and based entirely on privilege. Until we’re willing to put as much time, energy, and money into doing right as the fascists are willing to put into rewarding wrong, they’re gonna keep winning.

    I know that’s not a happy uplifting thought for your morning and I’m sorry for that, but it is a true thought and it ought to be motivating you and giving you strength of purpose and focus.

    What can YOU do? Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse have no money…but they have no problem telling their friends to pitch in. Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse and others like him have no resources, but they spread every bit of related propaganda around like it was engraved on stone tablets and handed directly to Moses by God. The Rittenhouse supporters aren’t off in a little klatch somewhere arguing intently over whether the kid “deserves” support because he used a Bushmaster and a third of the people in the crowd prefer Remington. The terror funders aren’t worrying about whether Aunt Sally will be offended. The terror funders are THERE. FOR. IT.

    And we…aren’t.

    Fascism appeals to the inherently obedient and submissive. They do what they’re told and march in straight lines, and while I’m definitely one for doing what I want and marching how I want it’s undeniable that there are times when that rigid obedience and unquestioning fealty are an enormous tactical and strategic advantage. This is the problem of the left: the left is inherently disobedient and averse to being herded…which ironically makes us that much easier to herd when a bad actor comes along.

    That’s why actual grifters like Matt “Being Liberal” Desmond, the “Occupy Democrats” Rivero brothers, and the collection of fraudulent astroturf faketivists collected under the “ReallyAmerican1” banner (itself a barely-disclosed account 100% owned and operated by the Democratic Party, and NOT the progressive wing!), among a host of others, are making millions of dollars off you while the real power of the left, the people with integrity and meaningful ideological commitment, ends up dropping off and having to go pick up a job flipping burgers or sweeping floors.

    NOT murdering innocent people doesn’t even pay minimum wage, but killing just one homeless black guy or antifa protestor is worth more than I’ve made, in total, in my entire life.

    Those are your “American Values.”

    When we fix that problem maybe we’ll stop seeing bigots get away with murder.

    Until the people who have the moral high ground decide it’s worth fighting to defend, we’ll keep losing.

    In lighter news, I took most of yesterday offline to handle some meatspace business like cleaning my living space and getting some laundry done, a little light maintenance for my host.

    As I write this, I frankly haven’t decided yet which of the several things on my plate I’m going to eat today, but it’ll be something. Probably get the second part of that National Debt piece up, I don’t want that to get cold before it’s done.

    Beyond that I’ll probably spend the day creating project nodes and subcontent on JHUS. I feel like this last couple of weeks of frenetic construction activity has me getting a bit burned out on structure and meta-work, and I suspect but cannot currently confirm that the next few weeks will pivot back toward actual content, working up video and audio that I can maintain a regular schedule on, and getting a couple more regular content features rolled out. Then when I’ve got a routine set on that stuff so a five minute video isn’t an all-day project, I’ll get back to the meta stuff and build more on that, see what I can fit in. (By way of comparison, as of this moment I’ve got…45 minutes into this post, it’ll be 1:15 or so before I’m done, and I’m hoping to get this into A/V as well as text, regularly, soon…so that’s another hour or so after writing to record, edit, and process everything before posting. That’s too long – two hours a day just to say hello? So I’m working on ways to maximize efficiency on that whole process before I even start doing it, and then that work should translate pretty easily and quickly to other work.)

    Sorry it wasn’t all bright and shiny today. I’m still in a fine mood, mental health is doing great other than worrying about money, and my workrate is still through the roof. I don’t know how long the tiger’s gonna run this time – at *some* point it’s a given that I’m going to hit a depression and things will slow down for a minute, that’s just the nature of my mental illness – but I’m going to hold on tight and ride that sucker until it drops, and right now it’s staying nice and steady, more so than probably at any time in my memory.

    So let me shut up and get back to work. Love y’all, please don’t forget to throw some support my way if you can. Unlike Kyle Rittenhouse I don’t have people throwing millions of dollars at me.

  • Taking Exception

    The Exceptions, Unaccepted

    Hey, folks.

    I want to talk about being exceptional.

    Going in I want to be clear up front that I think most of us are exceptional and the majority of those are exceptional in some positive, constructive, beautiful, and powerful way.

    There’s a back side to all of that, though, that has become particularly visible in the wake of the rise of “participation trophy” parents and the embarrassed children they blamed for their silliness. A lot of folks who frankly aren’t nearly as exceptional as they think strutting around being aggressively average, that sort of thing. Folks who like to throw how exceptional they are around in situations where it has little or no relevance in an attempt to exert their will on some unsuspecting maitre d’ who does not, indeed, know who you am.

    Being “exceptional” means you’re an exception to some things.

    That means you don’t get to throw a fit when you realize the world wasn’t made for you. I mean you can complain and get up and change it if you want, but just sitting around whining because you’re outside the mainstream and the world was made for those inside of it isn’t going to accomplish anything.

    You’re an exception. Own it. Expect that you will be the exception, but only when it is as inconvenient as possible to you, and never when you could really use a little magic.

    Stop trying to mainstream your exceptionality, that’s the exact opposite of being exceptional by definition.

    "When you're an exception, you're harder to rule." Photo of Temilola Ftoyinbo-Aqueh. She's standing in a wild area with a large fallen tree trunk behind her extending from foreground at right to the background at center-left, with the subject standing in front of the background terminus of the trunk and looking slightly upward while standing and facing to the left of the viewer. She's wearing a dark blue short-sleeved blouse top of no particular description otherwise, and khaki pants. Her left thumb is hooked in her left pants pocket, with the rest of her fingers hanging below.
    When you’re an exception, you’re harder to rule. Meet Temilola Fatoyinbo-Agueh by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

    Expect that the world is not made for you, and when that is more than a personal inconvenience and rises to the level of being symptomatic of a larger social ill, then by all means stand up and say something. Use whatever thing at which you’re exceptional to make the world around you a little better.

    Being What You Are

    Rise to it. Be exceptional. I don’t mean be exceptional by showing up every time there’s a flooded drainage ditch so you can show off your big truck, I mean show up to do the work without worrying about the reward.

    That’s how we got baby changing stations in a few men’s bathrooms, finally (and how we got them at all to begin with). It’s also how we mitigated the worst of the AIDS crisis (but only after a whole lot of people died for no good reason). It’s how we’ve won incredible advances in civil rights and elected the first people in our nation’s history to the our two highest executive offices who weren’t white men, over the last fifteen years.

    You can’t just sit around constantly complaining about how broken everything is and how it doesn’t work for you, when you’re also basking in the pleasures and privileges of being exceptional.

    You have to bring solutions, you have to be able and willing to separate your own interests and your emotional attachment to them as your interests from whatever work you’re doing that may relate to those interests, you have to be willing to accept that you’re fallible and have probably been wrong at least once in your life that you’re still unaware of.

    You have to accept that the price of being exceptional, by whatever laws of the universe you happen to believe in (or none at all, it’s still observable reality) is the obligation to apply your exceptions to the benefit of others. Failure to live up to this obligation tends to end poorly one way or another for those who do so. I’m an atheist; I don’t pretend to know why that is or assert some higher omniscient power who is carefully doling out punishments and rewards. I just observe that it is so.

    “Noblesse Oblige”

    It’s tough for most people out here right now. If you think of yourself as “exceptional” in some way, you’re getting some kind of break on that. A break you can use to help others alleviate their own pressure.

    There’s an old joke/parable/aphorism about a guy who falls into a sinkhole maybe twenty, thirty feet deep, breaks his leg, and can’t get help from the priest or kindly old lady or doctor or millionaire walking by. Then some ragged hobo jumps down into the hole with him and says, “Listen, I’ve been here before; I know the way out. Follow me.”

    That is your obligation as a person of exception. Noblesse oblige can be a pretty arrogant and toxic conceit, but it very much applies here if you are indeed somehow “exceptional,” and most of you are, somehow. (And not in any self-deprecating “yeah I exceptionally SUCK” kinda way either!)

    If you’re exceptionally intelligent you owe it to the world to help them understand the things you do and they don’t…and you owe it to yourself to try to find a way to do it with tact so everyone doesn’t hate you for doing it. This was one of my blessings and curses; “gifted child.”

    Gifted Child – A Digression

    This is a conversation I don’t like having, so I’m going to say up front that people who brag about IQ scores and standardized test results are stupid and insecure. (That said, there’s a whole lot of internet trolling that amounts to “what makes you think you’re so smart?” “Well, years of exceptional results on various standardized aptitude tests.” “STOP BRAGGING!” You can’t beat stupid.)

    When I talk about being a “gifted child,” as was the standard term at the time, I don’t mean I took a couple of watered down “AP” courses that don’t even rise to the level of standard-level classes forty years ago. I mean I was one of the kids in the 70s that psychologists and education specialists spent a lot of time being fascinated with and subjecting to an entertaining array of testing and observation as a young lad.

    I don’t like going in to it because it’s almost impossible without sounding like you think you’re “better than,” and that’s rarely the case – certainly it isn’t with me. I was a godawful human being in a lot of ways for most of my teen years and early adulthood, into my early thirties, and being a “genius” has definitely brought more cost than benefit thus far – it’s probably a good thing for all of us I was only broken and not evil.

    It’s really not a value or character judgement. Some folks have a knack for auto mechanics or agriculture; I have a knack for understanding things. Some people are taller than me, too, or shorter. You probably play better basketball than I do. It’s just not about “better,” and that’s part of the point of the article; we’re all exceptional somehow and most of us have something unique and wonderful to offer the world, without a bunch of ego-serving artifice like participation trophies.

    One thing you eventually learn – and usually the hard way – when you’re in a position like that is that you can never, ever, ever count on being the “biggest one in the room,” no matter what the test scores say, and chances are in that room of ten thousand people there may only be one or two who have a greater capacity for learning, innately, than I do…but there are nine thousand nine hundred of them who are better and smarter than me about something.

    So about little John Henry The Gifted Child Who Never Lived Up To His Potential: If you put stock in such things – and at the time they did, currently there’s a more nuanced understanding and some issues have been found with execution that tend to reinforce biases of economics and prejudice against girls as well as cultural, ethnic, and economic minorities – my “IQ” was around 150, give or take five or six points depending on which day of the week I took the test and what kind of mood I was in (and I took a whole bunch of ’em). That’s not an internet quiz result, that’s straight up Stanford-Binet & WAIS/WAIS-R & similar batteries and evaluations, administered by qualified professionals.

    By way of comparison, average is around 100. The real “big brains” of history are estimated in the 200+ range – DaVinci, Newton, Leibniz, J.S. Mill, Einstein. You run down and find folks like Decartes and Michaelangelo around 180-ish, until you get down into my neighborhood (say 140-160) where you find folks like Ben Franklin, Paul Allen, Emerson, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, FDR, Napoleon. A little lower and you start finding people such as Hillary Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Lincoln, Eisenhower, Washington and the like around 120-130.

    Typically people start being referred to as ‘geniuses’ somewhere close to 130 or a bit higher.

    In 1983 in 7th grade I pulled a 650 math and 710 verbal on the same SAT taken in the same room with several hundred high school juniors and seniors. According to the numbers that placed me in the top 0.02% of test results – and that’s the old school SAT with essays and page after page of Miller Analogies.

    Put practically that means if you put me in a room with ten thousand people, statistically I’ll be one of the two “smartest” people in it (and the other will likely be DaVinci). There’s a reasonable probability that your UNIT tests and DATs and other more modern intelligence tests that started coming out in the 1990s were developed or refined in part using data that originated with me and certainly with some of the roughly 1.4 million human beings on this planet who could properly be said to be “like me” in this regard, and all the tests and observations we went through in the 70s and 80s.

    School personnel wanted to jump me twice – in first grade they wanted to put me in fourth, and in 8th grade they wanted to make me a high school junior taking a couple of college courses on the side. My folks said no, using the excuse they didn’t want me to be socially maladjusted (hah!) but mostly because it was a lot of hassle and some money and they didn’t want to.

    So yeah, if you’re from that time or were there and remember those feel good news stories you used to see like ‘Third Grader Earns Fifteenth Doctorate?’ That was almost me, except I was from a deeply dysfunctional home. There’s a ton of writing I want to do about that whole experience.

    I’m not that obnoxious neckbeard who’s constantly jumping in to conversations with “well, actually…” and “not all men!” and the like.

    I’m the person that guy thinks he is.

    The “advanced placement” kids of the 90s and 2000s and now are basically dealing with the ideas developed around people like me fifty years ago, which were then extended outward and more toward the mainstream and neurotypical (or at least the perceived ideals therein) as yet another way to stratify and define kids before they’re old enough to even know they’re individuals. There’s an aspect of the whole “participation trophy” thing here, too, but again that’s not the kids’ fault.

    That whole “common core math” thing? That’s a ham-handed attempt to teach people who aren’t walking around with a brain and a half how to math like people who are…written by people who aren’t and who don’t understand the internal thought processes that make things “normal” people struggle with seem so obvious to someone like me that we can barely break them down far enough to describe. (Like the reality that profit motive is always a conflict of interest and therefore probably shouldn’t be a part of socially critical infrastructure systems like health care and criminal justice…) I recognize the behavior it’s reaching for, it’s just not quite getting there because the people who designed aren’t the people who think that way – I am, that’s why I can see it.

    Unfortunately, it’s not the people who think that way, who design the curriculum; it’s the people who study the people who think that way and then try to interpret, describe, and explain it without being able to actually think that way themselves. A bit like if I were explaining a Matisse – I’ve got words to describe it all day long, but I couldn’t recreate it on a bet.

    If you’re exceptionally talented at some creative art, you owe it to the world to give them the beauty you’re capable of – or the pain – so they can find the places within themselves those feelings exist and explore them and utilize them and, when necessary, survive them.

    Not only that you owe it to all those poor souls who feel the same tempests and trials and terrors you do but lack your exceptional skill at communicating it and sharing it; you let the lost souls of the world know they’re not alone.

    If you’re exceptionally wealthy you owe it to the world who doesn’t have a lot of wealth to do what you can to help people out; nobody EARNS a billion dollars, ever – more to the point nobody EARNS their way to being that far outside the top of the bell curve economically. At best one skillfully manipulates one’s self into such a position without violating too many ethics too egregiously along the way if they’re lucky and even care to try and act ethically.

    Why do you “owe” this? Because without other people doing the same for you – usually without any idea who you are or will be or even that you, as an individual, exist – you would not be here. There isn’t a man, woman, or child alive on this planet whose existence is not predicated on millions of other men, women, and children paving the way for them. Tell yourself otherwise if you choose; that just means you’re also an arrogant liar who’s capable of successfully lying to themselves.

    Getting There

    Most anyone reading this or likely to or even able to is exceptional in at least several different ways simply for that fact. You’re literate, you have access to a computer, etc.

    If we really want to reach that shiny, peaceful, prosperous, progressive future that we’ve all dreamed about and hoped for and seen on the covers of the sci-fi novels, it is absolutely up to each and every one of us to be at our most exceptional to the greatest benefit of those around us at every possible turn.

    Is it possible to get it right every time? Of course not. But you work toward it. You strive, you don’t write it off as an impossible dream, only one that won’t be reached immediately and may never be so completely, but you can’t let that stop you because by definition that’s what striving means, it’s taking on the risk – and sometimes the reality! – of failure, learning from it, picking yourself back up and moving forward having done your best to improve yourself for the experience – if by no other means than not making the same mistake again.

    That’s how we get there.

    I haven’t always been a good human being, and I’ve never pretended to have been. But that hasn’t stopped me from getting better. Not as in somehow “cured” but as in improving in the ways that are important to me, like not being the abusive jerk I was until I faced the reality that I was making choices and started striving to choose better when I was around thirty. Sometimes I’ve failed, sometimes I’ve succeeded. Sometimes I’ve succeeded in ways that look like failures from the outside. Sometimes I’ve failed in ways that looked like successes. You keep moving, you keep trying, you keep breathing and doing your best.

    We all need to be doing that, right now, together. We need to be supporting each other in the acknowledgement of each of our individual human fallibility and failure and loving each other in spite of and sometimes because of it.

    We’re all pretty exceptional, and the list of people whose only exceptions are negative is pretty short. We owe it to ourselves, each other, and…well, the entirety of what we know as “reality” to use those exceptions together to create the best reality we can.

    The other option is having less than the best reality that we can…and why would we choose that?

    How do you find ways to use the things about you that are exceptional to help other people?

  • The Progressives Are Winning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    We are right.

    We have the answers we need.

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

  • When I Was Forty-One I Had A Very Good Year…

    A tiny snippet of a whole lot of Mr. Desmond and his friends proving once again how much they don’t care what I have to say, I’m not relevant to anything or anyone, and there’s no way in the world they’d be the types to gang up and dogpile someone who criticized them genuinely and politely over a minor error in a “news” article…for now a dozen years and counting.

    Curating all this old content has me thinking…gosh I did a lot of great work in 2011.

    2011, when I had equipment and fairly stable housing and transportation, and also wasn’t working full time (was in school; still very much full time but way more flexible, and I could integrate a lot of the work you’re seeing here as material for my classwork). Almost like there’s a connection there…

    If I was the conspiracy type I’d note that all of this was happening and moving forward pretty well until I ran into Mr. AddictingInfo and his friends in September of that year who continue to this minute to openly and publicly exhibit the very behavior I’ve been calling them out on for over a decade and they continue to insist they’re not engaging in, *even while they do it right in front of your eyeballs.* The contempt these people have for your intellect is astounding.

    Not to belabor the point, I’m just looking at the material I was producing and the reactions it was getting and wondering what would’ve happened if once again the “cool kids” hadn’t decided I wasn’t allowed to be “one of us” because they know they look like the half-assed pikers they are by any meaningful measure in comparison. They know that my entire raison d’etre is to do my best to help as many people as I can understand where we are, how we got here, and how to get out of it, and that includes divesting them of their ill-gotten and broadly abused power over public discourse.

    Thanks to all of you who read, comment, share, like, and contribute. This is unquestionably the most difficult period of my life, coming on the heels of a series of very difficult periods interspersed with just bare stability that consumed the time I’d have rather been creating content. I’ve taken some really major hits, and I wish I was all mister stiff upper lip and roll with the punches, but I’m kind of sick of normalizing that crap. My life sucks, any fault in that of my own ended a long time ago and I’ve worked hard to set right what I could and stop doing things that would need to be set right later. I’ve helped a lot of people. Some appreciated it, some didn’t. Some just appreciate what I do.

    But there can be no question that the rabid dogpile response on YouTube validates everything I’ve been saying about these clowns, and they showed up precisely as expected.

    “C’mon now, who do you think you are?
    Hah! Bless your soul…
    You really think you’re in control?”

    Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”

    Sure, my life is really tough right now and I’m still not sure how I’m gonna fix it other than coming in to a LOT of money FAST. And I’m up against such BS; I had a major network admin tell me flat out that he could easily put me in front of Mackenzie Scott, but wouldn’t because I was linking to content on other platforms. Stupid little human crap like that for whatever reason just constantly floods my path, and I’ve been plowing through it like a North Dakota winter road crew for what seems like all my life, and now I’m finally just sick of all of it and not playing the game anymore…and that’s exactly what a whole lot of folks were hoping wouldn’t happen.

    These people were betting I’d be long gone by now, and I’m not.

    I’ve got my flaws. I’m about 60% nuts, really. Not in the sense of being genuinely unstable per se, I’m not that guy. I got way to close to BEING that guy a long time ago, and I put the brakes on that crap real hard. That’s not me.

    But there’s this thing that so-called “normal” people have where they can tolerate being forced to exist in ways that are objectively intolerable. Our entire “way of doing things,” with money buying political power and the ability of a human being to survive and be their best without first committing half or more of their waking adult lives to generating profits for someone else in exchange for a tiny, tiny fraction of the value their work…those things are really insane.

    Of course I’m aware that anyone who’s genuinely lost their minds tends to think they’re the ones who are sane and everything else is nuts. Trust me, it’s kept me up at night more than once. I defy you to suggest in any way that anything is working well and properly anywhere in the world right now for anyone but the wealthiest, and that there is a direct proportional relationship to the wealth controlled by a given individual and their sense that the world is currently well-ordered and sane.

    Part of what’s nuts, and part of why I have kept circling back to Mr. Desmond and his abhorrent, ignorant business model over the years even as it has – to the great detriment of pretty much everyone but the people at the top, as usual, in this case the folks who are running these giant meme farms purporting to be liberal and progressive activists while the entire extent of both their activism and their expertise extends to reading the statistics at the bottom of every tweet, looking for keywords that resonate with the left, and pasting the popular ones into their branded template for distribution.

    As far as I can tell not one of them has ever had a real job, but they’ll stand here all day telling you the journeyman tool and diemaker who’s been a musician for four and a half decades, put well over a million miles under his ass as a professional driver, spent years in desktop support and various network administration and database development roles, web design, media production, and a ton more is the fella who “refuse to work.”

    People fall for that crap, and that’s nuts.

    The people pushing it will push until their last breath to make you believe I’m the one who’s nuts for saying so.

    The degree to which that small group of folks who doesn’t like me REALLY DOES NOT LIKE ME and will absolutely cross any boundary including trying to influence me to suicide, attempting to destroy me professionally, attacking my family, attacking my workplaces, trolling the social media of people who share my content in an effort to discourage that from happening (again, all of this happening in broad daylight while the people doing it tell you that you’re nuts for not believing them instead of your lying eyes), is beyond nuts.

    I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I’m pretty broken and screwed up myself, but I seem to attract some real deep-core psychos, the types who will play out a game for fifteen or twenty years just to amuse themselves because they think they’re getting away with it. These twits at the big leftie pages are just one subset of a larger group of folks – still a tiny fraction of a minority of the people I engage with and talk to, mind you, but an incredibly loud and aggressive one – who fall into that “really does not like me” category, and near as I can tell the only legitimate complaint most of ’em have is either they don’t like my personality or I stopped pretending I was falling for their bullshit.

    That’s pretty nuts.

    Anyone telling you otherwise is not a reliable information source.

    Anyone telling you the insane amount of time and energy I’ve had to spend dealing with all this nonsense over the years, including pervasive death threats, including hassling my parents when they were alive, threatening my kid when she was little, countless employers harassed, is somehow the reasonable and expected result of my unacceptably aberrant behavior is not only an unreliable information source, they’re a psychotic asshole and they need serious help.

    The truth is we – you reading this and me writing it -have an incredible amount of power when we work together, and that terrifies the people who run the instapundit and bias-pandering clickbait ideology-for-profit accounts. When we work together, we can improve our collective information quality by improving our collective information literacy.

    The way to stop falling for grifters is to understand how the grift works, so it works less effectively on you.

    Now ask yourself this question:

    Who’s the person you trust? The person who tells you that…or the person who spends a dozen years with all his friends ganged up to tell you the person who tells you that is the real grifter?

    I don’t have exclusive command of THE REEL TRVTH or even “all the answers.” I’ve got a pretty decent dose of each, but I’m human and fallible.

    What I do have is not just the iron-clad certainty but ironclad real-time evidence that these “leftist” heroes and “influencers” are mostly just a bunch of money-grubbing fascists selling you a cheap imitation of the principles and values you hold most dear. There’s a screenshot of it at the top of this post.

    Class dismissed.

  • Post Hoc, Ergo Cluster Hoc

    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?

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    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.

  • Cutting Education Funding Is Wrong (2011)

    Another of those subjects that just refuses to go away because the fascists we’ve allowed to take part in our government know that keeping us stupid is their best weapon.

    The sound quality on this really stinks, I’m afraid, and I don’t know why. Unfortunately all the source video has been lost to the inevitable costs of poverty, but if it’s that tough to hear feel free to DM me via FB or Twitter and I’ll go ahead and transcribe it here.

    What’s interesting about this video to me is that it inadvertently documents one of those “things I never do,” in this case working with Eric Byler and a group of fellow students who eventually called ourselves “Michigan’s Future” (clearly reflective of my traditionally-aged colleagues!) at Western Michigan University to get a resolution passed by the local city council that they would refuse to enforce any attempt at creating an Arizona-style “show your papers” law. I’m pretty bad about documenting the things I do; in this case it turns out that I did, and totally forgot. You also see legendary Kalamazoo city council member Don Cooney speaking at a pro-education rally, among other things; Don turns up again in a documentary I did about the Occupy movement.

  • Boycotting Ignorance

    Original description:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    But.

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

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

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

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

    The reality is this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    …or you can pay ONLY $50 RIGHT NOW…

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

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

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

    Now this is important:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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