March 4th, 2015
Rudy Giuliani says, although Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and white grandparents, he “doesn’t believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.” Yes, Rudy, it was a horrible thing to say — and horribly stupid. I found out through this kerfuffle that Rudy…
February 25th, 2015
The Islamic State (ISIS) video graphically shows the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians by knife-wielding Muslim believers on a Libyan beach, soaking the sands with blood. The adult human body contains on average about 5.5 quarts of the life-giving fluid, so here went another 23 gallons of the red stuff wasted in the name of religion and Muslim testosterone. It has been ever thus. The Roman Colosseum built by the Flavian Dynasty between…
February 18th, 2015
One of the few economists in the world who dares to speak out about why 80 individuals on this small planet now have the assets, wealth, and total net worth of 3.5 billion people, currently half of the world’s present population, is Christine Lagarde, the former finance minister of France who is now managing director of the International Monetary Fund. At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland attended by…
February 11th, 2015
Some years ago I wrote about a childless Texas ranch couple who wanted children back around the beginning of the 20th Century, but where they lived in ranch country there were very few children to adopt. One morning the rancher drove a team to the nearest town to pick up some supplies. At the local general store the owner told him about an orphan train from the East that was parked at the local station with a few orphans left. The rancher went to the station, talked to a few orphans,…
February 7th, 2015
Molly Ivins, my favorite Texas political reporter, was an irascible, irreverent, funny and very quotable observer of politicians who were basically mental midgets governing the best and the brave.
She stuck labels of “Shrub” and “Dubya” on former President George W. Bush, and also pinned this on him: “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.” She’s the reason for my column title. To improve him, it would have…
January 28th, 2015
So far, paleontologists say our early ancestors learned how to control fire over a million years ago. Modern man took over from the Neanderthals about 40,000 years ago if the scientists are right, and we have made tremendous economic and personal progress just in the last 100 years.
In 1910 we expected to live only 47 years. Now we expect to live at least 81, with many living beyond 100. Only 14 percent of 1910 homes had…
January 21st, 2015
Some radicals think that Common Core, the education super-baby touted by billionaires, conservative politicians, wealthy foundations, Republican and Democratic governors, Chambers of Commerce, Fortune 500 business leaders, and educational leaders and teachers is now the result of a back alley rape of a poverty-stricken teenager by a socialist-liberal group planning national domination. That’s what happens when politicians enter an arena they know…
January 15th, 2015
A political philosopher many years back dropped this gem about Washington: “You can lead a man to Congress but you can’t make him think.” Cuba, with its 11 million mixture of nationalists, communists, revolutionists, and feudal landlords, has been the center of our Stupid Virus pandemic for over a century.
As a Marine Corps officer back in the middle 1950s I spent about five months circulating in and out of Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico,…
December 23rd, 2014
Dick Cheney, the architect and godfather of our policy of torture after 9/11, appeared on Meet the Press last Sunday and assured the public he was the man who casually tossed over 200 years of American history and morality into the Potomac trash can. We were a moral nation at birth. During the Revolutionary War General George Washington developed a series of policies regarding the care and treatment of British…
December 17th, 2014
So This Is A “Culture?”
What is a culture? Right-wingers like to acclaim the myth that America is an “exceptional” country—the “shining city on a hill” and all those wonderful, marvelous cultural images. Dictionary definitions of culture include these statements: “The sum of attitudes, customs, and beliefs that distinguishes one group of people from another. Culture is transmitted, through language, material objects, ritual, institutions, a way of thinking, and art, from…
By Josette Ciceronunapologeticallyanxiousme@gmail.com What does it mean to truly live in a community —or should I say, among community? It’s a question I have been wrestling with since I moved to Fargo-Moorhead in February 2022.…