Gadfly

A Recycled Coffin

August 14th, 2019

Is The Bottom Going To Fall Out?
The story about the Fargo man who died in his storage unit who remains unclaimed by any family reminds me of thousands of Irish funerals conducted during the Great Potato Famine. Because of the numbers of deaths during those trying times, the Irish held the cost of funerals down by recycling coffins. Everything looked normal while the coffin was lowered into the grave but when it reached the bottom of the grave the bottom of the coffin was fixed to drop…

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​A Gigantic Bush

August 7th, 2019

Ronald Reagan

Humanity has always been on the move. The new science of paleogenetics proves it. Humans have been crossing lands since Lucy decided to climb down from a tree on the African savanna. Every human should read “A World On The Move” in the July National Geographic. We humans don’t have family trees. We are all tiny branches and leaves on the same gigantic single human bush growing out of mother continent Africa.

Genetic scientists can now take a thousandth of an ounce of a…

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​A Country On Oxygen

July 31st, 2019

Hungry Kids, Expensive Views, and A Nutcase In The Oval Office
We are in serious trouble. America is suffering from a world-wide pandemic that has been the downfall of most empires. It’s called greed. One of our numerous billionaires, Howard Schultz, who convinced people that drinking $5 cups of coffee is a great physical and mental boost, wrote this prescient paragraph about money in his book ‘From the Ground Up’: “Money is never about money. It’s about dignity, autonomy, the…

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Women Belong On Mars

July 24th, 2019

Let’s Send Our Best To Mars
In the first place, women live about six years longer than men. There are 43 people in the world known to be at least 110 years old. This may come as a shock, but 42 are women, according to the Global Gerontology Research Group. The University of Southern Denmark’s Institute of Public Health has studied the life expectancy records of many societies and countries as far back as 250 years and has determined that the difference between man and woman is due to…

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​Freedom???

July 17th, 2019

There Seems To Be A Lot Of Confusion About What Freedom Is!
At a recent conference of the evangelical Christian’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, Chairman Ralph Reed, long a hard worker for the Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell, had the freedom to proclaim this about our president, the Manhattan Village Idiot: “We have had some great leaders! There has never been anyone who has defended us and fought for us, who we have loved more that Donald J. Trump. We have seen his heart and he is…

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History Is Not ‘Bunk’

July 10th, 2019

Henry Ford Was Wrong
Over 100 years ago the inventor of the Model T had a rather unusual opinion about the study of history, which, like the famous albatross, settled around his neck for his long lifetime. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune he uttered these fateful words: “Say, what do I care about Napoleon? What do we care about what they did 500 or 1,000 years ago? I don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across and I don’t care. It means nothing to me.…

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​Male Ignorance

June 26th, 2019

Sexual Ignorance: Like Lightning, It Can Strike Anywhere
There has been a spate of laws restricting or eliminating abortions in over a dozen states, a subject very important to millions of women. States that have passed such laws are governed by male-dominated legislatures. The Nevada legislature, “dominated” by a 51% majority of females, is one of the few states passing legislation to make access to abortion easier. The current 50 state legislatures are made up of just 28.7% of…

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Are Demons In First Class?

June 19th, 2019

From Kerosene Lamp To Drone Deliveries
The world continues to be a very exciting place for an adolescent who spent his evenings after milking my share of four cows reading books from my country school like “Men of Iron” by kerosene lamp. I read that book several times. I was intrigued by the life of a young squire serving his glorious knight in religious medieval battles. Some young knights ended up in cemeteries where they were housed while traveling to different parts of paradise.…

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​American Prophet

June 12th, 2019

Bob Dylan: “You Better Start Swimmin’ Or You’ll Sink Like A Stone”
I was shocked when Hibbing native Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. I think he was, too. I had always enjoyed his songs as great poetry, but I didn’t care for his gravelly voice, twanging guitar—and sometimes his stage attitude. He has performed in 3,000 concerts around the world. I have felt his songs were really accurate and significant message-poems about people and incidents in…

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Are We Living ‘Normal?’

June 5th, 2019

English writer C.S. Lewis was thinking of the start of war in 1939 when giving a sermon at Oxford University he expressed the following: “Human life has always lived on the edge of a precipice. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal.” Maybe we should say normal human life is always abnormal. Here we are, eighty years…

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