Gadfly

A Covey of Vultures

December 23rd, 2019

There Are Old Bold Pirates and New Bold Pirates

I’m transposing a phrase by E. Hamilton Lee and General Chuck Yeager, both pilots of renown, who used the phrase: “There are old pilots and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots” in the old business of flying airplanes to the new business of swindling money out of healthcare consumers. The first Golden Age of Piracy in history lasted between 1650 and 1730 was led by a back-alley list of glamorous despicable pirates by the…

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Can This Eagle Be Saved?

December 18th, 2019

Where Are The Best Capitalistic Countries?

A worker and his family in (_______) is automatically covered by a taxpayer-funded universal healthcare program equal in quality to any on Planet Earth. Twenty percent of the costs of their healthcare does not go to paperwork, insurance companies, doctors out of network, agents haggling and denying exorbitant bills, and fancy boutique buildings. The young children in the family attend a highly professional and ethnically diverse public daycare…

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American Dream—or Nightmare?

December 11th, 2019

It’s Time For Pitchforks
I have been told my French ancestors lived in Normandy in the last half of the 18th Century and some of them used pitchforks for a living. I often wonder if any of them took part in the storming of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789, an act which started the French Revolution. The Bastille was a medieval stone fortress turned into a prison by the French monarchy to hold political opponents and assorted criminals. The fortress represented royal power and…

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In The Country Of The Blind….

December 4th, 2019

88,633 Reasons Not To Build A Wall
Our Great Leader (a title used by North Koreans for Kim) is demanding that Congress include $5 billion in the 2020 federal budget for the border wall which he promised his rabid constituents Mexico would pay for. If there is something more stupid than building a wall on the Texas border, please let me know. Geographers utilizing the Ground Positioning System (GPS) have determined that the United States has 88,633 miles of tidal shorelines and 12,383…

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Genocide In The U.S.

November 27th, 2019


Race In the 399th Year of Our Civil War
The first black slaves in the U.S. were brought to Virginia shores in 1620. In 399 years we still have not accepted all humans in the “United” States as equal citizens. No doubt we will “celebrate” the 400th year of our Civil War in 2020. We often hear the term “genocide” used in describing the cause of wars in other parts of the world such as Nazi Germany, Rwanda, Bosnia, and the current discussions about votes concerning an old war in…

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A Murder On 5th Avenue

November 20th, 2019

Daily Trump cartoon

King Donald: The Most Dangerous Human In The World
I will never forget a summation about President Donald Trump by a frequent visitor to Mar-a-Lago: “Even his friends don’t like him.” After observing Melania and him for years, I believe his third trophy wife doesn’t like him either. But--that’s life in the New York fast lane. A book called “A Warning” by someone serving in the Trump administration who wishes to remain anonymous, is quite revealing about the character--and…

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Sex-From Asexual To Zygote

November 13th, 2019

Catching Up With The Realities Of Sex
There should be no question that our world has changed when we now have had National Coming Out Days for our gay sons, daughters, relatives, friends, and strangers who are members of the Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender-Queer (LGBTQ) community that now has over a hundred gender identities. And it’s happening all over the world. In May of 2019 Taiwan legalized same-sex marriages, becoming the first Asian country to do so. Over 170,000 people…

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A Colon Rules The Country

November 6th, 2019

President Donald J. Trump: ‘A Picasso of Pettiness, A Shakespeare of Shit’
I am a fan of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, an immigrant from India. He is one of the many reasons I don’t bother going to “Christian” churches on Sunday anymore. His program “GPS” usually contains one of the best sermons about the world situation. On Sunday, October 20 he tore a new orifice in Trump in his first few sentences: “The hallmark of Trump’s foreign policy is a disdain for professionals and…

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​When Republicans Are Very Liberal

October 30th, 2019

Trumpers Are Not Conservatives
According to most dictionaries a conservative is a conservationist who practices or advocates preservation of natural resources. A conservancy is an organization of conservatives whose main drive is to conserve land, fisheries, forests, water, minerals, wildlife, energy, other “natural resources” –--and lots of money. A conservative is a person who tends to favor the preservation of the existing order—and to regard proposals to change with distrust. …

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2020 Needs To Be The Year Of the Woman

October 23rd, 2019

Men Have Screwed Up The World Enough
Women have been under the control of men for four million years since Lucy fell out of an African tree. It has become evident that much of Planet Earth may become uninhabitable in just one generation from now from the transgressions and inactions of men. Men have been in charge for millions of years and have miserably failed their primary duty of protecting the planet and the human race from extinction. It’s time for women around the world to take…

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