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  Tony Carper J u s t n o w   · Shared with Public It is with deep sadness I share with you the passing of Paulette Kandel, a longtime friend, colleague, and respected professional in Florida’s emergency management community. Many of you who served in emergency management, emergency preparedness, public safety, and local government across Florida may have known her, worked with her, or crossed paths with her over the years. Some may not have been in touch recently, and I wanted to make sure her passing was known among those who would remember her. I knew Paulette for nearly forty years, and I knew her best during the years she worked with me. For twelve years, she served as my right hand in operations. She was dedicated, committed, smart, kind, and steady. In the emergency management business, those qualities are not decorative. They are essential. When pressure came, when decisions had to be made, when plans had to become action, Paulette was there. She stood on the wall whe...

Social Security is not charity. It is not a handout. It is not a federal party favor tossed from the balcony by some benevolent committee of millionaires with cufflinks and moral anemia. Social Security is earned money. It is deferred wages. It is the promise made to every waitress, mechanic, nurse, truck driver, factory hand, clerk, soldier, teacher, janitor, and small-business grinder who paid into the system for decades and expected the country to keep its word. Now comes the old familiar chorus from the gilded balcony: Social Security is “unsustainable.” Social Security is “going broke.” Social Security must be “reformed.” Whenever the rich start talking about reform, working people should immediately check their pockets. Reform, in their mouths, often means the same thing it has meant for fifty years: you get less, they keep more, and the whole thing is wrapped in enough actuarial fog to make theft look like statesmanship. The scandal is not Social Security. The scandal is the wag...

Gross Domestic Product is not just another sterile government statistic released into the bloodstream of cable television and forgotten by lunch. It is the broadest vital sign of the American economy, the closest thing the nation has to a quarterly EKG. It measures the value of goods and services produced across the country, which means it tells us whether the economy is expanding with real force, crawling forward on fumes, or quietly losing altitude while everyone in first class keeps ordering champagne. So when the latest GDP number came in at 1.6 percent, revised downward from the earlier estimate of 2.0 percent, it deserved more than a shrug. A four-tenths miss may sound small to anyone who lives in abstractions, but in an economy measured in tens of trillions of dollars, small percentages are not small. They are aircraft altitudes. They are warning lights. They are the difference between a controlled descent and the first sickening drop. GDP matters because it is not merely a numb...

Andrew Ross Sorkin, in his 60 Minutes piece Sunday night, warned us about the shadow of 1929. But the greater danger is not another 1929 dressed in period costume. It is a modern collapse powered by modern instruments: algorithms, propaganda, political cowardice, and financial machinery designed to make looting look like progress. Every age of speculation arrives wearing a halo. In the 1920s, Wall Street told the common man he could finally own a piece of American prosperity. Buy stocks. Buy on margin. Borrow against tomorrow. Trust the market. The future was electric, mechanized, industrial, and invincible. Then the bill came due, and the rich did what the rich usually do when the building catches fire: they found the exits first. Today the pitch has been updated for the age of artificial intelligence, private credit, crypto, retirement-account experimentation, and financial products so opaque they might as well be written in Sanskrit by a committee of squid. The language is smoother ...

  Horatius at the Gate Then out spoke brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate: “To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his Gods.” Memorial Day is the day America stands before the gate. Not a ceremonial gate. Not a gate of marble, bunting, speeches, and polished phrases. The real gate. The hard gate. The narrow passage where free nations are tested, where history presses forward with fire in its hands, and where someone must decide whether to stand or yield. Macaulay gave us Horatius, the captain who stood against fearful odds while Rome trembled behind him. He did not stand because death was beautiful. Death is not beautiful. He did not stand because war was glorious. War is mostly mud, terror, smoke, torn flesh, ruined families, and old men explaining why young men had to die. Horatius stood because something behind him was worth defending: the ashes of his fathe...