August 23rd, 2017
Photo: Wikipedia: Regiment of Armaments surrender Battle of Moscow
‘For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven’
The recent clashes between white supremacists and American ideals actually started hundreds of years ago in the Jewish pogroms of Europe and Russia, and when the first black slaves were brought to New England in 1619.
About 12.5 million blacks were brought to the U.S., many of them adding billions to slave owners’ profits and the…
August 16th, 2017
Can we learn anything after we know it all?
There’s a 100-page book written by a high school dropout that should be read by all high schoolers, college education students, teachers, and politicians.
Michael J.Fox of movie and TV fame wrote his little manifesto, “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Future: Twists and Turns and Lessons Learned,” after receiving a number of honorary degrees and doctorates from leading universities while speaking at their graduation ceremonies.…
August 9th, 2017
The world has decided King Donald has made us irrelevant
Fareed Zakaria of the Washington Post and CNN while on assignment in London had a Nigerian man approach him and say with a mixture of outrage and amusement: “Your country has gone crazy. I’m from Africa. I know crazy, but I didn’t think I would say this in America.”
In Dublin, Ireland a young Irish woman told him:”I’ve come to realize that, as a European, I have very different values than America these days. I realized…
August 2nd, 2017
When have-it-alls and well-to-doers don’t want to share any of it
There’s a new novel out about the 19th Century Great Potato Famine, when Ireland lost one million of its population of eight million to starvation and disease, and two million to emigration to other countries, including many thousands to the United States.
Ireland still has a smaller population than it had before the famine. Domesticated in Peru and Bolivia over 7,000 years ago, the potato became the sole subsistence…
July 26th, 2017
A reasonable conclusion: “We should have killed our baby.”
For some unfathomable reason, some people think they are immortal, that death is not a part of life. Our culture tends to teach us to avoid the topic of death as if it will never come. We really get uncomfortable discussing our options about life and death.
But death is also a precious part of life and we should accept it with grace and peace—as well as the difficult and painful parts of both living and dying.
My dad lived to…
July 19th, 2017
Three “great leaders” who might really screw up the world
If you have had a chance to watch documentaries based on North Korean culture you had to notice that all citizens referred to 33-year-old Kim Jong Un as their “Great Leader” in interviews.
His picture was always visible whether inside or out, indicating that he remains in power through the fear and intimidation that only a cult icon can possess. As the ruling grandson of his ruling grandfather it helps tremendously to stay…
July 12th, 2017
What are the best laid plans for our future?
Israeli historian Tuval Noah Harari recently made a fascinating declaration in an article about the future: “People living in the 12th century knew pretty well what the 13th century would be like. Now we are in the first part of the 21st century and we don’t have a clue what the 22nd century will be like—or whether there will be one.”
Progress was slow in the 12th century but now in the 21st technical and scientific progress is…
June 28th, 2017
How many Americans shot themselves or others today?
We won’t know for awhile how many Americans were KIA or WIA from firearms on June 14, when Republican Majority Whip Steve Scalise of the House was critically wounded by some of the 71 rounds fired by James Hodgkinson and the police.
Actually it was not a big mass shooting deal, although Scalise was made the national center of attention by his congressional colleagues and the mainstream media.
In the first 165 days of 2017 we had only…
June 21st, 2017
From Homer’s Odyssey to Buddy Holly: The times they are a-changin’
When Robert Zimmerman, born in Duluth and raised in Hibbing, better known as Bob Dylan, won the Nobel Prize for Literature (worth almost a cool $1 million), he said, “When I received this Nobel Prize for literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. The music of Buddy Holly changed my life, along with Homer’s Odyssey, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and Erich Maria Remarque’s All…
June 14th, 2017
Red blankets, thousand-dollar pills, and angry Irish
It makes for an interesting week when people, rats, monkeys, and the Irish wave the middle finger with wild abandon toward their erstwhile enemies. The Irish finally showed how fed up they are with the “state” Roman Catholic Church that treated pregnant girls horribly in forced-labor laundries and transferred priests who took sexual advantage of adolescent boys for centuries.
Irish voters sent the Vatican a final goodbye finger…
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By Alicia Underlee NelsonMore than 1,000 pro-worker events are planned for Thursday, May 1 across the country, including rallies in Fargo-Moorhead, Grand Forks, Minot and Jamestown. East Grand Forks and Bismarck will host protests…
From concerts and car shows to Japanese art and Juneteenth celebrations, there's so much going on around the region this summer. This year's High Plains Reader Summer Events Calendar is back and bigger than ever. It's packed with…
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By John Showalterjohn.d.showalter@gmail.comHigh Plains Reader had the opportunity to interview two mysterious new game show hosts named Milt and Bradley Barker about an upcoming event they will be putting on at Brewhalla. What…
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By Ellie Liveranieli.liverani.ra@gmail.com There appear to be differences in the incidence of mental illnesses between men and women. For example, women are more likely to be diagnosed with depression, post-traumatic stress…
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By Vern Thompsonvern.thompson.nd7@gmail.com Our trucking business has me driving almost daily from gas plants in western North Dakota's oil patch to Canada. I haul natural gas liquids (NGLs) products we used to see flared off at…
