Eight years ago in the summer of 2018, an automated monitoring system at the US government’s Social Security Agency flagged a questionable transaction and immediately forwarded it to a human worker at the agency to investigate.
It took more than a year for a Social Security employee to look into it. And it was painfully obvious – Social Security was paying too much ‘supplemental security income’ to the recipient. Continue reading
WE are in a war. Man has been in that war since day one. Just studying history shows that there are people who want to make all the rules, who want to control what we eat, if we eat, what we believe, and even how long we get to exist on this mortal coil.
Look at the wars from the earliest recorded time. The world is divided into three groups of people, those of us who want to live equally with everyone else, those who want to run the world and decide who can live and who can die, and those who don’t care enough to give a tinker’s damn.
So, it is the first two groups who matter. The third isn’t even good enough for cannon fodder. (Ah, yes. This is just my humble opinion, not edicts spelled out in media.)
We from group one (yes, I identify with the real white hats) have been fighting this war since high school. We saw that the school system was a second-group factor and fought it with words – all we had as ammunition. Continue reading
“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.” ~ Rumi – 13th-century Persian poet.
It’s early, even for me. I read the opening quote before falling asleep, and it stayed with me all night. The metaphor didn’t hit me until about 3 AM. So here I am. Rising from a fitful slumber with that quote echoing in my mind, and unsure where it could lead.
Rumi’s poem is a passionate plea for spiritual awakening, mindfulness, and conscious living, using the transition from night to day as a metaphor for moving from spiritual ignorance to divine awareness. I also see a connection to our naivete – and that’s today’s theme.
As my coffee and I scan through 125 emails, wading through the spam, I click on a response to a recent post about socialism. A dear friend reminds me that it’s our responsibility to choose capable leaders and protect the institutions and checks that keep the government accountable. The article, titled “The Promise and the Trap” [link], addresses “the creeping stranglehold of socialist ideology in America.” I couldn’t agree more. That’s its central theme. This commentary comes into focus. Continue reading
Element5 Digital/Unsplash.com
Schools are ending gifted and talented programs. They will no longer separate kids by ability.
Why?
To address “inequity.”
“This is so misguided,” education researcher Michael Petrilli said. “These equity people say, ‘Oh, we’re against gifted education.’ Continue reading
Experts have revealed how AI could really destroy humanity, and it won’t be nearly as cinematic as in The Terminator (pictured)
A top artificial intelligence safety researcher sparked alarm this week after he quit his job and warned that the technology could ‘kill us all’ by the end of the decade.
Jacob Coxon, who helped train the latest versions of AI at San Francisco-based Anthropic, urged the public to ‘not underestimate’ its power – particularly if it becomes ‘superintelligent‘. Continue reading
The most serious threat to American liberty today is not a single cabal but a convergence of three powerful institutions — the national-security bureaucracy, the global technology industry, and the administrative regulatory state — that together create a system of soft despotism that is far more durable than any elected official.
This convergence is not a Trump invention, but it has not been dismantled by President Donald Trump either; in important ways, it was accelerated, normalized, and in some cases weaponized during his presidency, even as he rhetorically fought it. The result is a rapidly emerging single “new American order” imposed by a master plan and America’s technocrats, and something more insidious and more likely: a dystopian drift that could indeed end in civil upheaval if citizens lose faith that the system can be reformed from within. The danger is not that one man is a puppet; it is that the machine is stronger than any man, and that the American people have not yet decided whether they want to break it or merely curse it.
There comes a time in the life of a country when a man ought to stop listening to what the politicians say they are doing and start looking carefully at what they are actually doing. Continue reading
In 1902, John D. Rockefeller established the General Education Board with a founding donation that dwarfed anything previously committed to American education by a private individual. The stated mission was the promotion of education in the United States without distinction of race, sex, or creed. The actual mission, documented in the Board’s own publications and internal correspondence, was considerably more specific.
Within a decade of its founding, the General Education Board had inserted itself into the curriculum design, teacher training, textbook selection, and institutional funding decisions of public schools across every region of the United States — and the education that emerged from that process looked nothing like the one it replaced. Continue reading
Every once in awhile – I want to post something that ignores all of the political stuff that we are having to face each day…
Watch 5-year-old prodigy Angelica Nero step up to the studio microphone to record Frank Sinatra’s legendary classic, “My Way“.
From hitting the iconic high notes to delivering raw emotion beyond her years, Angelica gives everything in this special recording session.
“What if the rights and principles guaranteed in the Constitution have been so distorted in the past 200 years as to be unrecognizable by the Founders? What if the government was the reason we don’t have a Constitution anymore? What if freedom’s greatest hour of danger is now?” ~ Andrew P. Napolitano
What’s the point in celebrating the Constitution one day a year if we permit the government to violate it the other 364?
September 17 marked the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, a document designed not merely to establish a government but to restrain it.
Yet restraint is in increasingly short supply.
Across the political spectrum, Americans continue to tolerate abuses of power so long as those abuses are carried out by the “right” people, against the “wrong” people, or in the name of some emergency deemed too important to question.
That is how constitutional government dies! Continue reading
Last month, Paul Sperry at Real Clear Investigations revealed that the “Fiqh Council of North America issued a legal ruling (fatwah) in coordination with the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America” that allowed Muslim charitable contributions or Zakat to be used for political donations.
Sperry estimated that this could unlock a “potential political war chest of more than $140 million a year in mosque and other donations” for pro-Islamic candidates.
While the political implications of that ruling are quite significant, what is revealing is the basis on which the ruling was made. The Fiqh Council based this ruling on the precedent of “mu’allafah qulūbuhum” which is translated as “for those whose hearts are attracted ˹to the faith”. The specific application of this lay in the past when Mohammed was just beginning his conquests and bribed various tribal chieftains to become Muslims or to ally in his reign of terror. Continue reading
Come what may over the next decade, should I be so fortunate to live so long, I won’t go quiet if things take a turn for the worse – Heaven Forbid – and our nation’s commies take all three branches of government into their destructive, filthy hands. I won’t back down.
I want to thank William Shakespeare for the sub-title; I honestly couldn’t find anything more fitting. It says it all.
Isn’t that the purpose of the title? It entices us to read, listen, and watch more because we’re interested in what it promises. It piques our curiosity.
Shakespeare’s play is a romantic comedy about two couples, but the plot is almost beside the point. The title does the work. It promises drama, confusion, conflict, and entertainment before the curtain even rises.
“I will undertake no unjust wars; will enter into no sinful alliances; will not oppress my subjects by excessive taxation, to support extravagance in my court. What is good for nothing or evil in its operation, what is wicked in its principle, and what would lead me away from righteousness and truth, I will never set before my eyes.” ~ Adam Clarke (1760 – 1832) commentary of Psalms 101:3, “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes.”
The U.S. government has not only entered into a sinful alliance with the State of Israel; it has enthusiastically allowed itself to become an enslaved serf of the State of Israel in fighting a multitude of unjust wars. For all intents and purposes, when it comes to foreign policy, Benjamin Netanyahu is the President of the United States, no matter who sits in the Oval Office.
It was Netanyahu that persuaded Donald Trump into going to war with Iran. Everybody in the world knows it. Trump’s unjust war of aggression against Iran is not only making the Middle East more unsafe, but it is also taking the entire world to the precipice of war, crashing the global economy and even destroying our own country. Continue reading
The Senate crawls back from recess on September 14. The marble hallways will fill up. The cameras will click. And the question hanging over the chamber is the same one America has been asking all summer: Where’s Mitch?
Not “how’s Mitch.” Not “what’s Mitch thinking.” Just… where.
Because the longest-running turtle in Washington has been MIA since June. Last recorded vote: June 11. Hospitalized June 14 after a fall. Then weeks of silence. Then rehab. Then “recovering at home.” Then more silence. Meanwhile the rest of the country is expected to clock in on time. Continue reading
Vietnam veterans affected by Agent Orange chemical exposure pose for a photo with the Rivetin’ Rosie’s Project at the Utah Capitol on Feb. 12, 2026, the day they were recognized by the Utah Legislature. Hannah Turk, a Utah Agent Orange Veterans Foundation board member, is at the far left. (Photo courtesy of Hannah Turk)
Agent Orange Awareness Day, though not an official federal holiday, is observed in the Beehive State and the rest of the country each year on August 10.
That specific date was not arbitrarily chosen. According to the Blinded Veterans Association, the U.S. began spraying Agent Orange in Vietnam on August 10, 1961.
Although its use was intended to save American lives, the herbicide turned out to be extremely harmful to humans and the environment. That was because Agent Orange contained the toxic chemical dioxin. Continue reading
The first shots were fired in Ohio, although for several weeks afterward nobody could agree upon what they meant. There had been violence before, enough of it that Americans had grown accustomed to the vocabulary devised to make violence sound less frightening than it was. A shooting outside a courthouse became an “altercation.” An attack upon a federal facility became an “isolated incident.” A confrontation between opposing political demonstrations became a “disturbance.”
Armed groups that appeared in the streets were described according to the sympathies of whoever was doing the describing, so that one faction’s militia became another faction’s domestic terrorists, while one side’s revolutionaries were another side’s defenders of democracy. There had been assassinations and attempted assassinations, attacks upon police, assaults upon politicians, riots in several cities, and occasional gun battles between organizations whose names were becoming familiar to Americans who had once known little about political extremism. Yet the government and the press had been reluctant to use the one phrase that might have forced the country to confront the truth.
That phrase was civil war. The words carried too much history. They belonged to photographs of dead boys in gray and blue uniforms, to burned towns and amputated limbs, to Appomattox and Gettysburg, to a generation that had once believed its political differences were so fundamental that bloodshed was preferable to compromise. Americans of the twenty-first century preferred to believe they were more civilized than that. They were about to discover that civilization is not something a people possesses permanently. It is something a people must continually choose. Continue reading
Jeffrey Bennett
July 2, 2002 ~ I am a constitutional citizen of this sovereign nation, a voter, and a taxpayer. I served honorably in the armed forces of this nation for 20 years through war in Asia, police actions in Grenada, Panama, and the action in Kuwait/Iraq. I retired an enlisted man 10 years ago and have worked in the private sector, running my own business. I generate a good amount of money for the various governments I have empowered through my continued support, those being Federal, State & Local. I am neither an idiot nor a coward. I believe in our blessed savior, Jesus Christ. I have raised four children during all of this. My point is that I have comported my life as was expected of me by the society we have forged together. There are many who have not, most notably, your selves. Continue reading
July 12, 2021 ~ Something is terribly wrong with the Education ‘Village‘ of America – the complete breakdown of America’s government controlled education system through indoctrination and Socialism. Our children have become truly ‘damned‘ and will have little chance to truly succeed in this nation – UNLESS – the system can be overturned.
This commentary was so-named because of then First Lady, Hillary Clinton’s comment, “It takes a village to raise a child.” In addition to my feelings that our children are truly ‘damned‘ as long as this system is allowed to continue.
The ‘Village‘ is the place that I would not wish to be in today. I was privileged to participate in one of the last non-socialist school systems. Hell – I also know that the conversion had already begun, but I had great teachers. At 78 years of age – I can still picture and name over 90% of those whose care I was placed into. Continue reading
The United States nation faces threats that extend beyond the familiar divide between Democrats and Republicans. Increasingly, two ideological movements — one on the far left, one emerging on the populist right — share a willingness to undermine the principles that have long defined the American experiment. Continue reading
This well-known rhetorical flourish at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence needs closer consideration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” it states.
Look through history and you’ll find little evidence that most people experienced these self-evident truths. Until the West led the way in abolishing it, slavery was an accepted historical institution. Notre Dame Professor Keith Bradley once estimated that “in Rome and Italy, in the four centuries between 200 B.C. and A.D. 200, perhaps a quarter or even a third of the population was made up of slaves.” Continue reading