In 1954, Frank Sinatra was on top of the world. He’d just won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in From Here to Eternity — a comeback role that rescued his career after years of decline and a voice hemorrhage that nearly ended it all.
Hollywood was paying him handsomely again. But there was a problem. The top marginal income tax rate was 92%, and Sinatra was about to watch most of his comeback earnings disappear before a single penny ever hit his bank account.
So Ol’ Blue Eyes did what every major Hollywood star at the time was doing: he set up what was known as a “collapsible corporation.” Continue reading
All over the United States, the streets of our major cities are covered in poop. So exactly what does that say about us? It isn’t as if this is a new problem. As long as human societies have existed, human and animal waste has been a problem. Civilized societies have always found ways to deal with it, while uncivilized societies have always struggled to keep things clean.
The quality of the education that our children are receiving in America’s public schools just continues to go down. At one time, the concern was that not enough students were taking advanced courses. But now we have reached a point where a very large portion of our high school graduates cannot read effectively, cannot write effectively and cannot do basic math effectively.
Okay, parents, how many of you have gone to your local city hall, county commission meeting and petitioned that they work with you to get all schoolbooks removed until proven innocent of brainwashing your children?
It doesn’t happen until the halfway mark. You may remember the single most famous scene in Network, Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet’s take on television news, tabloid culture, corporate takeovers, and the shape of things to come, happening closer to the beginning of the movie. We don’t need to tell you which one we mean: A newscaster named Howard Beale, drunk on prophecy and clarity, rises from his anchor’s desk. Having run down everything that’s wrong with the world outside our windows — unemployment, crime, pollution, a failing economy — the gentleman now has a favor to ask of his viewers. He demands them to temporarily remove themselves from their state of perpetual isolation and become part of the collective chorus, to open their windows and scream into the void. Say it with us. “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!” 
In the dim glow of my easy chair, beneath the spell of classic rock anthems, jazz riffs, and soulful blues, my mind drifts through the labyrinth of a life forged in fire. Sixty-nine years on this spinning rock, and a profound sorrow grips me – not for myself, but for America, for humanity’s squandered promise. We enter this world as innocents, brimming with potential, yet too often we descend into baseness, immorality, and outright evil. What does it mean to be human in a world where the Golden Rule is trampled underfoot, where man’s eternal battle against his fellow man and the merciless forces of nature reveals our deepest flaws and rarest triumphs?
We live in a lowest common denominator society. For the last several decades, virtually every major institution in our society has become less civilized, and that is because our entire population has become less civilized. 20 years ago, a film entitled “Idiocracy” was released. It was about an average American that was selected for “a top-secret hibernation program but is forgotten and left to awaken to a future so incredibly moronic that he’s easily the most intelligent person alive”. It was an incredibly stupid movie, but the truth is that we are living it right now. Did you see the Super Bowl halftime show?
Transhumanist Yuval Noah Harari delivered a deeply unsettling speech at the World Economic Forum. While his remarks contained numerous points that warrant serious examination, for the sake of brevity I will focus on summarizing his overarching philosophy and then directly addressing the section of his speech where he advances a case for eventually granting personhood to 
The latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office show that the Social Security trust will run out of money by fiscal year 2032, which starts in October 2031. 
The Department of Education is getting a bigger budget, less than a year after President Donald Trump ordered the department’s closure.
BRACKETTVILLE, Texas
U.S. Rep. Josh Breechen (R-OK), who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, was interviewed on the “Washington Watch” program Wednesday after participating in a contentious committee hearing. The hearing featured Democrats grilling and lecturing ICE Director Todd Lyons after two anti-ICE activists, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot and killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis with phone cameras recording the incidents. 
But last week – after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got 18 states to ban SNAP purchases of products like soda, candy, and processed snacks – PepsiCo announced price cuts of up to 15% on Doritos, Lay’s, Tostitos, and other Frito-Lay products.