Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 202: The Roxana Syndrome

Episode Date: June 11, 2021

This week we take a look at child labor in America, the epidemic of boss-bullying, and the mysterious Havana Syndrome afflicting many U.S. officials Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Well, here we are after promising to never do one on Zoom again. We're back Zooming. Yep. It's indicative of the times when nobody really knows what to do anymore, you know? I suspected that we would not have seen the last of our Zooming days. days um i so i you know had to drive over to hazard this morning and i didn't have my speaker to listen to podcasts and so i had to listen to an entire hank williams like box set you know that's it's not the worst fight in the world so yeah so i always like borrowing your car when i spent two years carless i don't have the selection you always had uh prince you had uh yeah you had

no oxcore but you had prince dirty mind controversy and you had rick ross mastermind i got i got to keep those three in rotation well now i've got a hank williams box set i've got several box sets i've also got a bow diddly box set which is pretty funny because there's um there's at least four or five tracks on this like bow diddly chess records box that i have where like the entire track is just bo diddly and his guitar player roasting each other which is a pretty funny concept because like back in the day the first podcast back in the day you recorded on reel-to-reel tape and you know before you went in and recorded you would have to like segment out the amount of tape you could spare for a recording session and it's pretty

funny to to think about like those guys just going in there and being like um you know just fucking around for two hours just making yo mama jokes which is what they are they really are it's just like you know yo mama's so fat she can't see the back of the back of her head or you know something like that yeah so early early mama humor totally yeah or or you know roasting a man's old lady, you know? Yeah. Yeah, this is probably the genesis of marry an ugly, if you want to be happy for the rest of your life, find an ugly woman and make her your wife. Right.

That probably started out as somebody making a reference to somebody's wife being ugly. I'd say so. And they're like, you know know we can make a hit out of this actually songwriting back in the day was pretty tight well i mean i thought well i was thinking that actually because i was riding over there and there's that hank williams song rambling man and uh the first couple lines um i can settle down and be doing just fine till I hear an old train rolling down the line.

Then I hurry straight home and pack. And if I didn't go, I believe I'd blow my stack. What happened to the rambling man? Is the rambling man not around anymore? You don't see many drifters anymore. It's true. Especially in my childhood, you'd see all kinds of drifters anymore it's true especially when my childhood you'd see all kinds of drifters all the time i grew up in the housing projects which was like ground zero

for drifters you don't really see the drifter much anymore he used to be a celebrated archetype in the american song canon but now he's kind of he's kind of what has he been replaced by, you know? I don't know. I think what it is is there's all these think pieces about, like, not ghosting somebody. I guess that's our modern equivalent of ghosting, or being a rambling man is ghosting, I guess. When ghosting sort of became frowned upon, the rambler as an archetype in the American song book

just kind of dissipated. Yes. You get canceled for writing songs about rambling men. For being a rambling man. I do like the image, though, of a guy going about his day having just you know settled down he's doing just fine he's he's stable he's in a stable relationship but then he hears a train coming down the down the line and he's like i gotta get home yeah he gets the itch for the life again

it is kind of a funny concept because i mean mean, I lived in Vegas for a little while, which, like, there was this fantasy in my head that if I ever torpedoed my life, I could just start all over in Vegas and somehow I would, like, you know, carve out a living or whatever, whatever. But honestly, like, the romantic notions of American yesteryear really don't exist like that anymore. Like, your creditors will still find you. It doesn't matter if you move to fucking Madagascar.

You know what I'm saying? Right. These jackals will hunt you down. They'll find you wherever you lay your head. So, like, not only has, I mean, we talk a lot about capitalism poisoning everything, but it has poisoned our fanciful notions about what are you going to do if like your life just falls apart and you just need to run away and start over bro you're working in a goddamn k mart and fucking uh fairborn ohio that's what you're doing you're not getting on a train and you know being a scamp um well you know now i mean it could change

we need to bring it back man ramblers right bring it back yeah i'm all for it you know another thing that another thing that happened to songwriting i'd be interested to know what you think about this it's sort of been MFA-sized in some ways, where it's like we've substituted just stories about a guy or a gal doing something for really flowery, abstract language. And then it's like those guys that write the flowery, abstract language are like, man, those guys are like, man, those guys are genius. And don't get me wrong, there's people that write good flowery abstract music but like i just kind of miss a story about a just a guy that goes to arizona or something

you know what i mean just a guy standing on a corner in winslow arizona yeah um no i mean it's taken it's kind of like that band the war on drugs like you listen to it you're like ah this is pretty good i mean the music's pretty good but you listen to the lyrics and it's just complete it's like there's a man who walks around and he shakes his hand and he falls on the ground you're like what the fuck this isn't a song nobody nobody knows how he feels. I don't know. I don't. I mean, like, you still got to write songs, you know? Like, lyrics still have to be good.

Like, I mean, maybe I'm old school, though. Maybe I'm an old-timey guy. I just like some lyrics that speak to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, cowboy music's coming back, so we might get our wish before, you know. Feels like it anyway.

Yeah. Well, okay. Letcher County. Let's say you're rambling to Letcher County, and you get caught, you get picked up for i don't know what is that charge is it like scampering yeah it's a misdemeanor charge i won't we need that we along with like the old songs and like the old professions we need to bring back the old crimes i agree i agree um scampering being one of them yeah let's say you get picked up on that um and thrown into the poke here in whitesburg

uh good there's a good chance that you will be cutting weeds at the historic hobgibson cemetery at little cowan uh in an orange jumpsuit. Oh, I forgot about that. Dude, that's as dark an image. We've got to put that up as the cover, but that's as dark an image as I've seen in a long time. It reminds me of... Go ahead. I'm sorry, there's like a slight delay.

It reminds me of that scene in Halloween where they break out of the asylum and all the inmates are just kind of walking around. I know I'm not trying to dehumanize those people or act like they're weird or anything. That's not what I'm saying, but I'm saying just the haunting effect of that shot is kind of what this cover of the Mount Eagle this week looks like. Yeah, I mean, I could paint it for you what

it is is it's a it's a wide angle shot of a bare hillside trees in the background the ground is lush green there are four men in uh jail um jumpsuits like orange jumpsuits uh with weed eaters cutting grass at the um historic hob gibson cemetery at little cowan this is on the front page of the mountain eagle our local newspaper i loved it because it was heavy on the symbolism on just multiple layers because i'll read you the caption. Let your county jail inmates cut the weeds at the historic Hop Gibson Cemetery at Little Cowan.

The inmates are outperforming public service again after an absence of more than a year because of the pandemic. It is hoped that they can fight the litter problem that is cropping back up in the county. So it's like... Let me ask you a question. Can you imagine being the most reviled people

in your community for no good reason? You know what I mean? Because you got into a little trouble at some point and you didn't have money. Like, you know, you're doing the same thing everybody in the rich communities are doing, but you got caught and you didn't have the funds to, you know, get yourself out of it or whatever.

Can you imagine being both hated and also the care of the community is also on your shoulders too you know what i mean like oh let's hope they can let's hope they can uh beautify this and rectify this problem meanwhile everybody talks about them like they're fucking less than human i mean well i liked it because it was it comes at you from several different angles all right so first you've got you you can peel this back imagine this is some sort of like a theory class this is lacon or some shit i don't know um is this a sam adams joint by the way it is a sam adams joint yeah um okay yeah first you've got the uh you know forced gang labor basically granted i imagine that these guys if

you're in a jail all day you're probably looking for any fucking reason to get out of the jail so um i mean you know whatever but the idea, though, that we use inmates. I hate to use that word. I believe that word is now de-classed. It's not, you know, detainees would probably be a more appropriate word. They've been locked up. I mean, just the fact that we use them to do, you know, the basic labor, the basic duties of upkeep of our county.

So that's the first thing that jumps out at you. Then there's the wide-angle shot of a cemetery. So forced gang labor in a cemetery. Then there is the message of hope. Like, oh, you know, nature is healing. The prisoners are back out. The inmates have bloomed. It's springtime.

You know what that means. Yeah. And then I like how it comes with an entire article about how a big problem right now is littering across the County is one thing. The virus did not slow. It's just like, yeah,

like we've got a poverty rate, like, you know, 25% of people live on their poverty line. Living in the most abject poverty you'll find in this country. But right. But it's the, it's the litter.

It's you got to, you know, I, it's, it's very, it's a litter you gotta you know Wattsburg is a town this must be said Wattsburg is a town for those that don't know that is now kind of governed by reactionaries but for the longest time was governed by the worst kind of liberals

oh yeah absolutely like the type of people that think that like you shouldn't smoke cigarettes unless you make $200,000 a year that you shouldn't get cigarettes unless you make $200,000 a year. That you shouldn't get tattoos unless you're wealthy. You know what I mean? That just normal shit people do is just strictly the conceit of the ruling class.

If they want their situation to improve, then they should just start thinking about being more smart with their money. Right. What you're saying is they shouldn't get tattoos if they make under two hundred thousand dollars a year like poor basically poor people go ahead no just poor people shouldn't just just should have you know have no fun no they can't have cell phones you know that that's that's one of the sort of prevailing uh sort of things that

these people that were this ruling class i speak of that they do is like oh they shouldn't they shouldn't have uh iphones or smartphones they should for some reason they should just have like you know either a landline at their house or like some like flip phone from 1999 because they're poor like they shouldn't like have a phone that can like you know uh help them find work or whatever it is you know right they should have to they should have to suffer for some reason for just no good reason yeah um the best way to describe this, like, you know how it goes on to the next page, and the header on the next page is, litter problem near being out of hand. It's just like, how the fuck can a litter problem, it's just like, I live here, it's not piling up, it's fine,

it's the same as it's always fucking been. It's just like, it's a classic example, and I, when I sent it to you yesterday yesterday i sent it to you with the caption liberalism is healing it's a classic example of how post-pandemic liberalism is healing all the things they care post-pandemic and post-trump really i mean it's just like the the panic is over liberal Liberalism is healing, everybody. Things are getting back to the way they should be. Yeah, they had to correct course for a minute. Right. You know, they had to adjust their beliefs to win the election. You know what I mean?

Right. They don't really ultimately... You know what's funny? It's like the whole long con of getting people on the left or whoever to vote for Biden was kids in cages. And then just this past week, you see Kamala Harris telling Guatemalans, don't come.

Just like matter-of-factly, don't come. You know what I mean? It's just such a great display of political dexterity. She was just like, just don't come. The reason you won is because of the humanity of people coming from Central and South America. That was like the only thing on the ballot that you had over Donald Trump, supposedly. And now it's just like, okay, now we can just be who we are. You know what I mean?

We're in power. And they're going to vote for us again because who are they going to run? You know. Right. Yep. But you're right. It's bad. Well, yeah, there you go, everybody.

Yeah, liberalism is healing. The inmates are back out cutting the grass. Your litter problem will now be back under control. So don't worry. So then let's go down the road so we're taking a little tour of white of ledger county why not we're rambling we're rambling men taking a tour of ledger county um so uh let's go down the road to jenkins that's right um yeah we'll go down the road to jenkins uh where i don't know if you've been i don't know if you have kept up with this story

but about a week ago or two the jenkins police had one of their police cruisers get stolen from them um by like which i mean it's like i'll i'll read you this story because the fallout from it has been kind of funny Jenkins officials voice concerns Over cruiser theft In the wake of the recent theft of a city Police cruiser at the hands of a Prisoner several city officials

Express concern and embarrassment About the incident at the June meeting of the Jenkins City Council Stephen Tackett had been arrested by Jenkins officers and placed in the cruiser, but while his truck was being searched, he managed to get free. After kicking the window out,

he stole the cruiser. Hell yeah, Steve. A hand grenade was found along with several guns in Tackett's truck. The grenade was removed by the Kentucky State Police. The cruiser was later found, but Tackett remains free. This dude, I mean, like, like this dude's on the run and i think it's pretty awesome like just been making a complete ass out of the cops steve tackett the teflon don councilman

rick dameron made a motion that gps units be placed in all police vehicles and this is the interesting part i think this is a fascinating like look into small town policing but mayor todd dupree said the expense of outfitting the police cars could create problems in a time of budget strain so if you'll recall i think that was last week we were talking about the city of pound had to fire i think it was on the patreon two weeks ago the city of pound had to fire their their entire police force because they were out of money they're completely broke um but but this is the interesting part um they want to uh outfit every police car with gps units so that they can track them when their police car gets stolen again that to me is the funniest part it's like yeah our cards are gonna get stolen again so let's just just put GPS units in them so we can track them.

You know what I mean? Yeah. He suggested that the city look at the cost of the GPS before deciding. Councilman Chuck Anderson added that very often there is only one officer available to answer calls. Anderson also said that officers sometimes wear T-shirts to work that indicate they're police officers rather than actually wearing a uniform and said it makes them look unprofessional.

Like many small... That's hard to do these days. Everybody dresses like a cop these days. That's true. Any lip dick with a thin blue line T-shirt can walk into Jenkins PD and just say you're a cop. That is true. That's very true. Um, like many small towns in Jenkins, the turnover rate among the police is high. A regular complaint from cash strap city councils is that as soon as officers are trained at the police Academy in Richmond,

larger cities hire them at a higher rate of pay than smaller towns can afford. larger cities hire them at a higher rate of pay than smaller towns can't afford um then it goes on to talk about some of the speeding issues in jenkins and how they want to pay the cops more basically like what what we're in a fascinating dynamic in small town america where defund the police is actually kind of happening in some in some places i'm not going to say universally because across the board through no external force though exactly no i mean it is entirely a result of well here it's a result of the decline of circumstance yeah the decline of the tax base um you know uh an ability to raise new revenue streams um again that is not the case i would say it's not the case for most small towns most small towns are still probably doing fine in the police area but some of them yeah like they're they're

running up against this contradiction where they have to make a choice like do we want to keep eight police officers on staff in a town of 800 people like Or do we just want to let them go? I mean, we don't, you know, I don't know. Do we want to have one cop for every 16th person? Or do we want to have good roads and hospitals and whatever else? Right. Anyways, yeah, shout out to Stephen Tackett, though, for exposing the contradictions

this week. That should be a new segment. Just kind of like Donkey of the Day, but in reverse. Who's exposing the contradictions of the situation we find ourselves in? Steve Tackett's our first winner.

Yeah, I mean, for sure. Yeah, so, that's, I don't know, that's just an interesting, interesting goings-on in small-town America. So, let's zoom out then. I want to go to the national scene and the economy. The economy at large.

This is in Bloomberg opinion. Why teenage workers are leading the economic recovery? I saw this, dude dude this is insane the job market recovery is looking better for 2023 and 2024 even while this year's forecasts need to be reined in a bit the best evidence for the optimistic outlook is coming from a surprising place teenagers the last two jobs reports poured cold water on the hope that we could add a million jobs or more for a few months in a row, which means a full employment recovery to pre-pandemic levels is going to take longer than we thought. But booming employment trends among teenagers suggest that over the next few years,

strong demand for workers should flow through into higher levels of labor force participation than we saw in the late 2010s. What makes teenage employment useful to study right now is that teenagers are less affected by the factors holding back labor supply than any other demographic. If they lived at home with their parents, they weren't eligible for economic impact payments. If they were full-time students, they'd be ineligible for unemployment insurance making enhanced benefits benefits a non-factor they're unlikely to be parents squeezed out of the labor force by closed schools or lack of child care they're obviously not older workers who may have accelerated retirement plans during the pandemic and teens were less likely to get ill from covid 19 um man you you it's funny you had a good tweet about this about like uh you know i think what was the one you shared that woman was like my my boy's 14 years old he goes to work every day well all his friends like go to the swimming pool and be kids and all you other lazy people out there

just stay at home and whatever so we've we've always had child labor i had my first job when i was 13 i was four i was summer going into eighth grade so i guess i would have been 13 yeah yeah it's like it's always been a thing yeah i don't understand why this is news also also i wonder if that person at Bloomberg, I guess this was in Bloomberg, I wonder if they stopped for a second to realize, oh, actually the most vulnerable people with little control over their own lives

are the people that are the engine of this economy. That's not new either. Basically what they're saying is that demographic is just younger than it ever has been. mean ultimately what this is linking up with is how a month ago and i don't know i haven't seen as many signs and memes and stuff as i was a month ago but a month ago it was a very big deal that you know workers did not want to work. Remember all these signs? It's the new pandemic. We're short-staffed. Yeah, the great short-staffed pandemic of May and April and May. What they're doing to aid that is basically trying to attack teenagers into the workforce.

In May, for the first time in history, the jobless rate for teenagers was lower than the rate for workers aged 20 to 24. I'm going to ask you a question. Are teenagers class traitors? They're scabs. Are they scabbing? They're scabs. Teenagers are scabbing. It's making us all look bad. I mean, a bit obviously we're doing a bit but it is funny

because everybody always says about gen z like oh the kids are all right the kids are going to say this and the kids are like i'm getting paid man i'm getting paid baby no yeah i'm trying to yeah i'm trying to earn some money i don't even know what kids do they go to the movies i don't think so um i don't know yeah typically the unemployment rate for teenagers is at least five i mean the that fucking phrase the unemployment rate for teenagers i mean like there there should be an age like before which you cannot work in the same way that like you know you can't you should be able to vote by 12 and you can't work until you're like...

27. Those are the rules. Age of consent, 40. Can't have sex until you're 40. Yeah, can't have sex until you're 40. This is a great society Abortion's legal up to two years That's a stance we've all heard That means two years after they're born

Let's see The surge in teen employment isn't statistical smoke and mirrors It's showing up in other measures of labor force participation. While levels for prime age and older workers remain far below their pre-pandemic benchmark, they've jumped for teenagers. The unemployment to population ratio for teenagers hit a 13-year high in May. Blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, you kind of get the idea.

But, I mean, do you really need something to kind of spell it out for you even more bluntly than that just how bleak everything is i mean yeah it's an empire and decline gang i'm still i'm still like laughing at the concept of like just having all these sort of age limits just like you're the you're like you know the grand potentate of society and you just put arbitrary age limits on everything and just how much that would fuck up your society if nobody could have sex until they're 40. You go to prison immediately

if you're caught having sex before 40. If you're caught working before 27. You'd have the world's lowest GDP. The highest incarceration rate. Everyone's like, who the fuck came up with these rules? Camera cuts to us. Actual parents are just like doming their kids at their second birthday party

because that's the last time they could actually legally murder them. It's like this society is completely dysfunctional and yet somehow is outpacing the united states right 2019 to 2021 and growth people are jealous people want in on that trailbillies uh nation you can't uh you can't fuck with us we've got it we've got to figure it out a society where you can't you don't have to work but in that free time don't think you're gonna be having sex either find something else to do start start woodworking i guess um okay uh so i don't know let's let's go to someone let's go to some people that are working um this was sent to me by our dear friend sam wallman shout out um we love sam he makes a lot of good art for us um day one love yeah yeah um sam sent me this thought it would be a great entry

into our uh getting the good segment um this is from australia i don't really know much about australia but um this my knowledge of australia begins and ends at Sam Long. I'm joking. Love the Oscars. Yeah, I mean, while... So, you know, again, I don't really know how things are shaping up over there post-pandemic-wise or what, but I did like this story. This is from the Brisbane Times. Brisbane? Brisbane.

Brisbane? Brisbane. Brisbane Times. Spike in workers bullying blackmailing bosses while working from home um the pandemic induced trend of working from home has led to an increase in employees bullying their superiors and blackmailing their bosses for pay raises. A Queensland workplace lawyer says. Jonathan Mamaril, a doctor of Brisbane law firm NB Lawyers, who, NB, non-binary lawyers maybe, who has been involved in industrial relations cases

within local and national companies, said the issue happens across the board. He said he had been involved in an array of recent cases involving disputes stemming from working from home. It's been an issue for the past few years, but where it started gaining momentum is COVID. There have been a few examples lately. In these cases, this behavior is not just happening once, it is happening constantly. We had a middle manager deliberately leaving their manager out of invites to team or Zoom meetings on the basis they had forgotten.

However, they were actually undermining their manager's authority and questioning their competency because that person had applied for the same managerial position and missed out. Oh, very interesting. This is some inter-office politics going on. and missed out oh very interesting this is some inter-office politics going on um another example was a secretary who had power over organizing zoom lunches but was leaving out newer senior employees because they couldn't be bothered connecting with them that one's good the first one's a little bit reactionary but that one actually is actually good Can't be bothered to get that. Yeah. Let's see.

Mr. Mamaril said he had also dealt with several cases involving blackmail. An employee was given access to financial documents and realized other staff were getting paid more than they were. So they questioned their superiors about it. They then threatened to release what other staff were being paid unless they were given an immediate pay raise. This just a crude version of union contract negotiations.

Right, exactly. In a similar situation, an employee had password dongles to access company IT systems. Dongles? Is that an American word or is that just an Australian? I don't know. I've heard dongles as like something you plug into something. Right, right.

I don't know. Yeah, Aussies have a lot of good isms and slang. Anyways, I mean, you get the gist. It's kind of interesting because this law firm is basically having to respond to these managers who are all of a sudden waking up to a lot of their business being conducted over a computer, which creates all sorts of other opportunities for breaches in access to information, being able to exclude certain people from certain either social events or work meetings.

It is a weird example of how, in some ways, uh it is a weird example of how in some ways digital tools can be used uh for organizing efforts but the real funny issue here though is just that there is this law firm and these people just kind of completely aghast that workers would even be doing this right now of all times you know be doing this right now of all times you know yeah i don't yeah that's i guess you could say they're getting the goods that's when i don't know that's when you guys step on their necks though this is exactly the time shout out to australia we need more australian content on this program we really do honestly think about it i mean hillbillies and Aussies have a lot in common, including the only people in the world that still say reckon, also that have their fair share of cryptids and everything in the environment that will kill them around them.

We share a lot of DNA to them. Both dregs of the British Isles. Both have a really fucked up settler colonial past but have kind of sublimated it through some other oppressed identity just press that out a little bit with our own oppression

right no you're exactly right yeah shout out Sam shout out my yeah, shout out to, shout out Sam. Shout out my buddy Joanna. Shout out Savage Garden. Yeah, Australia rules. So yeah, like I said, we started out in Letcher County.

We're rambling men. We started out in Letcher County. We went to Jenkins. We started out in Letcher County. We went to Jenkins. We went to every small town McDonald's on an interstate between here and Springfield, California. Is that even a town? Maybe I meant Bakersfield.

It is now. Maybe it's Bakersfield. And then we went to Australia. So what we're going to do now in this rambling tour of the world is we're going to go to every American embassy abroad and to the White House. We're going to go to the White House too. I want to talk about this story that was in the New York Times. Is this a Howard Dean bit?

Is this what you're queuing us up for? Yeah. Yeah. I am. Yeah. We're taking the tour, baby. I wanted to do this story that was in the New Yorker that was going around. Okay. was going around um okay we kind of have talked about it on a previous episode

but we i don't remember if we really dug into it or not into the details and so on this one i kind of want to dig into the details this is in the new yorker are u.s officials under silent attack the havana syndrome first affected spies and diplomats in Cuba. Now it has spread to the White House. Okay. Okay. Can I tell you my first impressions of this? Yeah.

I didn't finish this story, and I want to go through it. But I just don't want to discount. Actually, let's just get into it. All right, okay. So it opens up by talking about this guy. He was a senior official in the Trump administration. He had been on his way across the white house grounds one day um in a part of the white house grounds called the ellipse between the white house and the washington monument as he walked he began

to hear a ringing in his ears his body went numb and he had trouble controlling the movement of his legs and his fingers trying to speak to a passerby, he had difficulty forming words. It came on very suddenly, he recalled later, while describing the experience to a colleague. In a matter of about seven minutes, I went from feeling completely fine to thinking, oh, something's not right, to being very, very worried and actually thinking I was going to die. He fell to the ground before he reached his car and realized that he was in no condition to drive. Instead, he made his way to Constitution Avenue where he hoped to hail a taxi. He managed to open the Lyft app on his phone and ordered a driver who took him to the hospital. When he arrived at the emergency room, the official thought, I'm probably not walking out of here.

So, you know, they ran some tests on him. They were unable to determine what he was on or what was going on they they suspected he was on drugs they they wound up diagnosing him with a massive migraine with aura so um and so i'm going to skip ahead here um people who have investigated this have discovered that what began with several dozen spies and diplomats in Havana now encompasses more than 130 possible cases, from Colombia to Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to Austria, in addition to the United States and other countries.

At least four of the cases involve Trump White House officials, two of whom say they had episodes on the Ellipse, that place I mentioned earlier. The CIA accounts for have they are we discounting the possibility that these guys uh plaques have broken off and they're having strokes like mini strokes or something like that these guys live off nothing but mcdonald's i mean it's just um i kind of want to yeah i want to get into the speculation of what this is let's let's kind of pathologize this a little bit it's it's interesting um in late may 2019 a large group of white house officials checked into an intercontinental hotel in london where they prepared for president donald

trump's state visit before dawn the the funniest thing the funniest thing about this story by the way is that a lot of the people it details are just Trump administration officials. I mean, like, if you were, okay, I'll go ahead and say this. If you work in any part of the government that deals with anything the empire does, you are a bad person. Even at the State Department. I don't give a fuck. fuck like the really one some of the few like actual government positions that are probably morally okay are like working for prosecuting securities fraud or something you know like that might be it you know what i you know what i think so you know what i think's hilarious when like

you know i think it's hilarious like when people that like uh like our peer group even people on the left are like, yeah, so-and-so is cool. They work at the State Department. But like that's just their job. Like you still got to have a job. And then they try to sort of make a false equivalence. Like that is somehow tantamount to like working like at Target because you're working for a big corporation. It's all bad, man. Right.

Like, no, motherfucker. Like you don't have to carry a four-year degree to work at Target. And, like, you know what I mean? Nobody stuck a fucking gun to your head and told you to apply to work at the goddamn State Department. Sorry. Yes, the government comes to every small town. Get out of here.

Yeah, and finds a 14-year-old working at a Burger King and says, good job, young man. You're now going to go work for the state department you will be pressed into indentured servitude you haven't you haven't uh had any gay sex in the last two years that they ask you that on the polygraph um yeah so like every person this story details is just a bad person which yeah you're right like if you're working in the government as a bureaucrat you had to get there by choices you made it's not like some you're right like working at target or some even like a coal mine or something it is very much like you had to go work in those You didn't slip on a banana peel and get a job at the Pentagon. All right.

Yes, you very much had to make choices to work there. So every person this story is detailing is just a bad person, which is funny, which makes this story fun. It's a fun story for us to read, but also a fun mystery. If this is true crime we're solving a mystery and all the people all the victims are the worst people you can imagine so it's a special kind of trailbillies true crime let's get started in late may 2019 a large group of white house officials checked into an intercontinental hotel in london where they prepared for president donald

trump's state visit. Before dawn on the day of Trump's arrival, Sandra Adams, a mid-level White House staffer, collected a sheaf of documents that had arrived overnight for her team and had a quick breakfast in the hotel dining room. When she returned to her room overlooking Green Park, she pulled open the curtains and settled into a chair to read. Suddenly, a ringing sound, annoying at first, then distinctly painful, seemed to envelop her. When she left the room, her ears continued ringing. Later in the trip, she invited a more junior White House staff member, Adrian Banks, to hang out with her in the hotel room before the two went to dinner. The names Sandra Adams and Adrian Banks are pseudonyms.

As they chatted on the couch, Adams again heard the sound and felt an acute pressure in her head, as did Banks. They rushed out of the room and into the hallway, where the sound and the pressure subsided. But for the rest of the trip, both officials suffered migraines. When the delegation returned to Washington, Adams described the incident to a special White House office responsible for tracking security threats. She was told that what had happened to Banks and her was classified, which meant that they were not to tell anyone, including their doctors, about their experience

in London. They visited doctors at the White House Medical Unit, who thought that Adams and Banks were suffering from ordinary headaches and sinus infections that had potentially been brought on by stress. The doctors suggested that they take ibuprofen and decongestants and get some rest. As the weeks passed, Adam's ears and lymph nodes became more swollen.

Her migraines grew worse, and she felt as if she had strep throat. Banks continued to have headaches, too. Their symptoms persisted despite repeated attempts to private physicians and urgent care clinics. Adam's total colleague, no one seems to take it seriously so i mean you know it's it's they're they're going to it's the age-old problem of government officials being discriminated in the medical in the medical world you know this is a big problem yeah it's a horrible scourge. Believe government officials. So, a few months after the incident in London,

the doctors checked Banks and Adams' vision, balance, hearing, and cognitive skills in a series of tests known as the Havana Protocol. Adams listed the symptoms that had persisted. Migraines, swollen lymph nodes, and sore throat. A doctor told her, referring to the Havana victims whatever you heard those are not the same symptoms as the rest of the cohort Adams left with the distinct impression that the doctor wanted her to believe that she had imagined the experience in London so yeah so no like none of these doctors that's the funny part of this story I mean like they're just like yeah i mean they're probably

sexist doctors you know who just like you know just like just women being hysterical but it has the added effect of like these are bad people too. Yeah, also, these are people that manufacture narratives about why the way the world is and get us into wars and all kinds of shit. Why trust them when they're relaying their symptoms?

One of them was probably responsible for just smoking Qasem Soleimani or something. You know what I mean? Just absolute monsters. Yeah. After the initial incidents in Havana, the FBI sent a team of agents to the city to try to figure out what might be causing the illnesses.

They found no dispositive evidence of any attacks, although by the time they arrived, the theoretical perpetrators would have had ample opportunity to conceal evidence of wrongdoing. In addition, profilers with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit conducted assessments of the victims. The unit presented its findings to State Department officials, including John Sullivan, a deputy secretary and head of a task force that the department had set up to look into the Havana Syndrome. The profiler's assessment was that the victims were suffering

from a mass psychogenic illness, a condition in which a group of people, often thinking that they have been exposed to something dangerous, begin to feel sick at the same time. That's what I was going to bring up at the first. To me, this whole thing read a little like the dancing hysteria in New England, like, I don't know, around the time of the witch trials or some shit.

No, I mean. Oh, how could I forget? The great dance hysteria of 1758. I mean, there were. I feel like you have to designate the year because there were multiple dancing hysterias. Across Europe and Newland throughout time like some mold or fungus would get in the water supply and people would lose their mind for fucking or yeah or you know it's a mass hysteria like the thing i think of is i don't know if you remember this story it was in the new york times magazine a few years ago

about the teenage girls about the laughing laughing what the laughing yeah the girls in leroy new york who all had there was like 18 of them and they had twitches and they would laugh hysterically right yeah it it turned out that um you know as you know just as a brief overview of that like as the the media attention on that died down those girls mostly went back to normal like one of them did have Tourette's um but overall it was just a mass hysteria psychogenic illness thing and it was just I don't know it was kind of driven by the media um i remember those girls coming on tv though and having like the like looking like they had Tourette's essentially as a Tourette's sufferer myself i i was never that you know probably that animated but yeah right

um but so yeah so you've got doctors saying oh there's nothing here you've got the fbi saying there's nothing here you guys are crazy um so and then as an added thing here the cia is also uh trying to basically say that there's nothing to see here to the extent that they are they're saying that um you know they can't coordinate anything mean, the picture that is painted here, it's a very fascinating picture, is you've got multiple governmental agencies all competing with one another but all keeping their secrets close to their chest and not sharing any information at all. So all of them are individually denying that this is some sort of weapons attack. But they also can't

coordinate anything to find out just because of the bureaucratic nature of our government in the way it's competitive at the sort of interagency level um the only people that aren't skeptical of this are like john bolton like john bol Bolton and his side right-hand man. There is, apparently though, I will say this though. There is a little bit of evidence that something might actually be going on here. Specialists at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Brain Injury and Repair have been able to use MRIs to study the brains of 40 Havana Syndrome patients. They found no signs of physical impact to the victim's skulls. It was as if the victims had a concussion without a concussion, one specialist told me, but the team found signs consistent with damage to the patient's brains.

The volume of white matter was smaller than in a similar group of healthy adults, which indicated that something structural in the brain had been affected. So, and then it kind of, like, goes into what, you know, John Bolton and his right-hand guy, this guy named, like, Charles Krupperman or something, they think that, like, Russia is behind this. There is this really great quote. Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger, an expert on China, said that when he first got wind of the cases, he thought that North Korea might be the culprit.

But a government expert told him this is Russia's M.O. And then they go on to say that it's because, like, Russia has, like, a known history in investigating or experimenting with pulsed microwave technologies. So, I mean. These people are. Dude, North Korea is a hermit kingdom with, like, a fucking clearly unwell guy that has great taste in pants, I guess. At the helm. Cuba is like... I want to tell you, in 40 years, Cubans are going to be the victims of anti-Semitism.

Right. These motherfuckers ascribe these magical qualities. These Cubans are always these sneaky little people who are trying to always get one up on people. That's the thing. Plus, it's communist, so that doesn't help the case against the people. Well, I mean, it actually acknowledges in this article that whatever this is, if it is pulse microwave technology, if that is what this indeed is, then there are no signs that the u.s government has the same technology because right here it says the u.s national security agencies have a problem

a program underway to develop effective countermeasures they are currently looking into what it might take to build a device that can cause brain injury similar to those which have been observed in havana syndrome patients as part of that effort scientists at a military laboratory are planning on exposing primates to pulsed microwave radiation and studying their brains dude if that happens i swear to god we have to march on the fucking monkey cages that's it absolutely no moss dude we're gonna there's gonna be like another cold war and we're all gonna be walking around like we just had a fucking stroke because like this got out of hand and everybody's brain just got microwaved even more so than they already are i mean like well okay let's take this like piece by piece

like okay you're gonna tell me that the uS. government does not have a weapon that can cause similar brain injuries, but Russia and even more, you know, extra... North Korea does. People believe any goddamn thing. It's incredible. I mean, and then, like, another part of this that I think is interesting. And then, like, another part of this that I think is interesting, you know, it goes back and talks about the two women who we heard from earlier who were, like, in the hotel room on the couch, you know, who heard the ringing in their ears and had swollen lymph nodes. One of them, in November 2019. It's called playing in a punk band. with it right in november 2019 one of them adams who lives in virginia she was walking her

dog with a friend when she noticed that an suv was parked near her house and that a man on the other side of the street seemed to be following her as she stood across from him she felt an intense pain in her head which made her double over she also heard a sharp high-pitched ringing noise which was completely different from the sound she heard in london adams friend heard it too and felt the pressure in her head though not as acutely adams reported the incident to white house security officials this time they were very concerned robert o'b, the new national security advisor. In this story, there's been like four national security advisors because Trump couldn't hold on to any of them.

He just swapped them out every week. He thought that high-level officials like him, cabinet members, were relatively safe, but that other government employees, special assistants, schedulers, diplomats, who had access to valuable information by the nature of their jobs were the main targets of whoever or whatever was causing the syndrome. In 2022, Adrian Banks visited the doctors at University of Pennsylvania. They found suspected scar tissue and damage to the ear, possibly caused by significant sinus and ear infections. More recently, Banks has been diagnosed as having hearing loss

and told a colleague, I have ringing in my ear and pressure changes. I have migraines frequently. I get dizzy. I'm still struggling. You know, I will say this. I do have this weird inner ear thing, and I didn't have it before I went to Havana in 2016.

So maybe they thought i was working for the state department too maybe they did um i mean honestly though i don't know how you would um disaggregate all i mean because like what i'm thinking reading this if you're a government employee you spend like 18 hours of your day on a phone in front of a screen even more than we do and we're you know obviously terminally online like they have to be on devices at all times on the phone talking into the phone like who's to say some of this isn't in some way like they're not just like you know spending way too much time looking at screens and then before you know it they've developed a mass hysteria psychogenic

illness where they think like government agents from russia are following them around and it's it's just like what it really is is a like sublimated paranoia about the fact that they're living in an empire that makes no sense anymore can't even justify his own existence like bro it's like it's like basically what it is is 16 russia russia gators with many years disease it's like what this all amounts to for me i really do love the idea that like the little you know like havana the underdog that's been picked on by the empire has figured out this like sneaky way to give like these bad people at the state department brain disease i like that narrative oh yeah i don't buy it i think i think much more likely is either a mass hysteria or b uh the cia is making these people cannon fodder so they can test out these type of weapons

themselves but but but using it also to play that ninth dimensional chess where they blame it on the cubans because like it's 19 it's the 1960s again or something that's true they are being completely mum about it dude that is hilarious dude that is interesting like if that's the case if that is truly the case then that means that like these two employees that we've you know heard and the one at the very beginning who like collapsed on the white house lawn and was like couldn't speak and was like oh i need a lift like if if that's the case that means and they are some of the worst people in the world they are basically imagine the nightmare of their lives they've got all these weird symptoms going on nobody believes them government bureaucracy completely stonewalls them and

just gaslights them we don't know what you're talking about they see people on their street corners pointing mysterious things at them like dude that's pretty fucking incredible there it is funny it's like the co-ed brother should make a movie with this stuff like these strange men and like men in black suits just like pointing at them on the street and then they're just gonna just collapse that was a that was a weird detail like the lady who collapsed and her friend said she could also feel pressure in her head, but not as acutely. Like, how the fuck? I mean, I'm no expert at, like, pulsed microwave radiation, but, like, if two people are standing next to each other, is there really a way to just exclusively focus on one person

and not the, I don't know, dude. It just seems to me like mass hysteria. There's some holes in this accounting of things for sure yeah yeah i mean the nsc official who fell ill in november 2020 on the white house grounds continues to suffer on occasion from excruciating migraines and cognitive problems including difficulty with his memory what is so incredibly frustrating and demoralizing about the experience is the lack of definitiveness he told a colleague. At the end of the day, I can't prove this happened to me.

But the uncertainty. This is great. But the uncertainty, the derailment, the ongoing effects personally to my career, those are real. The gaslighting. They certainly are real, my man. Jesus. Holy Christ, dude. You know what would be a hilarious revelation in 30 years? All the Lyme disease long haulers actually just had Havana syndrome.

Like the Cubans were actually doing a decades-long program and everybody blamed it on chronic lyme disease but actually it was like everybody's brains were being microwaved and one symptom of that was the mass hysteria of believing you had something that you know i mean one honestly a more believable story would be that the cubans were just like incubating a massive like tick colony and just breeding lyme disease through them and releasing it to like embassies like that would be more believable than a microwave gun i think yeah yeah this is like man grow up this is like fucking cartoon shit i think you're right honestly i think that is the best i dude i think you're right i think the best probably explanation for this is something that some technology the cia devised they're they're using like hapless um government employees

who just lower level bureaucrats right and so forth yeah right as they're sort of guinea pigs and it's it's engendering a mass hysteria i mean i i think it's hilarious because i mean it's just another example of uh i mean the government basically i mean it's just an example of just the complete nihilism of our government you you know? I mean, they just don't give a fuck about anybody. Even if you're on their side, they're like, no, we don't give a fuck about you. What are you fucking... Like, we'll use you. I mean, it's just like them using people to test, you know, MKUltra stuff, you know, hallucinogenic drugs and other things.

They didn't give a fuck who you were. Yeah, it's like there is precedence for shit like this yeah like yeah like that's why i mean i'm not crazy by thinking that's a possibility am i yeah well um i mean we're safe because i mean we didn't make the choices that got us we didn't slip on a banana banana peel and wind up working for the commerce department so um um well so i thought that was a a nice uh fitting end uh to our rambling trip around the world um there is a final destination that you can go visit. This has been a free trip, but if you'd like to pay a little bit

extra for a premium trip, for first class, go to the Trillbillies Patreon. That is patreon.com p-a-t-r-e-o-n.com slash trillbillyworkersparty workers party like i said for a little bit of an upgrade you'll get some premium content uh you'll get to sit in one of those

first class seats where they allow you to nap before the plane takes off and yeah we give you little shooters and you know some acceptable cuisine that's right um so go check our drive for 5 000 too uh it's like that deaf leopard song uh or paula abdul song two steps forward and three steps back come on yeah we're trying to get 5 000 patreons um we get close and then it's like we get like 10 more or 20 more whatever whatever, dump off like cotton. But we are moving towards that goal. So if you'd like to help us, please join in and tell others to do the same. We're pretty close.

I think we're within like 200. So I think you can make that happen. Tell a friend, tell a friend. Let's get there. We've got good things planned. Right. All right. Well, so thanks for listening this

week everybody uh we will have a another trip uh for you next time and until then i guess keep rambling but don't get canceled for it keep on rambling in the free world that's right stay out of havana if you work for the state department that's right all right well we'll see you next time