Ep47 -- The Finger Butt Fallacy

 I must say that I fancy myself a bit of an amateur etymologist,  although not actually regarding the origin of words, but rather the origins of inappropriate humor.  Actually, to be completely honest, I'm not really all that interested in discovering the details of the origins of inappropriate humor, but rather I just like the fact that someone somewhere was the first person to think something up.

Like, for example, who was the first guy, and I'm pretty confident in assuming that it was a guy, who thought up the Dirty Sanchez? I just like the thought that there's someone out there, somewhere, responsible for that little comedy gem.  And, while I know it's probably impossible to find the true originator of such an enduring cultural artifact, I mean, who knows, maybe there were two guys who thought of it more or less simultaneously. Sort of the Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace of the ass play joke. But sometimes you can pinpoint exactly when one of these ideas goes viral and becomes meme-ified.

One such moment occurred on October 5th, 2019. That was the day that one Paul Rudd appeared on YouTube's Hot Ones to test how much spice he could stand by tasting a series of increasingly sadistic hot sauces.  And it was on that show that Rudd shared an artistic skill of which he is clearly quite proud, and appropriately so,  which has become known as the finger butt photo.

Now, quick little disclaimer: if you're going to look that up online, definitely include the words Paul and or Rudd in your search. If you don't, I cannot be held responsible for the things that you will see, which you definitely cannot unsee.  Okay, so, finger butt photo, which I must say clearly owes an homage to the crush your head sketch from Kids in the Hall.

But as Rudd demonstrates, if you take a picture of someone on your phone, but as you're taking the picture, you put your other hand in front of the camera and angle your finger just right, It will appear as though above the head of your subject, or laid out before them, depending on the perspective you're going for, is a naked butt.

Now, there are variations on the classic technique, whereby the advanced photographer may create the illusion of sex specific features, such as the pinky scrotum variation that Rudd demonstrated on the show.  At this point, I imagine that some of you are thinking, and quite possibly saying out loud, what the hell is he talking about?

Well, this past week I've been thinking about a few different, commonly held views throughout our society that result from this same sort of circumscribed viewing of things, whereby what we see isn't the full picture.  And often, with anywhere from inconvenient to all life on earth threatening consequences.

So, to find out more about what I'm calling the Finger Butt Fallacy, as it pertains to human history, politics, social and financial inequality, and God knows what else,  stay tuned.

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I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we all get conned into accepting a manmade culture that's out of sync with our human nature, and how we can fight back, and put the kind back into humankind.

But first, a word about a non-sponsor.  This week's episode of The Great Ungaslighting is not brought to you, and after this will never be brought to you, by Cal-Maine Foods, America's, and actually the world's, largest egg producer.  Don't know if you've heard, but eggs have kind of been in the news a bit lately.

Everybody knows that egg prices are way up, with an over 50 percent increase in the past year, and a 15 percent increase this past January alone.  Prices are up so much that Denny's has added an egg surcharge to their menu. Now, the big question, of course, is why? If you do an internet search on why eggs are so expensive various news outlets and AI-generated responses will all tell you pretty much the same thing.

It's due primarily to the bird flu, as well as supply chain disruptions and increased demand. That all seems reasonable, and there is certainly an element of truth to all of those explanations.  But, fortunately, Matt Stoller's  BIG newsletter on Substack has taken a pretty deep dive into the egg crisis with an article written by Basil Misharbash, called Hatching a Conspiracy: A Big Investigation into Egg Prices.  And I'm guessing none of you would be particularly surprised to discover that the story we're all being told isn't exactly the whole story, and conveniently leaves out the part of the story that's not particularly flattering to big egg producers like Cal-Maine.

Okay, so first, what has happened to supply and demand for eggs? As the article notes, since the latest bird flu pandemic began in 2022,   producers have had to cull over  115 million egg-laying hens. That's a lot of birds, but that loss of birds is over three years, while 300 million other hens laying away at any given point, plus another 120 million or so chicks being raised into adult egg-laying hens.  So, in the grand scheme of things, egg production during this pandemic is only down about 3 to 5 percent compared with 2021 production.  But that is a decrease in supply, which should lead to an increase in prices. But demand for eggs is also down.

Americans consumed 10 percent fewer eggs in 2024 than we did in 2021. That's a big drop. And egg exports dropped by nearly half between 2021 and 2022, and have pretty much stayed there. So, supply is down, but demand is down, too. You want to know what's up? What's way up? Why, it's the profits of massive egg producers like Cal-Maine, whose gross profits the past three years have been between three and six times greater than their earnings before this bird flu pandemic started, reaching record highs for the company.

Over that time, Cal-Maine realized unprecedented margins of anywhere between 50 percent and 170 percent above their production costs.  You don't need to know much about business to know that 50 170 percent margins are pretty freaking huge. And the result has been windfall profits for the egg industry of about 15 billion.

And of course, it's a telltale sign that claims of high prices being caused by a die-off from bird flu are bullshit because those massive windfall profits are not being used to replenish those decimated flocks. Instead, they're going to stock buybacks and dividends to support shareholders, as well as acquisitions of competitors to further cement the monopoly advantage of companies like Cal-Maine, advantages that allow them to charge extortionate prices for eggs in the first place.  And, the big egg cartel is so powerful that the current administration has decided to bribe the industry into increasing production,  going so far as for us to pay them with government subsidies to help rebuild their flocks.

As Mushb Bush notes so succinctly in conclusion, The current egg crisis is what the Sovietization of American business looks like. We don't have egg companies in the business of making eggs anymore. We have egg companies in the business of exploiting egg shortages. 

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And, we're back.  Okay, I know most of you probably spent the last few minutes looking at finger-butt photos rather than listening to this week's non-sponsor rant. So, be sure to follow the BIG newsletter on Substack and read this series about the egg monopoly crisis. 

But, the finger butt thing is a metaphor for something I've talked about a lot on this podcast. Perspective. You just look at the photo and it looks like there's a naked butt above someone's head.

But you pull back and you realize it's just Paul Rudd bending a finger in front of the camera.  And I thought about this a couple weeks ago, when I was having coffee with my friend Jonathan Blank, who you may recall I talked to last year about his documentary on the Netherlands, Sex, Drugs, and Bicycles.  I said something about how, you know, that's why we humans are so successful.

And he said, successful? I wouldn't consider us successful.  We've only been around for a couple hundred thousand years, and not only are we on the brink of destroying ourselves, but we're threatening to take all other living things on Earth with us. 

You've probably seen that exercise of imagining the entire history of life on Earth compressed into a single day.  We humans appear at about a minute and seventeen seconds before midnight, and in that time, Actually, not even in that time, but a tiny fraction of that time, which is a tiny fraction of the time life has spent on Earth, we humans are putting it all at mortal risk. So, successful?  Depends very much on how you define success and what time frame you're looking at.

And, of course, there's certain circular logic to how we define success. Usually, success is defined by whatever happens to be working at the present moment.   And that kind of thinking causes all sorts of problems. But I find a particular kind of problem rather relevant at this specific point in time.

In a 2023 post by Corey Doctorow at Pluralistic, He reviewed the book Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis and posited the idea that this capitalism that most Americans see as a kind of natural economic state in which humans must exist, may very well just be a brief fleeting experiment between the feudalism that we think of as the distant past dark ages and the emergence of a new technofeudalism.

To put it really simply, Doctorow broadly characterizes capitalism as a system based on profits, or generally making things. And feudalism is a system based on owning things and extracting rents based on that ownership.  Now, one could argue, and Varoufakis does in his book, that capitalism was officially supplanted by techno feudalism in 2008 with the massive bailout of the banking industry.

After the 2008 financial crisis, bankers and their banks lost billions in profits, but nevertheless ended up with billions more at the end of the year than they had at the start, in the form of public money handed over by central banks.  And that led to what has been called the Everything Rally, where all kinds of assets became way more valuable, and feudalists began their ascent.

And this sort of feedback loop began. which skews things more and more toward feudalists. For example, if you're a capitalist and you're making money, you need to use some of that money to invest in future production, R&D, and new technologies. But when the feudal lords get richer, they just buy more assets that they can rent to capitalists.

Remember how Cal Maine doesn't need to invest in increasing their egg-laying flock they can just distribute windfall profits to their fellow feudalists.   There's a reason why those guys,           Zuckerberg, were standing there at the inauguration.

They are your new feudal lords. As Varoufakis points out, Amazon is like a big, bustling commercial city. There are lots of shopping options and lots of capitalists at work there. But they are all subservient to their feudal lord, Jeff Bezos. So, we hear a lot of lip service to the free market capitalist ideals that make America great.

And I think many of us internalized that idea and just thought there was a kind of natural law and that would always be the dominant economic framework. Preserving our quote-unquote freedom to exist as homo economicus within our market-dominant environment. But pull back a little and suddenly the assumed supremacy of unbridled capitalism looks a lot like an inevitable subservience to something that severely restricts freedom for all but a tiny subset of the population, the feudal lords.

Or as Chris Wright wrote in Counterpunch a while back,  "Capitalism in fact, is a kind of fragmented totalitarianism. As private, totalitarian corporate entities proliferate all over society and constitute its essential infrastructure, its foundation,  the more oligopolistic they become, to some degree even fused with the state,  the less fragmented and more dangerous the totalitarianism is. Eventually, the libertarian millennium might be achieved in which all countervailing forces, such as unions, are eradicated and the population is left wholly at the mercy of corporations, reveling in its sublime freedom to be totally dominated." 

Sound familiar? 

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I've been reading a recent biography of Milton Friedman lately, don't ask me why, and I think his particular brand of economics, known as the Chicago School of Economic Thought, which is basically the intellectual framework behind the free market supremacy, small government, low regulation, private-over-public mindset that has been dominant in the United States since the 1970s. 

And for a long time, it seemed to be working out pretty well for a lot of people.  But I'd suggest that if the last few years, and definitely the past couple months, have taught us anything, it's that those who have claimed mission accomplished for those ideas might want to hold off on their victory parade until we see how this actually plays out. 

And as things really unravel in America under the weight of unprecedented inequality and corporate malfeasance, The circular logic of the Chicago School becomes more and more apparent.  If you define what's rational in economic, market-oriented terms, then of course you will conclude that the market is rational, and that market supremacy is the wisest course of action. 

But if you pull back a bit, and define rational more in terms of, say, that which does not drive the human species to extinction,  suddenly free markets might not look quite so rational.  

So I guess what I'm getting at with all this is, anytime anyone says this philosophy, or this economic model, or this social organization is the most effective, rational, and successful, be sure you understand exactly how they're defining success, and if they might be prematurely declaring victory, while the world goes to shit. 

And, once again, I find myself quoting America's great secular saint. Kurt Vonnegut, who almost 40 years ago probably said, although in full disclosure Scopes. net couldn't confirm it,  quote, We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective.  Now, I heard him speak at college around that time, and while I can't remember that exact line, it definitely fit in with the gist of what he was saying. 

And I'm sure we all thought at the time, that's a brilliant, insightful observation. And of course, now that it's been spoken out loud, we as a society will heed that warning and make sure it never actually happens.  Or,  maybe we won't.  

Well, that's it for this episode of The Great Ungaslighting. If you feel so inclined, please share it with anyone you know who might also find it interesting. And until next time, be kind to yourself, cut each other some slack, and use your damn turn signal.