Propaganda is of no use to the politician unless he has something to say which the public, consciously or unconsciously, wants to hear.
Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928).
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Edward Bernays
Author: Redactor
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Constitution Day
Slovakia celebrates a Constitution Day on September 1, for the Constitution passed by the Slovak National Council on September 1, 1992.
The Slovaks place their rights provision early in their document, like most American states, and not as amendments, as in the Constitution of the United States of America.
The state government of California spends a lot of money. But how much and on what?
That information has, apparently, been a state secret.
Until now.
For years, a watchdog group called OpenTheBooks.com has been working to discover and disclose government spending in the United States. Its efforts were enabled by 2006 legislation sponsored by Senators Tom Coburn and Barack Obama to establish a website, USASpending.gov, that details federal expenditures. Until his death in 2020, Coburn was the honorary chairman of OpenTheBooks.com.
The group reports that in 2021, it filed some 47,000 Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain data on some $12 trillion of government spending. So they’ve been busy.
California is now the fiftieth state whose spending is being made public in detail.
The state had long resisted requests for info about its spending. State controller Betty Yee said that it was impossible to comply with such requests because California has no central database of government payments. Compiling the data would be too darn hard.
The auditors at OpenTheBooks.com performed the chore instead, filing requests for public records with each of 469 state-government entities.
According to founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski, “It was a historic knockdown, drag-out dogfight that lasted a decade and spanned the last two California controllers. Since 2005, the state invested $1.1 billion in accounting software, yet still couldn’t publish a complete record of state spending.”
Various budgetary items will doubtless prove controversial — now that they are publicly known.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Noam Chomsky
As you’d expect, this whole structure of decision making answers basically to the transnational corporations, international banks, etc. It’s also an effective blow against democracy. All these structures raise decision making to the executive level, leaving what’s called a “democratic deficit” — parliaments and populations with less influence.
Noam Chomsky, “The New Global Economy,” How the World Works (2013).
Not only that, but the general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.
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Montessori
On August 31, 1870, educator Maria Montessori was born.
August 31 serves as Independence Day for Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, and Trinidad and Tobago.
The safety and efficacy of the coronavirus vaccines has been disputed from the beginning.
What this usually means is that those of a skeptical mind challenge the confidence of the pro-vax mantra — “safe and effective” ad nauseam — and, when they find stats that run counter to this official position, they publicize those stats. Then, major media outfits make a few carping criticisms of the new studies and quickly proceed to assuredly re-state as fact the original and now more-dubious propaganda.
Meanwhile, social media censors dissidents. And when more studies come out casting grave doubt on either the safety or the efficacy of the new drugs, those receive little public attention.
How Alex Berenson was treated is a good example of the methods of the orthodoxy. Take Wikipedia’s judgment: “During the coronavirus pandemic, Berenson appeared frequently in American right-wing media, spreading false claims about COVID-19 and its vaccines,” the article confidently runs. “He spent much of the pandemic arguing that its seriousness was overblown; once COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, he made false claims about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.”
False claims! In olden times — why, it seems like just a few years ago — a major news and history resource would not baldly call some contentious matter “false” or “true.” It would state the claims and then let the counter-claims carry their own weight.
In the case of “the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines,” though, it has become clear: their efficacy wanes, diminishing quicker with each dose, leaving the unvaccinated with proportionally fewer infection and spreading events than the “boosted.”
And as excess deaths and inexplicable demises increase around the world we are “not allowed” to state this in many public forums.
No way to run a health crisis.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Edward Bernays
Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.
Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928).
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Lenin Shot
On August 30, 1918, Fanny Yefimovna Kaplan shot and seriously injured Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Though certainly justifiable on some primary level — evil killers with power probably deserve to be killed in turn — this assassination attempt, like most such, had disastrous consequences, prompting the mass arrests and executions known as the Red Terror.
August 30, 1999, saw East Timor’s referendum vote for independence from Indonesia succeed.
Two podcast conversations recently went viral, capturing the attention of millions.
The first was on Triggonometry, where New Atheist luminary Sam Harris let his Trump Derangement Syndrome swing free, sans rational hinges. The second was on The Joe Rogan Experience, where Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg fielded a question regarding the same story — Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Mr. Harris called the Internet’s suppression of the Hunter laptop news “an eleventh-hour” way to rid America of a completely selfish, utterly unpredictable president — Donald Trump. “At that point,” Harris elaborated, talking about the run-up to the 2020 elections, “Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement: I would not have cared.”
The linkage between Hunter’s racket and Joe Biden himself did not seem to concern him, either.
The suppression of the laptop story by Twitter was also echoed on Facebook. The week after Harris’s unhinged rant, Joe Rogan queried Mark Zuckerberg, who calmly explained that the FBI warned Facebook against “Russian disinformation” and how his social media company then algorithmically suppressed the story without ever actually censoring the story as such.
While Zuckerberg absolved the FBI of specifying “Hunter Biden” as the keywords, and the FBI denies any ability to direct a company to suppress any “disinformation,” that’s hardly pertinent: apparently it’s easy for Leviathan Government to get Behemoth internet companies to play along.
This is an important issue upon which to stake future reputations. Comedian Bill Maher sided with principle and (yes) liberalism against leftoid-insiderish conspiracy on his show, while talking to Rob “Meathead” Reiner. The former All in the Family star professed ignorance of any of the pertinent facts.
Which is precisely what social media’s censorship and algorithmic suppression aimed to accomplish. But for more voters than just Meathead.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Garry Kasparov
The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.