Fanfare, bandiere, parate.
Uno stupido è uno stupido. Due stupidi sono due stupidi.
Diecimila stupidi sono una forza storica.
Fanfare, flags, parades.
Leo Longanesi, Parliamo dell’Elefante: Frammenti di un Diario (1947). With a few revisions, this came to be misattributed to Franz Kafka.
One fool is one fool. Two fools are two fools. Ten thousand fools are a historical force.
On September 3, 1914, Dixy Lee Ray was born. Her stint as governor of the State of Washington was a controversial one, as she economized in startling ways, and proved largely unsympathetic to environmentalist politics. Indeed, she later wrote Trashing the Planet, which took on trendy “solutions” to environmental problems, based in no small part on her own experience and perspective as a scientist. She was an early critic of the developing “global warming” pseudo-“consensus.”
You can say that again!
“A crowd of about 300 invited guests — a mix of elected officials and dignitaries, along with Democratic supporters,” reported CNN, “watched Biden speak” at Independence Hall in Philadelphia “from behind panes of bulletproof glass.”
The president said some other things with which I agree.
“There is no place for political violence in America. Period. None. Ever,” Mr. Biden intoned. Well, “ever” goes just a tad too far. After all, the American Revolution was violence. But generally, yes, Joe is right that “we can’t allow violence to be normalized.”
Which is why he should call out the political violence that occurred throughout the summer of 2020 as well as that of January 6th.
Biden spoke against “the politics of grievance” and those who “obsess about the past.” But golly gee whiz, does Biden really want to alienate his Critical Race Theorist fan base?
“You can’t love your country only when you win” an election, he argued. Hasn’t that been an equal opportunity foible for both Rs and Ds — considering the 2016 as well as 2020 presidential results!
Losing the battle for the economy of the nation, Mr. Biden is looking for Campaign 2022 to be a “battle for the soul of the nation.” But making sweeping attacks about all who favor Trump being “semi-fascists” has led even Democrats like U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan to criticize Biden.
“They refuse to accept the will of the people,” the president said of so-called MAGA Republicans. “They embrace political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.”
Sadly, that applies to both parties as well.
“Get engaged,” Biden implored the audience. “Vote, vote, vote!”
Well . . . maybe just vote once.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Somehow people always forget that it’s much easier to install a dictator than to remove one.
Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming (2015), Foreword, p. xiv.
September 2 marks the 1839 birth of American economist and reformer Henry George. George is most famous for his 1879 treatise, Progress and Poverty, but made many other contributions, including advocacy of the secret ballot and his able economic policy polemic Protection or Free Trade (1886).
Years ago, Gibson’s Bakery won a judgment of $38 million against Oberlin College because of the Ohio school’s role in harassing the bakery and defaming it as “racist” after a 2016 shoplifting incident.
The shopkeeper of the family-donuts, racist, college bakery, Allyn Gibson, caught students trying to steal wine. They attacked him. They were black.
For whatever reasons, students on campus chugged into uproar mode, accusing the bakery of racism as if it prefers to be robbed only by persons of pallor.
The shoplifters eventually pled guilty and acknowledged that the bakery is not racist.
The students’ irrationality was bad enough. Then Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo chimed in, working with protesters to defame the bakery. The school canceled its contract with Gibson’s and would claim in legal filings that the bakery’s “archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests.”
In 2017, the bakery sued Oberlin and won.
Oberlin has been appealing. Now it has lost in the Ohio Supreme Court, which refused to hear the appeal.
Only the U.S. Supreme Court can save Oberlin now. But according to the Legal Insurrection blog, the chances that it will even consider the case are slim.
Is $38 million the right award? Perhaps Oberlin should pay Gibson’s $50 million. Or a cool billion.
But Oberlin deserves to be punished just as Gibson’s deserves to be compensated.
May this finally happen.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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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).
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.
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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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.