Using all your strength

  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.”

The age of deilocracy

  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.

U.S. swing toward autocracy doesn’t have to be permanent – but swinging back to democracy requires vigilance, stamina and elections

  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.”

Tesla and terrorism nonsense

  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.

Trump administration seeks to starve libraries and museums of funding by shuttering this little-known agency

  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.