Gadfly

Whatever Happened to Local Control?

February 11th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

When the Free Market Gets Very Expensive for the Little Guy

About 15 years ago we spent two winters in Sun City, Arizona when the right-wing Republican legislature was playing a child’s game of “King of the Hill,” passing all kinds of junk aberrant bills about abortion, sex, gender, free speech, race, voting, and playing “doctor.” It was a constant source of entertainment because we didn’t have to live long-term with the craziness. After all,…

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Cauldron of Chaos

February 2nd, 2021

By Ed Raymond 

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Are We Heading for ‘Double, Double, Toil and Trouble’?

Shakespeare’s MacBeth is a play about chaos that results when a person in the human chain of being rises above his level of competence. In our society we call it the Peter Principle. We have just finished four years of chaos with many more on the horizon because we elected a man to the highest office…

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Bedlam in the White House

January 20th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

The Ku Klux Klan Don’t Wear Hoods Anymore

In a December column I wrote the following: “We are in the middle of dangerous times. We are on a knife’s edge of losing ‘it’.” “‘It’ stands for country.”

On January 13, the day the House impeached Donald J. Trump, I saw 2,000 National Guard troops trying to sleep on the well-lit marble floors of our Capitol near their rifles and equipment, taking a break from guarding it from Trumplican…

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The Chain of Being

January 13th, 2021



By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Where Do We Belong in God’s Universe?

In the 16th century the dominant religious “theory” was that everything on the planet from God down to minerals and rocks were links in the Elizabethan Chain of Being. The earth that came from the disintegration of rocks was at the bottom of the chain. At the top of the chain was God. It progressed downward to angels, demons (fallen angels), stars, moon, kings and queens, princes, nobles, men, wild animals,…

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Ancestors: Anamensis to Afarensis to Thomas

January 11th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

The Scientific Method, Darwin, and Religious Erosion

People who study us and our surroundings use the five following methods to come to a conclusion, basing it on this scientific method: hypothesis, observation, prediction, experiment, and confirmation.

As an example, the experts in past pandemics used this scientific method to determine that a vaccine will work against COVID-19. They observed what the virus did to people. They predicted it was similar…

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The Gadfly: Autopsy of a Dying Party

December 27th, 2020

The Gadfly: Autopsy of a Political Party

Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Why did Trump win Robeson County?

The southeastern corner of North Carolina is a low-lying area in one of the poorest sections of the state. It is the home of the Lumbee Indians, the largest Indian tribe east of the Mississippi River. The town of Lumberton is near the center of the county. It is poor farming country, and is heavily wooded yet rather swampy.

I became rather familiar with the area when our battalion…

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A Microcosm—Wyoming

December 17th, 2020

The Love Of Dogs--And The Super Rich And Superpoor Of Teton County

President Harry Truman is a favorite of mine. He read a lot of history books, threatened to punch a music columnist criticizing his daughter Margaret’s singing, kept a sign on his Oval Office desk: “The Buck Stops Here,” and insisted: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” Almost all presidents had dogs. Research at Duke University on dog intelligence points out that over thousands of years dogs…

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America on Hospice

December 4th, 2020

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Mission Possible

President Joe: your first important mission, if you choose to accept it, is to ask 90 million American registered voters why they didn’t vote in 2020. Then tell Chairman Tom Perez and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to wake up from political dementia and call each non-voter for an exclusive interview. Why didn’t we have 50 million more voters? We had an election that really didn’t move us on the arc to FDR’s “Four Freedoms”:…

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Freedom or Free-For-All?

November 14th, 2020


Is There Personal Liberty? When Does It Begin And End?

It was bound to happen to an inquiring mind. Scientists around the world are monitoring sewage for outbreaks of COVID-19 because victims of the virus have had the very infectious virus in their feces. At least 65 universities in this country are taking samples of sewage daily from dormitories and campus sites to see if the virus is present. When tests prove their existence, the residents of that sewage system are tested to see who…

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A Two Minute Political Fly-By

October 21st, 2020

PQ: “With this COVID-19 pandemic, we are already in another Great Depression. Soon we will have millions of citizens living in ‘Trumpvillas’ when they are evicted or foreclosed on.”

by Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Where Was That Messenger From?

During the vice-presidential debate, there were three beings on stage who tried to obey the established rules that responses to questions must be limited to two minutes: two were moderator Susan Page and candidate Kamala Harris, the other…

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