Gadfly

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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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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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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Why Does A Once-Free Drug Now Cost $375,000 A Year? Easy In The U.S.!
It was only a matter of time. It had to happen. The American healthcare “system” that costs Americans twice as much as in any other developed country is now having another war over money—and it’s ironically appropriate it’s over human excrement. The money war is between drug companies and doctors and patients over a procedure called fecal microbiota transplants. It’s a revolutionary treatment that has…

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Guns, Lockdowns, and Panic Buttons
The girl is now a seventh grader at Sandy Hook Elementary. In 2012 she was the only survivor of her first grade class of 21 in a mass school shooting. Among the first words by this six-year-old to her parents after the mass shooting: “I’m OK, but all of my friends are dead.” Why do some children have to go through this while others are put in caskets? Because the federal government does nothing about controlling the gun culture.

As early as 1970…

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Human Life Is More Interesting Than Ever
Life is so much more fascinating than just 25 years ago. There’s something that tantalizes me every day. We don’t know whether the operation was considered to be successful in 2017 when a Chinese doctor claimed he had transplanted a head of a corpse onto a cadaver in an 18-hour operation. Actually Italian Dr. Sergio Canavero has been planning a live head transplant of a head for a number of years. He thinks it will take about 50 specialists…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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