On September 14, 1901, U.S. President William McKinley died after suffering eight days from a gunshot wound. Anarchist Leon Czolgosz, the shooter, was executed on October 29 of that year. McKinley’s successor was his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, sworn in on the day of McKinley’s death, September Fourteenth.
No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.
George Jean Nathan, The Smart Set (August 1922).
John Calvin returned to Geneva on September 13, 1541, after three years of exile. His subsequent work in church reform and theology became known as Calvinism, and profoundly influenced the course of European and (eventually) American culture, including several concepts of servitude and liberty.
On the same date in 1989, Desmond Tutu led South Africa’s largest march aganst Apartheid.
“The U.S. budget deficit inched closer to $2 trillion after the first 11 months of fiscal year 2026, the Treasury Department reported on Sept. 11.” So begins an article by Andrew Moran, published today in The Epoch Times.
Overall, the fiscal year-to-date budget deficit totaled $1.97 trillion, almost $200 billion higher than the same 11-month span in the prior fiscal year.
Tax receipts were $360 billion last month, bringing this fiscal year’s total to nearly $4.9 trillion. This was slightly lower than the $5.2 trillion posted during the same 11-month span in fiscal year 2025.
Federal spending slowed to $527 billion, with Social Security being the top budgetary item ($141 billion). This was followed by net interest payments ($86 billion), healthcare ($81 billion), and national defense ($72 billion).
Debt-servicing payments overtook Medicare as the federal government’s second-largest fiscal year-to-date expenditure, exceeding $1 trillion in August.
Andrew Moran, “US Budget Deficit Nears $2 Trillion Amid Bond Market Jitters,” The Epoch Times (September 12, 2026).
The largest federal annual deficit in history was $3.1 trillion, recorded in the 2020 budget year. That was the first year of the Covid lockdowns and bailouts.
Socialism is the theory that the desire of one man to get something he hasn’t got is more pleasing to a just God than the desire of some other man to keep what he has got.
H. L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major (1916).
On September 12, 1848, Switzerland — known by endonyms Schweizerische Eidgenoßenschaft (German), Confédération suisse (French), Confederazione Svizzera (Italian), Confederaziun svizra (Romansh), Confoederatio helvetica (Latin) — became a unified federal state with a constitution limiting central government powers and providing decentralized state (canton) power patterned on the U.S. Constitution.
Flock cameras, you may remember, are the traffic cameras integrally linked to an artificial intelligence that tracks car license plates (and thus the cars, and drivers) that come within the cameras’ field of vision.
The company contracts with cities and other governments. To
You know, “to protect us from crime.”
The fear — and I know it, because I fear it — is that this will lead to a total surveillance state where “innocent until proven guilty” has no real meaning. Watched and analyzed, our every action on the roads and sidewalks would potentially become ensnared in Big Brother tyranny.
A somewhat secondary fear is that police and other government workers — or hackers — would be able to access the database/a.i. for reasons of an, uh, extra-legal character.
And that has happened aplenty!
The latest tale comes from Sussex, Wisconsin, where our “public servants” tracked a specific person — Napoleon Jones, a Navy Veteran — after he had recorded a traffic stop that “just didn’t feel right” and had then been arrested and (understandably) filed a complaint.
While it is legal to record a public traffic stop, for some reason cops really don’t like “civilians” to record them.
In the course of reviewing the complaints, Jones’s lawyer discovered that the police had been tracking him through the Flock system.
Before you shout the now common protest of “What the Flock,” remember what we are up against: government workers using the system to defend their own misbehavior.
This is not the transparency we were looking for.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The appearance of virtue may be useful to the guilty; but it is less useful than virtue itself, and is frequently a snare to others.
John Taylor of Caroline, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (Fredericksburg, VA.: Green and Cady, 1814).
On September 11, 1789, Alexander Hamilton was appointed the first United States Secretary of the Treasury.
The date marks quite a few other, perhaps more memorable, events, too. But few Cabinet selections were more consequential to United States history than President George Washington’s appointment of Hamilton.
A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.
Alexander Hamilton, letter to The Daily Advertiser (February 21, 1797).