Pun Salad

Social Security is projected to consume an ever-larger share of America’s national income, mostly thanks to an aging population.

Indeed, demographic change is why the program is bankrupt, with an inflation-adjusted cash-flow deficit of more than $42 trillion.

Yet Senator Elizabeth Warren wants to make a bad situation even worse.

In a blatant effort to buy votes, she is proposing a radical expansion in the old-age entitlement program.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) appeared flustered when a reporter asked if her ethics plan would bar her potential vice president's child from serving on the board of a foreign company.

The Warren campaign singled out fossil fuel companies that "spend freely on influence peddling" when she debuted an ethics policy intended to "end Washington corruption" on Sept. 16. But she fumbled with an answer when asked about whether the policy would apply to her vice president—a hypothetical scenario alluding to Hunter Biden's lucrative appointment to the board of a Ukrainian gas company while Joe Biden served in the Obama administration.

"No," Warren said, before haltingly adding, "I don't—I don't know. I mean, I’d have to go back and look at the details on the plan."

Despite her youth and reported autism diagnosis, the demand for hands-off treatment of Greta and — let’s call it what it is — the outright, downright rudeness and insolence she displayed in New York is yet another highly public exhibit in the downward spiral of manners and protocol that plagues society today.

There was a darn good reason your parents told you when you were growing up to “respect your elders.” To give deference to people in authority. And to honor the office even if you didn’t care for or agree with the man or woman who held it.

Social media have amplified society's cultural upheaval, increasing anxiety and depression in American children.  Adults have foisted the entire globe's problems on a small group of so-called youth activists.  This unprecedented politicization of America's children is causing irrevocable psychological damage.

Vermont is the Petri dish where progressive experiments are easily conducted on children, whether it is widespread displays of Black Lives Matter flags in schools, transgender surgeries for children, or third-trimester abortions.  Youths are encouraged in Vermont to protest, by numerous organizations, teachers, and government officials.  They protest race, sex, guns, nudity, marijuana, and border children.  Currently, there is a week-long protest to rescue the planet from climate change.  

The key to reducing the destruction of the planet is personal responsibility.  Lowering personal consumption, by personal conscience and choice, is the only effective means to constructively alter human behavior — government mandate rarely works.  Instead, those who recklessly thrust terrified children into a manufactured climate "crisis" embrace government as the arbiter of responsibility.  This is the difference between "Live Free or Die" and "Live Green or Die": the first is a call to personal responsibility, the second a threat of totalitarian domination by robotized children.

For now, I appreciate the case Hägglund does make for what he calls secular faith: putting your trust, your devotion not in an afterlife or a next world, but in this life and in this world (5). His other primary emphasis is spiritual freedom: creating systems in which we finite humans can choose what we should do with the limited time we have (12)./p>

Along these lines, when someone says that they have to do something, I’m occasionally reminded of the fierce motto of New Hampshire: “Live Free or Die.” Do I have to do ______? I sometimes want to say, “All I have to do is live free or die.” But there is immense power in what I (or we) choose to do with whatever freedom we have (27).

David Di Maria, associate vice provost for international education at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, told The PIE that there is a risk that information gleaned from social media for immigration purposes might be misconstrued.

“Any time information is taken out of its original cultural and historical context there is definitely potential for misunderstandings to occur,” he explained.

He pointed to a domestic example: “Many outside of the US would be alarmed to view a social media posting containing the phrase, ‘live free or die,’ but within the US, these words are understood as the official state motto of the state of New Hampshire,” he said.