Watch your thoughts; they lead to attitudes.
Watch your attitudes; they lead to words.
Watch your words; they lead to actions.
Watch your actions; they lead to habits.
Watch your habits; they form your character.
Watch your character; it determines your destiny.
Modern society is in dispute over the value of chivalry. Chivalry originally referred to the medieval knight’s code of honor but today references a range of – usually male – behaviors, from courtesy to overprotectiveness. Some see it as the mindset of elite warriors, glorifying violence and demeaning women. Others see it as necessary and desirable to protect groups under attack.
Last week, I dyed my hair orange - not red, not the subtle hue of a delicate tiger lily bloom, but bright, shiny traffic cone orange. This is actually not an unusual occurrence. I've dyed my hair various less-than-conservative shades on the color wheel, and invariably I have received contrasting responses that have ranged from "Hey, cool!" to genuine concern from those who believe that I am yet another victim of the devil's crack rock.
What do you think? In today’s society, does a person have to lie or cheat at least occasionally to succeed?
The question isn’t whether occasional liars and cheats sometimes get away with dishonesty; we all have to agree with this. The question is whether you believe people can succeed if they're not willing to lie or cheat.
Nearly every country in the world has a central bank – a public institution that manages a country’s currency and its monetary policy. And these banks have an extraordinary amount of power. By controlling the flow of money and credit in a country, they can affect economic growth, inflation, employment, and financial stability.
These are powers that many politicians – including, currently, U.S. President Donald Trump – would seemingly like to control or at least manipulate. That’s because monetary policy can provide governments with economic boosts at key times, such as around elections or during periods of falling popularity.
Our leaders call Alabama’s effective voucher program the CHOOSE Act. There’s some grim irony in that.
Of course, you can choose to pay for private school tuition, whatever your reasons may be.
But it’s not my choice. Or what the families of 730,000 Alabama students want. We pay taxes to support the teachers educating our children in public schools. And we want teachers and staff to have the resources they need to help students thrive.
Yet our leaders plan to divert that money from classrooms into the pockets of wealthy families, in the form of $7,000 tax breaks. More if they have more than one kid enrolled in a private school.
Today marks Holocaust Remembrance Day. Each year, communities and schools plan various events such as reading the names of Holocaust victims and survivors, forums of Holocaust survivor speakers, or panel discussions with historians. These events run through an entire week of remembrance.
Such formal days of remembrance are important. As a sociologist who studies grief and justice, I have seen how these events and permanent memorials can be both healing and inspirational. I will share four reasons why remembrance activities are important.
When American soldiers liberated the Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp in Austria 80 years ago this May, Spanish prisoners welcomed them with a message of antifascist solidarity.
The Spaniards hung a banner made from stolen bed sheets over one of Mauthausen’s gates. In English, Spanish, and Russian, it read: “The Spanish Antifascists Greet the Liberating Forces.”
Both American servicemen and Spanish survivors remember the camp’s liberation as a win in their shared fight against extremism, my research on the Spanish prisoners in Mauthausen finds. They all understood the authoritarian governments of Nazi Germany, Italy, and Spain as fascist regimes that used extremist views rooted in intolerance and nationalism to persecute millions of people and imperil democracy across Europe.
A video of a Las Vegas Tesla dealership that had been set on fire by anti-Elon Musk protesters was posted on March 18, 2025, by an account on X called EndWokeness.
The next day Musk replied to the post, “Some people just want to watch the world burn,” an iconic line from the 2008 Batman film “The Dark Knight.” Alfred, the Wayne family’s faithful butler, says the line to Bruce Wayne – Batman – to describe the motivations behind the Joker’s chaotic acts of violence.
Musk – and Alfred – was right. Some people do, in fact, say they think that society should be burned to the ground. It’s part of a psychological measure political psychologists created called the “need for chaos.”
Prior to becoming pope, he was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, and was the first person from the Americas to be elected to the papacy. He was also the first pope to choose Francis as his name, thus honoring St. Francis of Assisi, a 13th-century mystic whose love for nature and the poor have inspired Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
Today, Christians are celebrating Easter, the day on which the resurrection of Jesus is said to have taken place. The date of the celebration changes from year to year.
The reason for this variation is that Easter always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox.
Albert Einstein said it’s a form of insanity to keep doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result. So, if you want something different, do something different, or change your expectations, or both.
In my own life, I’ve found that adjusting my expectations has made a big difference in my ability to enjoy my life.
A few weeks ago I started learning Irish via an app.
The lessons progress like any foreign language course. Start with food and water and how to get them. Gloine uisce, le do thoil. A glass of water, please.
Step outside and describe the weather. Tá sé grianmhar. It’s sunny. Or Tá sé dorcha agus scamallach. It’s dark and cloudy.
The Republican-led House of Representatives passed on April 10, 2025, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act – or SAVE Act. The bill would make voting harder for tens of millions of Americans.
The SAVE Act would require anyone registering to vote in federal elections to first “provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship” in person, like a REAL ID or a passport.
One of the things that fascinates me about Americans living today is the willingness of many of them to treat immigrants like horse dung. I just don’t get it. No, I’m not saying that they treat people like that directly. I’m saying that they support and even get excited about how the U.S. government treats immigrants like horse dung.
Consider what the U.S. government has done to migrants it has sent to El Salvador. Pursuant to a deal that U.S. officials have entered into with the Salvadoran government that involved payment of $6 million in U.S. taxpayer money, U.S. officials are sending migrants to that country to be incarcerated in a brutal prison in which it is common knowledge that torture and other horrific human-rights abuses are taking place.
President Donald Trump told an NBC interviewer on March 30, 2025 that he was “not joking” about a third term as president, despite such a term being barred by the Constitution.
“There are methods which you could do it,” he said in the interview.
For months, Trump has been hinting – in joking tones – that he’s interested in finding a way to continue in the White House past the legal limit of two terms. But the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution is clear that Trump can’t be elected again. The text of the amendment states:
Frank is a new supervisor who wants to do well. Maria consistently comes in late. When he confronts her, she makes a joke out of it.
Hoping to win friendship and loyalty, Frank is painfully patient with her, but Pat, a conscientious employee, urges him to do more. Soon others begin to come in late, and Pat quits. Frank feels victimized, but he has no one to blame but himself.
Congress may soon consider whether to cut spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the main way the government helps low-income Americans put food on the table. The Conversation U.S. asked Tracy Roof, a political scientist who has researched the history of government nutrition programs, to explain what’s going on and why the effort to reduce spending on SNAP benefits, which can be used to purchase groceries, could falter.
I teach history in Connecticut, but I grew up in Oklahoma and Kansas, where my interest in the subject was sparked by visits to local museums.
I fondly remember trips to the Fellow-Reeves Museum in Wichita, Kansas and the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. A 1908 photograph of my great-grandparents picking cotton has been used as a poster by the Oklahoma Historical Society.
This love of learning history continued into my years as a graduate student of history, when I would spend hours at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum learning about the history of human flight and ballooning. As a professor, I’ve integrated the institution’s exhibits into my history courses.
The Trump administration, however, is not happy with the way the Smithsonian Institution and other U.S. museums are portraying history.
There are two sorts of conservatism.
There’s the kind espoused by the 18th-century British politician Edmund Burke. It emphasizes restraint; reverence for tradition and maintaining political and social order through mutual duty. Laws must prevent mob rule at the bottom and tyranny at the top. Change is acceptable but not revolution. One should work with the world as it is, inside a moral framework aware of human shortcomings.
The U.S. operates one of the largest and most punitive criminal justice systems in the world. On any given day, 1.9 million people are incarcerated in more than 6,000 federal, state, and local facilities. Another 3.7 million remain under what scholars call “correctional control” through probation or parole supervision.
That means one out of every 60 Americans is entangled in the system — one of the highest rates globally.
President Donald Trump unveiled a sweeping new tariff plan on April 2, 2025, to reshape U.S. trade and boost domestic industry.
Framing the announcement as “Liberation Day,” he proposed a 10% tariff on essentially all imports, with steeper rates for major trade partners, including 34% on Chinese goods and 20% on those from the European Union. On April 3, a 25% tariff on all foreign-made cars and auto parts took effect – a move that he says will revive U.S. manufacturing and reset America’s trade agenda.
Over the past ten years, the following question has been posed to me, “Flowers, why in the world does Alabama not have a lottery, and why can’t we receive the revenue from gambling that every one of our surrounding states and almost every state in America thrives on?”
The congressional majority is seeking to extend expiring portions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Relative to sunsetting these tax cuts as provided under current law, the cost of their extension would be $4 trillion over the coming decade—or around $400 billion per year. But, instead of reflecting this reality, the majority is attempting to force the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) to say the fiscal impact is instead zero dollars by using a “current policy” baseline rather than the “current law” baseline that is defined in statute. This approach is unprecedented in the 50 years since the CBO was formed and Congress acted within the current budget framework.
When I read about the capitulation to President Trump by the big law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, I couldn’t help thinking about the capitulation of lawyers in countries like Germany and Chile.
Paul Weiss is based in Washington, D.C. and employs around 1,000 lawyers. Its income last year was around $2.6 billion. Upset that the firm had taken positions not to his liking, Trump targeted the firm with an executive order stating that “the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, and all other relevant heads of executive departments and agencies (agencies) shall immediately take steps consistent with applicable law to suspend any active security clearances held by individuals at Paul Weiss and Mark Pomerantz, pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.”
A young boy was walking with his father along a country road. When they came across a very large tree branch the boy asked, “Do you think I could move that branch?”
His father answered, “If you use all your strength, I’m sure you can.”
By middle school, we’re all taught that the word “democracy” combines “demos,” the Greek word for people, with “kratos,” meaning rule.
Rule of the people.
That doesn’t describe the government we live under.
Alabamians say they want Medicaid expansion. They don’t seem keen on the state’s effective abortion ban. If you let Alabama voters decide whether the state should have a lottery, odds are that it would pass, and it wouldn’t be close.
The United States is no longer a democracy.
At least, that’s the verdict of one nonprofit, the Center for Systemic Peace, which measures regime qualities of countries worldwide based on the competitiveness and integrity of their elections, limits to executive authority, and other factors.
“The USA is no longer considered a democracy and lies at the cusp of autocracy,” the group’s 2025 report read.
It calls Donald Trump’s second inauguration following a raft of criminal indictments and convictions, combined with the U.S. Supreme Court’s July 2024 granting of sweeping presidential immunity, a “presidential coup.”
The 9/11 attacks provided the U.S. government with one of the greatest opportunities in U.S. history to destroy the freedom of the American people. Declaring a “war on terrorism,” federal officials seized upon the crisis to exercise omnipotent powers, purportedly to keep the nation “safe” from the terrorists who were supposedly hell-bent on coming to get us. In the process, the war-on-terrorism racket became as effective in destroying liberty as the war-on-communism racket had done throughout the Cold War.
With the war on terrorism, U.S. officials don’t have to bother complying with constitutional restraints and the restrictions in the Bill of Rights. That’s because the U.S. is considered to be at “war.” Therefore, the executive branch is permitted to do pretty much anything it wants without concerning itself with interference by the other two branches — Congress and the federal judiciary. That’s a perfect recipe for the destruction of liberty.
On March 14, 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order that called for the dismantling of seven federal agencies “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” They ranged from the United States Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America, to the Minority Business Development Agency.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services was also on the list. Congress created the IMLS in 1996 through the Museum and Library Services Act. The law merged the Institute of Museum Services, which was established in 1976, with the Library Programs Office of the Department of Education.
