Gadfly

Of mice and men—and elephants

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…

Just another day in Tombstone and Dodge, U.S.A.

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…

Living in Prozac nation

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…

Aggressive rats and monkeys

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…

Disaster capitalism

June 7th, 2017

How long does it take you to pay your Social Security taxes for the year?

Jay Gould was one of the richest capitalists in the United States in the 19th century, bribing legislators, robbing, killing, and hiring a private army to fight labor union strikes over wages, hours, and working conditions.

He and his associate Jim Fisk tried to corner the gold market so they could raise the price of agricultural products and increase the price of shipping on his railroads. Gould came from a poor…

Bulls, biblical BS, and blasphemy

May 31st, 2017

A good sign: the Spanish are finally giving up bullfighting

Sometimes it takes thousands of years to rid a society of a cultural icon. Bullfighting has been an integral part of Spanish society for almost a thousand years.

Bullfighting was first mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh which covered prehistoric bull worship and sacrifice in Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean area. It later moved to Rome to entertain the crowds in the Coliseum.

In the 1100s the rich brought bullfighting to Spain…

To pee or not to pee—that’s a question??

May 24th, 2017

The rich live 20 years longer than the poor

Several recent incidents in the airline industry are sending messages to the Ninety-Nine Percent around the world. If you can’t hold it, don’t book a flight.

A male passenger was removed from a flight because he had to pee while the plane was sitting on the ground. He violated the rule that toilets are closed while waiting for take-off. He had been sitting in his seat for more than half an hour and had told the attendants he had to go. They…

How about freedom from religion?

May 17th, 2017

It’s time to end religious slavery, discrimination, racism, and sexual violence

Religions have authorized slavery for thousands of years. It still exists in many corners of the world and is outlawed in few countries.

Religions have allowed men to marry several women at one time, which is now a crime called bigamy in some countries. Remember: Osama bin Laden had four wives.

Churches in our South taught that blacks were inferior to whites and pushed for Jim Crow laws to make sure blacks…

School lunch

May 10th, 2017

How about cow’s tongue for school lunch?

King Donald of Trumpistan has decreed that the school lunch regulations propagated by Michelle Obama back in 2010, after serious research and debate by medical authorities and dieticians, did not have enough fat, sugar, and sodium.

So he has ordered the Department of Agriculture to follow the desires of food corporations such as General Mills, Schwan’s, Cargill, Land of Lakes, and Hormel, that over the years have added millions of tons of fat…

Back to the basement, graduates

May 3rd, 2017

The absolute destruction of the American dream

It has become commonplace. The majority of college graduates in the United States now are forced to move back home to their parent’s basements, sometimes for more than a decade, because the 2016 graduating class is the most indebted in history.

They might make more than $15 an hour in a job, but they cannot afford homes, cars, or other accoutrements of a middle class life.

There is no doubt that economic growth and the national…