May 20th, 2015
James Hilton wrote “Lost Horizon” in 1933 with the theme that World War I with the introduction of flying machines and the machine gun, the 1929 stock market crash, and the resulting Great Depression, would send the world into a disastrous maelstrom. So in order for a few to gain inner peace and a sense of purpose, Hilton created the mythical Shangri-La based in a Tibetan monastery in the Himalayas. Hilton hoped that after the…
May 13th, 2015
When 1976 Olympic decathlon champion Bruce Jenner, a real hunk of a muscular man, came out 39 years later with the statement “for all intents and purposes, I am a woman” in a rather spectacular TV interview, he also emphasized the mysteries of the brain. Jenner admitted his brain is more female than it is male. Why? Is it because of a wound? Is Satan playing games? Is it because of messed-up neurons and bad electrical connections? We don’t have a clue—yet. He was just a very young…
April 30th, 2015
At last count the 7 billion descendants of Adam and Eve – or of Pithecanthropus erectus – who presently inhabit the earth try to communicate with one another through 7,000 languages.
Three billion use one of the top twenty languages in this order: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, Punjabi, German, Javanese, Wu Chinese, Telugu, Vietnamese, Marathi, French, Korean, Tamil and Italian. In contrast the…
April 26th, 2015
A few years ago conservative Republican judges on the US Supreme Court chastised their liberal counterparts for citing foreign legal cases in their written opinions because courts in other countries had nothing intelligent to offer American jurisprudence. We can learn nothing from civilizations that have lasted much longer than ours? The arrogance and resulting stupidity is absolutely astounding. The New York Times published an article recently that sanely and…
April 15th, 2015
Memo to the North Dakota House of Representatives: The times they are a’changin.’
Science continues to rip away the shroud of ignorance surrounding religious beliefs. Perhaps baseball fans recall a player by the name of Billy Beane who played for the Dodgers, Tigers and Padres in his major league career. He has been employed by Major League Baseball to serve as an intermediary between the LGBT community and pro baseball. He came…
April 8th, 2015
I love watching the top 64 college teams trying to win the NCAA basketball championship. I only miss a few games. But watching the North Dakota Legislature and the U.S. Congress commit March Madness governance is also entertaining and very maddening at the same time.
And watching the Middle East March Madness erupting into wars among dozens of countries, regions, provinces, tribes, groups, armies and whatever, reminds me of a demolition derby with…
April 1st, 2015
It’s Time to Sharpen the Pitchfork Tines
The Walt Disney Corporation just raised the price of a day pass to the Magic Kingdom in Orlando to $105. This increase was made while one-half of our population is in poverty, and two-thirds of our families do not have savings enough to cover a $500 repair bill or a $1,000 emergency room charge. Over half do not have a month’s income on hand, and their retirement funds represent about four months of income.
In the last six years the median…
March 25th, 2015
According to the Bible—and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution—Adam and relatives of Pithecanthropus Erectus have dominion over all of the animals on earth. If Adam and Hannibal the Cannibal are the smartest of all the creatures on earth, why haven’t we learned the language of other animals? We usually try to teach other animals our language. Rarely do we try to learn theirs. In the song “Talk To The Animals” written and sung by Bobby Darin,…
March 18th, 2015
It has come to pass that when a minority religious group rules a majority religious group disaster will occur. Look at conditions in Syria.
About 200,000 Syrians have been killed in the two years of that civil war and millions have chosen to be refugees in neighboring states such as Turkey and Jordan. Former English Prime Minister Tony Blair, who joined with former President George W. Bush to create a similar…
March 11th, 2015
We have been at war for 13 years. Presently out of 320 million people we have 1.4 million on active military duty and another 850,000 in the reserves. At the very end of World War II we had 16 million in uniform, about 10% of the population. Most able-bodied men served along with a few women. Almost every family was familiar with the armed forces. Now we have over four million people living on the country’s 2.1 million farms. In…