Gadfly

Cultural Stagnation

May 8th, 2019

Will we ever be done with religious bullies?
Unless the scientists are terribly wrong, life on Planet Earth started about 3.8 million years ago. At 2.59 million years ago, glaciers and ice sheets covered 30% 0f the earth’s surface. The future sites of three major European cities, London, Paris, and Berlin, were in the middle of a huge polar desert where nothing grew. Where there was some warmth, mammals, reptiles, and other life forms were wiped out by the cold and replaced by…

American individualism? A myth

May 1st, 2019

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

The rising tide of Kardashian philosophy
I have followed the life of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar since he was 18-year-old Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor covering black civil rights protests for his school newspaper, as a senior at a New York City high school.

At 7’2”, he helped his high school team win 71 straight basketball games, led UCLA to NCAA championships, and played for 22 years in the National Basketball Association. At one time he held most of the individual records in the NBA.

After his…

Ask your Congress

April 24th, 2019

There is more work in Congress than just getting re-elected

While doing our state and federal income taxes last week, I took a break to read the New York Times article, “Congress Doesn’t Seem To Care If Tax Season Is Miserable For You.” One could have a quick thought--or illusion-- that your elected representatives in state legislatures and Congress might care enough for your vote to listen to you just a little. If you think that, you haven’t been paying attention to today’s…

Americans In Trash

April 17th, 2019

The Nordic Model
Dr. Thea Hunter, a graduate of Columbia University and an adjunct professor of history at a number of elite colleges and universities, recently died at age 63 of extreme capitalism—and asthma—because of lack of health insurance and health care. She started her career at Western Connecticut State University in 2004 which required a two-hour commute from New York City. She was beloved by her students, but colleagues and other university workers often asked her if she was a…

A Continuum of Cons

April 10th, 2019

The Garden of Earthly Delights

An Orgy Of Business, Politics, Religion, And Sex
On March 4, 2019, the New York Times reported that President Donald Trump had lied 9,014 times since his inauguration. He must be close to 10,000 by now. Having followed the career of The Donald for about 35 years, I wrote in 2015 that he was unfit for any office because his mental condition is fully described in the American Association of Psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders. Psychiatrists label him…

Atheists 1, “Christian” Imperialists 0

April 3rd, 2019

Photograph by Sabrina Hornung

Are Modern Religions Straying Away From God?
When Christians were challenging the teaching of the “new” science of evolution in the 1925 Scopes trial, the hymn that probably best described the position of most Christians contained the following lines:

“Give me that old time religion, it’s good enough for me.

Makes me love everybody, it’s good enough for me.

It will do when I’m dying, it’s good enough for me.

It can take us all to heaven, it’s good enough for me.”

…

Animals Have Large Brains—Too

March 27th, 2019

After All, With A 20 Pound Brain, What Does A Sperm Whale Know?
Perhaps because I was a farm kid surrounded by spiders, horses, geese, maggots, pigs, rats, chickens, cats, bullheads, cows, rabbits, squirrels, snakes, dogs, honey bees, crows, and hundreds of other things with brains and nerves, I have been fascinated enough to keep files on what animals, insects, birds, and other creepy-crawlies do.

For an English literature class in college, I read T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.…

American Failure-Extreme Capitalism

March 13th, 2019

The Battle Between Extreme Capitalism And Democratic Socialism
After Vice-President Mike Pence representing racial and extreme capitalism ended his scathing rant about democratic socialism at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he went back to the dressing room, peed into a capitalistic toilet and flushed his waste into a socialistic sewer. Then he washed his hands at a capitalistic faucet of clean tap water from a socialistic water treatment facility-- then again ran…

A—sexual To Z—ygote

March 6th, 2019

Let’s Study The Difference Between Monosexual And Plurisexual
If we are interested at all in the science of genetics we are running into the terms “gender identity” and “gender fluidity” more and more. The difference between criminal and civil law becomes important. If a judge or jury finds a defendant guilty, that generally means there is “no doubt.” But in civil litigation there may be some doubt, but the person can be determined guilty by “a preponderance of…

Any Day We Shoot Over 380

February 27th, 2019

How Many People Have To Die For The Second Amendment?
There are no licensed federal gun dealers in our capital of Washington D.C., but 29-year-old resident Bobby Perkins Jr. recently went to prison for selling guns and drugs on the streets of D.C. A district court found him guilty of selling 224 guns bought in surrounding states on the street in just five months in 2015, with 94 of them being traced to homicides and crime scenes from Virginia to New York. But Bobby had spent much of his…

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