JHUS Staging

Tag: capitalism

  • The Right People

    We have bad policies for combating homelessness and poverty for one reason: because the very wealthy need the very poor to keep everyone else in line.

    The Right Policies

    During my usual daily searches through the news for things to be worried about, I came across this letter to the editor from Jake Trimble in the Salt Lake City Tribune titled “Latest abatement shows Salt Lake City is plagued by bad homeless policy.”

    Jake makes a number of excellent points and is clearly writing from a place of compassion and genuine concern. My primary issue with his letter is simply that it circles around the biggest issue – homelessness and what we’re failing to do about it – without addressing it directly. According to the latest Federal Reserve data there are about 15 million empty housing units and about half a million homeless people in this country. Perhaps another 2-5 million are housing insecure, depending on how you measure.

    That means there are enough homes to not just give every homeless person two, but also every housing insecure person, and even in the “worst case scenario” you’d still have five million empty housing units left over for those who can afford two or more.

    So let’s just kill this whole narrative right now: we have plenty of housing. We choose not to use it.

    Why would we make that choice? Because the people who sit at the very top of the pile – the Musks and Bezoses and Waltons and Gateses – have taught us that’s the right choice to make, and it is…for them. It’s just not for anyone else.

    The very wealthy, you see, need the poor to exist.

    Not just “poor” but visibly oppressed, hopeless, wasted lives must be present, because they’re the biggest weapon the wealthy have to keep everyone in between them and the poor properly controlled to perpetuate the power and wealth of those at the top.

    The poor must exist because without them, you wouldn’t be afraid to stand up to your abusive employer, or the broken local school system, or whatever else might be an option for you if you weren’t trained to believe, fundamentally, that doing so would cause you and those you love great harm.

    The truth is the owners – the five or six hundred people who really do own nearly everything – need the poor and destitute and hopeless to exist, to keep you in line.

    The Right Charities

    The social, cultural, and business leaders of our world don’t want “good homeless policy” in the sense this writer means it. They only care about “good homeless policy” to the extent of “people who aren’t homeless aren’t forced to look at and deal with homeless people.”

    There are BILLIONS of dollars in that valley, and plenty of room too. The only reason you don’t have a robust public housing system that more than adequately covers everybody’s needs is that you. don’t. want. one.

    You can’t sit around patting yourselves on the back for how you charitably used a millionth of the available resources that you could to help some poors, if there aren’t any poors.

    You can’t prop up the performative and often profit-motivated private ‘safety nets’ if the people choose to ensure all are provided for through the mechanisms of their duly elected government.

    You don’t get that warm, fuzzy, patronizing feeling of cutting that check, if nobody needs it.

    To actually solve these problems would end an entire system of funnels for making sure the “right people” are given the accolades and social reinforcement necessary to keep the money flowing in their direction.

    The extremely wealthy *need* the very poor, because the very poor are how they keep the rest of us (the rest of YOU – I *am* very poor) complying with their prerogatives.

    “You’d better stick to the program, you don’t want to become one of THEM, and we can make you one of THEM any time we want, so you keep your happy little head down and your happy little mouth shut and keep consuming AND generating profits for the producer on the products by selling your labor to them for far less than it’s worth, or else.

    “Now here’s a bunch of home security systems and motion-trigger cameras and alarms and guns to keep yourself safe from all those filthy poors. Aren’t you glad we’re protecting you? Wouldn’t it be a shame if we stopped? So yeah, it’d be cool if you just cooperate. It’s so much easier than fighting back, isn’t it? Yeah, it sure is.

    “Here’s a few thousand articles of pointless but emotionally stimulating bickering over the same old nonsense we’ve known how to fix for at least several generations but refuse because it’s not profitable for the ‘right people.’

    “Here’s some vapid celebrity worship and pointless archaic pseudo-competition to keep your attention and a gambling industry so THAT can be used to further extract value from you too!

    “Ooh and ahh at this news article about the plucky fifth grader who built a dialysis machine out of coffee cans, aquarium, tubing, and a hamster wheel because his mom can’t afford to pay for the dialysis that keeps her alive.

    “Awwwwww, what a champ!”

    Capitalism is nothing if not thorough.

    The Right Systems

    Since only the “right people” are allowed to run things and make decisions, none of it’s ever going to change, because they’re only ever going to make the most selfish decisions they can plausibly explain to the public – often with the cooperation of that segment of the public who don’t care to be bothered having to look at filthy poors.

    The kicker is, for those of us who really do want to help, the only available options are those that cooperate with the whole charade.

    There’s no way for someone like me to put together the knowledge I have in a way that is meaningful and accessible and available, unless I, too, go through the process of setting up a whole series of systems replicating the function of “the right people” while trying to keep the whole process honest. That’s why I created Musk For A Minute – not simply for myself but for others in my odd but not entirely unique position of being extraordinarily gifted at nearly everything except being financially stable.

    Because there simply is no other way for people like us to survive and add our humanity to the world, and the world needs our humanity in it. The more of us can do our thing, the better off we’ll all be.

    There’d be no need for it if we had meaningful structures in place to ensure those among us who produce non-material value are able, literally, to do so. If we were in a sane economic system – with a universal basic income + job guarantee administered by the same governments who own the money – what we call “charity” wouldn’t need to exist.

    To be clear, in these hypercapitalist days what we call “charity” doesn’t simply mean “giving from the kindness of your heart to some cause which matters to you,” I’m not talking about girl scout cookies here.

    I’m talking about the degree to which those who have more than they absolutely need are willing to part with some of it to help those who have less than they absolutely need because the systems and processes which are supposed to make sure everyone has what they absolutely need are badly broken and maladministered by those whose primary fealty is to the machinery of profit and exploitation.

    So What’s Left?

    You’re in a position of having to decide whether to support Musk For A Minute or the Red Cross or the Ukrainian military or COVID relief – or for most of us, how to effectively support them all and ourselves, just like I’m doing – because that’s how the people who own everything including the vast majority of information consumed by the average person in an average day want things to be.

    The “right people” need the poor to keep everyone between them and the poor – and that’s most of you who read this – under control.

    The most effective way they do this is to ensure that within that big chewy center, “right people” – people who are cooperative with the whole mess because they perceive the material or other personal benefit to them as being of more value than the ethics they’re compromising to gain that value – are nearly always selected to manage and govern and make decisions and be the foci of our attention, to create social proof for the validity of the whole system that keeps us all from being who we wanted to be back when we still believed we could.

    The more willing you are to turn a blind eye to the very crimes and excesses and sins and mendacity and avarice necessary to maintain such a system, the more of a “right people” you are. The more you push back against that and demand equality of opportunity and justice and privilege (i.e. “human rights”), the less likely it is you will ever be allowed to become a “right people.”

    If you get too mouthy about it, the right people will make sure you can’t even eat, so you end up with starving, unemployable geniuses running around. We’ll just dismiss them as “insane” and let them rot, we don’t need ’em. I mean after all, there’s a whole new series about Joe Exotic and that damn Carol Baskin!

    And that’s what we’re calling a “free country” these days.

    What can you do about it? Stop propping up clickbaiters and profiteers, and start supporting genuine voices of leadership and evolution. Having my own biases, I of course recommend Musk For A Minute.

    As always: the revolution you’re looking for starts in the mirror.

  • Screw Your Tiny House And The Tiny Horse It Rode In On

    Tiny Houses Are Not A Solution To Homelessness

    Yeah, I said it.  Tiny houses suck.  I don’t mean if you want a cute little cabin you have bad taste, I’m talking about as a solution to homelessness. The whole idea sucks.  It’s horrible, rotten, terrible. It’s an idea that needs to die, and quickly, at least in terms of being an applied solution to American homelessness. It’s quite literally worse than useless, and by orders of magnitude.

    Now that I have your attention:  I’m not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings who might be among that growing group of folks who are advocating for tiny houses and building and engineering them to be ever more tiny. 

    I understand that once you get below a very high ceiling within the entire housing-construction-real estate complex, most of you engaged here are earnest and well-meaning, hard-working, diligent, and really truly trying your best to do a good thing in the world, and I don’t want to discourage you from doing that.

    But I’d like you to give me a few minutes to explain, from the perspective of a person who has frequently been homeless and is currently housing insecure, why you may find, after consideration, that your talents and energy to do good things might be better spent on other angles for addressing homelessness.

    I’m going to break this up into a couple of sections. In the original context I’d planned to go through the whole establishing of credibility thing by pointing to all the various work I’ve done out there over the years related to the topic, but then I realized the only reason I feel the need to do that is that this started out with some schmoe responding to a social media comment, and basically telling me I have no idea what homeless people think, want, or need, and screw that guy. My work is out there and easy to find and my arguments are well-formulated and not in need of further validation by character reference anyway.

    This article started as a social media comment – as they often do – on a post about a local tiny house initiative and their latest step forward and maybe there’s a shipping issue and so forth. That post was a local news report updating the current status of a tiny house project here, mentioning that 14 acres had been purchased to place these new tiny houses on. My comment was thus:

    I wonder how many full-sized real-human-being apartments could be built on 14 acres for what they’re paying for glorified boxes.

    in https://www.facebook.com/wwmtnews/posts/10158698570231452?comment_id=10158698689221452

    And naturally, here comes the schmoe brigade to tell me what I got wrong:

    [citation needed] A+ for enthusiasm. F for argument construction though. And a five-yard penalty for abuse of punctuation.

    With that introductory flourish out of the way, let’s talk about the meat of the matter. In part 2 we’ll discuss why the social, political, and psychological implications and impacts of the entire “tiny house narrative” are extraordinarily problematic. Then we’ll talk about why the very suggestion of “tiny houses” as a solution to homelessness in this country is, ultimately, an arrogant insult built on an entire group of industries trapped in a loop of aspirational delusion that’s going to collapse like a house of cards, and their absolute refusal to accept that you only need so many housing units for so many people before building more is a gigantic waste of resources benefiting no one. Before we wrap it up I’ll show you the numbers I think support that prediction.

    First up: the personal perspective. Then the data, numbers, analysis, and conclusions that we will hopefully all agree support my core thesis, as difficult and maybe even painful as it may be for those of us who have really gone all-in on this in the hopes that it would be an effective solution to homelessness.

    Between The Cracks, Between The Lines

    From a standpoint of communication, messaging, and cultural expression of how we respect the humanity of the poor (and even that phrase is problematic, like “we” are doing “them” a favor), there is critical subtext in the entire notion of applying tiny house/alternative housing solutions to housing instability problems, and that subtext is being ignored to our great detriment and expense.

    As someone who has struggled with poverty and housing insecurity all my life, here’s what the “on the streets” ear in my head hears every time I hear someone going on about how wonderful it is to create “tiny house communities” where the homeless can be:

    “We’d love to help you out, but we can’t find a way to do it that both treats you as an equal among dignified free people and allows the gigantic kajillionaire conglomerates and the handful of people who own them to profit from you, so we’re going to train you instead to be so incredibly desperate that you’ll take ANYTHING, even a palette in an empty warehouse, and be glad to have it.

    Then we’ll come up with something that we can sell to the kind-hearted as a philanthropic initiative to ‘address homelessness,’ sequester you in boxes that none of us would want to live in outside of a few minimalists and a whole lot of people making specious hypothetical arguments they don’t actually believe in on the internet because they don’t want to ‘lose’ The Battle Of The Comment Section. You still get to be separate, less than, beneath dignity, and lacking in basic resources but we can tell ourselves we ‘did something.’ Sorry. I mean, we feel bad and all but if there’s no money to be made on putting you in a dignified living situation, you’re not going to be in one. But here’s a token attempt exploiting the good will and sincere earnest positive intent of a whole bunch of folks in between you and us, to make sure if you are paying attention enough to say any of this out loud it will hurt feelings and people won’t want to hear it.

    So, sorry Poors, you can have a tiny little imitation of a home and tell yourself how brave and strong you are for making the best of it to help distract you from the fact that your country doesn’t think you deserve a real place to live, and you’d probably better appreciate it and not complain or you won’t even have that.

    Suddenly when you’re hearing that message, the whole “isn’t this a good and noble thing we’re doing” narrative doesn’t play so well to your good intentions and kind heart.

    I’m sorry for that – genuinely, I’m not writing this to hurt anyone or make them feel like they’ve wasted their time or even hurt people by accident – but we’re not going to get moving on real solutions until we stop allowing ourselves to be sold on the idea that “good enough for them” constitutes human decency and the fulfillment of our immutable obligation to the ultimate morality of human life, i.e. the survival and propagation of the species.

    There is another reason why the whole “tiny house” thing infuriates me to a degree that, at first glance, most reasonable people would think unwarranted by the situation. We’ll have to get into some hard data and stuff to fully understand that, so let’s do that now.

    The Data

    Oftentimes folks who do this sort of thing get attached to this notion that if they can just provide enough numbers, charts, and graphs to make their point, then their point will be taken as well-made and that’s the end. Then you end up getting lost in the weeds looking at excruciatingly fine details of abstruse statistics, and the whole point of the discourse is lost.

    Fortunately in this case we have two very basic and easy to understand data sets to review: the number of “homeless people” – i.e. residents without a dwelling – in the US, and the number of “peopleless homes” – i.e. dwellings without a residence.

    There’s this great little tool called FRED at the St. Louis Federal Reserve website, and it’s chock full of all this great information about various aspects of the economy including employment, housing, economic status of individuals, and so forth. Among this information: housing inventories, that is to day how many housing units there are in this country and their status as owned, rented, occupied, unoccupied, etc.

    Here’s what FRED has to say about the number of currently vacant housing units in the US:

    For clarity: this images is telling you there were roughly 15.2 million empty residences in the US in the 3rd quarter of 2021.

    If you want to see the whole dataset with pretty charts over time and everything, it’s at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EVACANTUSQ176N, but what you need to know is in that screenshot: there were, on any given day between July 1 and September 30 2021, about 15.2 million empty residential units in the US.

    Coming up with homelessness data is a little more difficult, but when taking in all of the assertions put forth by reasonably trustworthy sources and trying to assemble a big picture, on the average day in the US there are about half a million people who are homeless. This number has remained remarkably steady for decades, and basically has stayed within that 500-600K range since the late 80s. I can’t find the link now because I’m an undisciplined writer and forgot to bookmark it while I was reading it, but while researching this I found some government report from 1970 saying there were then 300,000 homeless people.

    …and 600,000 empty housing units.

    I want you to think about that for a minute.

    In this country, right this minute, there are half a million or so people who will sleep on the streets tonight…and we have enough empty housing units for every homeless person in this country to have thirty places to live.

    There is absolutely no condition by which that is not an unforgivable outrage against our people. Germany recently took over something like 30K housing units from landlords who had a surplus of empty property under their eminent domain processes, and there’s exactly zero reason why we can’t do that here.

    That’s where the angry attitude comes from. It’s one thing to be like “hey sorry, we’re short on housing and doing the best we can, here’s a temporary fix.” It’s something else entirely to say “hey we could give you THIRTY places to live if we really wanted you to have one or cared in the least that you’re homeless, but we just don’t want to because our money is more important to us than you having a home.”

    And that’s not just how it is. That’s how it has been for my entire life. We have had at least twice as many empty housing units as homeless people for over half a century. That’s not just a bit of bad thinking, that’s a deliberately implemented system of oppression and waste for profit.

    Just this matter of the outrageous oversupply of empty houses we have on one hand and the outrageous lack of housing for the poor on the other is plenty of argument supporting our core thesis and I could leave the article here, but there are some very important secondary implications that I feel are critical to understanding the entire argument I’m making, so let’s take a look at those and then wrap it up.

    Economic Insanity

    We’ve discussed the sort of socio-personal implications of this approach and the difficult and (for most folks below the top who are pushing this, I believe) unintentionally damaging messages that it carries, and the stark reality that it just isn’t necessary.

    Now let’s set aside the social justice concerns and outrage and just talk plain old numbers, resources, and economics.

    It should not require an economist to tell you that if you have fifteen million empty housing units and half a million homeless people, you have a rather startling surplus of housing units, and that’s not a good thing. Those are completely wasted resources, doing no good for anyone outside of a small group of folks we’ll talk about in a minute.

    It should not require an economist to tell you that if you have fifteen million empty housing units and half a million homeless people, we darned well ought to be paying folks to take those wasted units off the hands of those who are wasting them.

    As it happens, I’m privileged to include some economists – and I’m not gonna namedrop about it, but if I did you’d recognize them if you follow the field, unquestionably – in my circle of acquaintance, so I asked them. Now these are busy folks so I wasn’t expecting a dissertation, but I wanted to make sure I’d given people who know what the heck they’re talking about a chance to say hey no, JH, you’ve got it wrong. None of them did.

    What we have here is economic insanity. If we gave a housing unit to every single homeless person in this country, there would still be 14.5 million empty housing units. Who’s gonna buy those when we only have half a million people un-housed? What could we have been doing with fourteen and a half million homes’ worth of building materials, infrastructure, and labor? Why are we overbuilding like this?

    The truth is, the entire US housing and construction industry is a shell game played on a house of cards. Naturally there’s a small percentage of folks out there who can afford multiple homes, but they don’t cover 14.5 million.

    Most of those empty units are owned by big landlords who have no intention of profiting from them or renting them out to begin with. One big property management company pays a few big construction companies to spend some millions at a few big supply houses to keep their economic ecosystem churning and generating profits. The big property management company mismanages and underutilizes the new properties at a loss for a while (nice tax break here, you can get it all the way to zero if you lose enough, or even get the government to pay YOU) until it becomes implausible to keep claiming it because why would a business keep losing money on purpose. They sell it at a loss, write the loss off their income, the next company does the same thing for a few years, later rinse repeat until the property has decayed to undesirability and then eventually it’s seized for property taxes or condemned for being in irrecoverable ill repair, it’s destroyed, and the cycle starts all over.

    By and large those 14.5 million empty homes are a couple of dozen super-rich bankers, property managers, construction companies, etc. shuffling money back and forth so it looks like something’s happening.

    Eventually the reality that we don’t actually need much in the way of new housing construction, haven’t in a while, and won’t for a while is going to catch up to this economic sector, and when it does things are going to be very, very chaotic and confusing across the economy for a while. Hopefully the folks who get paid to manage this stuff are working on a way to deflate this horrid balloon slowly before it explodes and takes a third of the economy with it. One good way would be to sieze several hundred thousand or even a couple of million newer, decent units under eminent domain (with reasonable and fair compensation to keep the fascists from whining too much about it) and start getting homeless people into them, but that’s getting back into the social aspects of things and I wanted to stick strictly to capitalist-economic argumentation, in this section.

    In the end, the “tiny house” movement helps perpetuate this broken system by continuing to prop up the systems by which landlords justify refusing to rent their empty properties to people who need them. Don’t tell us we have to rent to those filthy poors, they’ve got tiny houses right there.

    With that said, I did want to give a little positive energy to tiny houses in general, so let’s talk about that and get out of here.

    Tiny Houses Aren’t Evil

    I really do want to put some positive framing on tiny houses in general because they are, utilized properly, a wonderful idea that can save lives.

    The problem isn’t the idea of a tiny house. The idea is that a tiny house should be anything but temporary emergency shelter. I’d have loved to see a few thousand tiny houses in New Orleans after Katrina. They’d be a great solution for migrant-border crises such as the one at the southern US border, or currently blowing up at the Poland-Belorus border. Refugees, the displaced, situations when you need dignified shelter on the ground for a lot of people fast, and many of them may be transient, and many of the shelters may be used by many people, and so forth.

    That is a wonderful use of the tiny house concept and I don’t wish to discourage research and development in that area in the least.

    It’s just not a serious or effective solution to homelessness.

    We have the homes, and the only reason we’re keeping them away from those who need them is someone wants to make a buck.

    It is my carefully considered, and hopefully now well-defended, opinion that this is just not the way to run a decent society, and in spite of the earnest good will and compassionate intent of so many of those working on them, applying the technology of tiny houses to the problem of homelessness only serves in every way to perpetuate and reinforce the social structures that create it in the first place.

    It may well be that this approach can be useful in parts of the world where there aren’t enough homes to go around, but that just isn’t the case here. We have 15 million real people homes where we can put people who don’t have them if we want to, we just have to want to.

    We don’t want to.

    Maybe we should work as hard on changing that as we are on building tiny house Hoovervilles.

    Thanks for reading, please don’t forget to do all the social media stuff to help get this information and conversation out into the world!

  • America’s Drug Problem Part 1 (2011)

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

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

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

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

    Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Land Of The Lost (2009/2011)

    This is where a lot of things started for me. In 2009 I was invited by some “friends” to move to California. Turned out they were expecting me to service the lady of the house, which I was not really up for. When said lady carved my name into her chest, it was time to go. I’ve never told that part of the story until now.

    This video was recorded while I was on the streets in Woodland, CA in 2009, and originally published in 2011. It’s fair to say I’ve never really recovered, and as I write this in 2023 find myself again on the streets. It’s not easy to watch, but the folks who care about that sort of thing aren’t reading this site anyway.

  • Stop Wasting Food! (2011)

    Back in 2011 I cut this video about the massive food waste that happens particularly in developed nations. This was the description of the video at the time:

    Each day in this country millions of people go hungry while corporate food service throws out tons and tons of perfectly good food with excuses like “we will get sued” and “it will take away from our sales if we give this food away.” I’m calling bullshit, and challenging corporate food service to step up and do the right thing. Please join me; they will respond to public pressure, if there’s enough of it.

    Now, twelve years later, we still haven’t really addressed this problem very well, but movement has happened including the French government mandating waste reduction and distribution efficiency regulations. Just like it says in that last sentence, “please join me; they will respond to public pressure if there’s enough of it.” Hardly surprising that the earliest meaningful movement we have seen on this issue is in France, one of the world’s more infamous sources of social change via public pressure.