These family-centric films from the ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s will leave you feeling all warm and fuzzy on the inside. Continue reading…

Newmax’s Rob Finnerty and Kari Lake think Mark Kelly needs to be court-martialed for his insurrection video. That sounds reasonable to me, but all of them in the video need to be charged. Their video, suggesting a military insurrection, was very serious, and they could be pushing for a color revolution. We shouldn’t give them […] The post Sen. Mark Kelly of CCP Spy Balloon Fame Needs to Be Court-Martialed appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

The National Guard members who were shot by an Afghan maniac are Andrew Wolfe (24) and Sarah Beckstrom (20). The gunman opened fire with a revolver without cause. He shot the Guard members multiple times in close contact. The victims have survived surgery and remain in critical condition, Pirro said. Beckstrom and Wolfe were sworn […] The post Update on the Two National Guard Members appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

What really happened on the first Thanksgiving? Why do we eat turkey? How long has football been associated with Thanksgiving? Are Americans still honoring the spirit of the holiday?  The Daily Wire’s Morning Wire interviewed historian Melanie Kirkpatrick to get to the bottom of these questions – and more.  According to Kirkpatrick, author of “Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience,” Thanksgiving goes back even before the Pilgrims.  “Many of the European explorers who came to this continent called days of thanksgiving, and of course, the original thanksgivings were called by Native American populations,” Kirkpatrick explained. “The pilgrims, after their first harvest, they gathered their people together and called a day of thanksgiving,” she explained. “And I’ll point out that it’s very wonderful when you consider that half of the pilgrims had died between the arrival of the pilgrims and the day of thanksgiving. But nonetheless, they gave thanks for the blessings of the harvest and for being together. And then, of course, Native Americans joined them.” “There were about 90 Native Americans who joined them, and they celebrated for three days,” Kirkpatrick said. “We know all of that because thanks to two articles, two commentaries by two of the pilgrims.” However, Kirkpatrick said, “a lot of the other stuff we traditionally associate with the pilgrims is not necessarily true.” “There’s a famous painting of the first Thanksgiving, showing the pilgrims having a meal outside. That’s true,” she said. “But if you look at the other items in the painting, not so true. For example, the pilgrims are all dressed in dark colors. And in truth, they wore bright colors, which goes against what we all learned in kindergarten about how the pilgrims dressed.” “Similarly, the Native Americans who were there were depicted as wearing elaborate headdresses, like you’d see in the Plains Indians. But that wasn’t true either,” she said. “They wore maybe one or two feathers.” Did they really eat turkey at the first Thanksgiving? Kirkpatrick says we don’t know what exactly was eaten. However, one of the pilgrims mentions “the great store of wild turkey that was available.” “So they probably had turkey,” she said, adding that they had venison, too.  “We know they had venison because the Indians brought as a gift a bunch of deer that they had killed,” Kirkpatrick said. “That was a standard feature of Thanksgiving Day up through … parts of the 19th century actually.” Turkey became common on Thanksgiving as there were so many wild turkeys in New England, the author said.  “I just saw a flock of turkeys out my window the other day – I live in Connecticut. So they were easy to find,” she said. “Also, they were, by the end of the 18th, early 19th century, they were domesticated, so they were special.” Kirkpatrick added, though, that in New England in the 19th century, the central feature of the Thanksgiving Day meal was actually chicken pot pie. “I know people in New England whose families still have that tradition of having chicken pot pie around the time of the holiday – not necessarily on Thanksgiving Day,” she said. “And as the holidays spread out west, American settlers brought their own food traditions with them. So you find beef being eaten on Thanksgiving instead of turkey, and as settlers from other places came to this country, they brought their own traditions with them, like lasagna and stir fries, curries. So the meal is still evolving.” What do we know about the origins of the official Thanksgiving holiday?  “The early settlers in New England fixed the dates of their thanksgivings by community or by church,” Kirkpatrick said. “And then the governor of the New England colony would name a date.”  The celebrations were very “ad hoc,” she said. But this all changed when the “Mother of Thanksgiving” stepped in to make the holiday official.  “Along came Sarah Josepha Hale, who was the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Magazine, the most popular and most widely read magazine of the early part of the 19th century,” Kirkpatrick said. “She was from New Hampshire, and she adored the thanksgiving holiday, and she decided to try to make it national. She saw it as part of American culture, part of our heritage, and she tried to persuade presidents of the United States to name a Thanksgiving Day.” “Hale used the power of her magazine to write about Thanksgiving and encourage governors to coordinate the date so that they would have the same date,” she continued. “Finally, as the Civil War was approaching, she intensified her campaign. And in 1863, she wrote to Lincoln asking him to name a date when the whole country could celebrate. He did, and in 1863 was the first date that at least part of the country, the North, the Union, celebrated on one day.” “Every president since Lincoln has named a day, an official date of Thanksgiving,” the historian explained. “Interestingly, it wasn’t until 1941 that Thanksgiving became official. Congress passed a resolution naming the fourth Thursday of November the date of Thanksgiving, and President Franklin Roosevelt signed it into law.”  Thanksgiving And Football  Relatively soon after football developed in the United States, it was connected to Thanksgiving.  The tradition of tying football with Thanksgiving started to grow around the 1870s, Kirkpatrick said. “The first football games took place in the late 1860s between Rutgers and Princeton,” she said. “And then there was a college championship game that was played in New York City, and New Yorkers really got into it, and it was played on Thanksgiving Day. So that tradition in New York sets the scene, sets the trend, and other cities followed suit. And then high schools and community groups would have it by the 1890s.” “There was a tradition of having games on Thanksgiving morning, and the guys would go off to the games and the women would stay home and make dinner, and everybody would reconvene in the afternoon and celebrate Thanksgiving,” she said.  How Thanksgiving has evolved  Discussing the evolution of Thanksgiving, Kirkpatrick said the “value has shifted somewhat,” but people still associate the holiday with charity and family and friends.  “It’s not as religious a holiday as it used to be,” she explained. “For the first couple of hundred years, people went to church on Thanksgiving morning, too, before they went to football. But we don’t see that as much. It’s still religious in the sense that if a family is going to say grace before a meal, it’ll be on Thanksgiving.” “But the values of generosity to the poor, for example, have long been associated with Thanksgiving,” she said. “The earliest example I found of that was, I think, 1624. And today, people participate in helping, making sure that the military gets a good Thanksgiving dinner, and prisoners and people who have a hard time affording the meal.” “I think maybe the saddest image in American culture is somebody who has no place to go on Thanksgiving Day,” Kirkpatrick added. “It’s a day that’s associated with family and friendship, as well as food.”

As a product of a high-tech criminal operation, a fake passport just passed a scanner at a major international airport, and the border agent waved the man through. The New Criminal Data Farm Forget the image of a lone hacker in a dark room. The modern forgery operation starts in what looks like a tech startup, a “data farm” with rows of high-end computers. These machines run 24/7, not mining for cryptocurrency, but harvesting millions of identities. This is an industrial-scale identity factory, and its first job is to steal a person. Stealing Your Digital Ghost Before a forger can touch a printer, they need a real identity. They get this in two ways. The first is personal: a convincing phishing email that looks just like an airline update. A frequent traveler, let’s call her “Sarah,” clicks the link, logs in to “check on her flight,” and her entire travel identity, including passport details, is now for sale on the dark web. The second method is massive and impersonal, part of the “breach economy.” Hackers use “digital lockpicks,” such as SQL injection tools, to trick the databases of airlines and even government systems. They methodically extract complete identity profiles, and a single successful breach can yield half a million passport numbers overnight. A Black Market for People This stolen data isn’t just dumped onto a forum. It’s processed. Criminals run the data through the same kind of identity verification software that banks use, creating a “quality control” system for stolen identities. In climate-controlled server rooms, whiteboards show pricing charts. A premium identity might sell for $1,500, but a government employee with security clearances could be worth $5,000. An identity with dual citizenship and a clean credit history? That can fetch $15,000. Shopping for a New Face Forgers shop for these identities on encrypted marketplaces that look shockingly professional. They use the Tor browser to hide their location and pay with Bitcoin. These criminal sites have user ratings, customer support, and fierce competition. The forger isn’t just buying a name; they’re finding a puzzle piece. They use facial recognition software in reverse, searching for a stolen identity whose legitimate photo plausibly matches their client. The most significant risk these forgers face is the “honeypot.” This is a fake, professional-looking marketplace run by the FBI or Interpol, designed to catch buyers in the act. Paranoid criminals even use special software to analyze a marketplace’s behavior, looking for patterns that might suggest it’s a government operation. The Digital DNA Laboratory Once the data is bought, the ones and zeros must be turned into a physical document that can fool a machine. This happens in a “digital workshop,” perhaps in a warehouse in Bangkok, that looks more like a software company than a criminal enterprise. This is where casual crime becomes technical mastery. The team’s primary focus is on the passport’s digital DNA: the Machine Readable Zone (MRZ). That’s the block of text, numbers, and chevrons (<) at the bottom of your passport’s data page. It’s not random gibberish; it’s a highly standardized, complex code containing all your key information in a specific format. From Code to Creation This criminal enterprise has its own “MRZ laboratory”—banks of computers running custom algorithms. Their sole job is to perfectly calculate and encode the stolen data into a new, valid MRZ string. This digital file is the heart and soul of the high-tech fake passport. This perfect digital file is then combined with flawless physical forgery. We’re talking holographic seals created in a clean room, paper with the correct texture and thickness, and ink that reacts appropriately under UV light. It’s a multi-million dollar investment in equipment, all to create a perfect copy that machines and humans will accept as real. A New Breed of Criminal This is the reality of modern, high-stakes forgery. It’s not a small-time criminal with a laminator; it’s a global, industrial-scale operation run by technical masterminds. The battle for identity security is no longer just about a border agent’s trained eye. It’s a high-stakes war over data, algorithms, and multi-million-dollar workshops hiding in plain sight.

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Victor Davis Hanson painted a dire picture of America’s descent into chaos during a Fox News interview Wednesday night, just hours after an Afghan national shot two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C. Hanson, a Daily Signal senior contributor and Hoover Institution senior fellow, told guest host Kellyanne Conway that left-wing leaders have systematically undermined law enforcement and constitutional order. The renowned historian pointed to a disturbing pattern during Donald Trump’s presidency, starting when “retired generals came out and said, he should be removed, the sooner the better.” Hanson cited the chairman of the joint chiefs’ contacting his Chinese People’s Liberation Army counterpart. And he noted, most recently, the six Democrat lawmakers who told members of the U.S. military “you can decide … what’s legal and not legal, and act accordingly to your own wishes.” “A recipe for disaster,” Hanson warned. “A kind of a perfect storm.” Hanson connected this insubordination to current immigration enforcement battles. “We had Gov. [JB] Pritzker, Gov. [Gavin] Newsom, Nancy Pelosi … all saying that state and local law enforcement would confront ICE, and that was anti-constitutional,” he explained. The result? Hanson said that criminals believe “nothing is going to happen to me.” In the wake of Wednesday’s shooting of two National Guardsmen in the nation’s capital, Hanson said this breakdown of societal norms has created “a recipe for an ungodly tragedy.” When asked why Democrats coddle criminals while vilifying law enforcement, Hanson offered a stark assessment: “I don’t think they have a message or an agenda that people favor, so they have to cause total chaos.” He suggested Democrats believe voters will “get into a fetal position and say make it all go away.” Hanson argued that Democrats can’t win on the issues “so they have to create chaos, the violence, the Tesla dealerships are burned, the smutty videos” to generate systemic disruption. He compared it to 2020’s COVID lockdowns, which he said Democrats weaponized against Trump’s “really brilliant first term.” Hanson warned this violence and chaos “is going to keep happening, unfortunately,” as millions of illegal immigrants and prematurely released criminals roam free in American communities. The post Victor Davis Hanson Warns of ‘Recipe for Disaster’ as the Left Embraces Lawlessness appeared first on The Daily Signal.