Gadfly

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.…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

An American Enema

May 29th, 2019

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…

‘All Dead’ Said the Little Girl

May 22nd, 2019

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…

Androgenism and The 800-meter Dash

May 15th, 2019

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…

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…

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