Gadfly

Contracting and Deconstruction of Religion

December 4th, 2024

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Will God Ever Text Margaret Back and Answer Her Prayers?

More than 50 years ago a young Judy Blume wrote about 13-year-old Margaret Simon in a contemporary realistic novel titled “Are You There, God?It’s Me, Margaret.” The daughter of a Christian mother and a Jewish father who were not affiliated with either religion, Margaret felt “uncomfortable” about her lack of religious affiliation because friends did attend church, so she studied and…

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​Evolving from Homo Sapiens to AI

November 23rd, 2024

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

With What is Happening in the World, Why not Artificial Intelligence?

Since Lucy fell out of a tree and walked about four million years ago, she has been evolving to humans we call Homo sapiens. We have evolved from clumsy midgets to seven-footers dribbling basketballs, dashing down the basketball court to “dunk” a ball through a basket set at ten feet.

We walked on all fours for three million years as orangutans, chimps, gorillas and great apes.…

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​November 5: The Battle between Love and Hate

November 4th, 2024

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Will We Ever Recover from the Trump Virus of Universal Hate?

Just a month ago, the primary doctor of 336 million U.S Americans,U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory on the mental health of the nation’s current parents. He cited these reasons: (1) economic factors beyond their control, (2) costs of health care, (3)costs of childcare, (4) costs of elder care, (5 costs of housing, (6) and costs of groceries. To support his advisory, he…

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​Emancipation becomes ‘E-woman-cipation’

October 21st, 2024

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Citizens United Turned Billionaires Into Oligarchs, Dictators, and Kings

We have reached a stage in Divided States of America politics where if the Democratic Party decreed that zebras have black stripes imprinted on white bodies, the Trumplican Party would object by yelling “No!”: white stripes are strategically placed on black bodies. Then, after hearings and a filibuster or two, they would kill zebras to prove their case.

We have reached that…

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​Billionaires and the End Times

September 19th, 2024

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Where will the homeless go when billionaires go to their bunkers?

Icelanders are living almost on top of volcanos but are cooled by ice, snow, and placid attitudes while hiding a keen sense of humor. But with the planet heating up and devastating windstorms, floods, hurricanes, tornados, and fires of many descriptions constantly harassing the earth’s humans, animals, and plants, they understand what will happen.

In 2019 Icelanders decided to…

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​Choice: Estrogen or Testosterone

August 15th, 2024

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Men have made a real mess of the world. We should try estrogen.

I didn’t bother to count the countries involved in wars because this column won’t be published for a week. But I don’t think any of the participating countries are led by a woman at this moment.

There are wars and revolutions on five of the seven continents. Not much is happening on Antarctica, although there may be an encounter or three on Oceania, the continent of thousands of…

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​Death by Wrist-Checking

July 18th, 2024

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

How can anyone be lonely with eight billion homo sapiens on Earth?

The world seems to be in the throes of a PTSD pandemic. Even the price of happiness is going way up. Back in 2010 two Nobel Prize laureates studied the complexities of happiness and determined that in most cases $75,000 a year would buy some of it. But this figure applied only to day-to-day moods. The two experts said happiness “plateaus” at some figure depending upon the individual.…

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​Nine Levels of Hell on Earth

June 20th, 2024

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Should ‘The Chosen One’ be Sentenced to Spend Months at each Level?

It’s not unusual on this planet, we have had hundreds of men and a couple of women who have used religion to become dictators and gods in countries and empires when the only god they believed in was themselves.

Think Nero, Caligula -- and his horse, Qin Shi Huang Di, Hirohito, Genghis Khan, Joe Stalin, Catherine the Great, Adolf Hitler, Kim Sung-un, and Donald Trump – I love the…

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A Garage in the Sky

May 16th, 2024

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Is It Possible to Move from a Tent on a Sidewalk to a Garage in the Sky?

There have been wealthy people who added a car elevator to the mansion for their Bentleys so they could unload groceries close to the kitchen, but I have never seen a high-rise apartment building advertise a sky garage for each of the 62 apartments in a high-rise—including the 62nd floor penthouse. On a barrier island called Sunny Isles Beach 30 miles from Miami, a developer is…

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Where Boosters Meet Fences and the Rich Invest in Junk, Stuff, and Celebrities

April 16th, 2024

by Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

According to my great-grandfather many years ago, my French ancestors migrated from Normandy to Quebec to Manitoba to Wisconsin to Minnesota over the spread of more than two centuries, finally settling in or near Little Falls and then spreading to the Twin Cities. People left Europe for two major reasons: economics and freedom of religion and freedom from religion. France had been involved in many big and small religious conflicts between religions and…

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