Gadfly

​The Genesis of a Liberal

February 27th, 2022

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail,com

Three Men Who Turned Me Into a Social Liberal and a Moral Capitalist

My political beliefs were not forged by Greek philosophers, Nobel economists, politicians, and historians. They were born and matured by words of steel by three writers of fiction: Howard Pyle, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Shakespeare. In District #54 in Morrison County we averaged about three kids per grade, give or take (I graduated from Eighth Grade with Jim and Adeline). Our…

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​To Pee, or Not To Pee?

February 19th, 2022

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Should That Be a Question on the Job in the Richest Country in the World?

Back in the 17th century, Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play mused about life and death, heaven, purgatory and hell, religion, and whether suicide might be an answer to all of life’s problems in the greatest soliloquy ever written. Here are a few lines:

To be, or not to be, that is the question; whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,…

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​Will It Be by Bang or Whimper?

January 29th, 2022

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

The Roman Empire Lasted About 600 Years

How long will the American Empire last? The English historian Edward Gibbons covered the rise and fall of the Roman Empire in six volumes published in 1788 and 1789. He covers 98 AD to 1590 AD in his epic work. Among his six volumes he has an excellent summary of why Rome failed in just one sentence: “The Roman Empire succumbed to barbarian invasions in large part due to the gradual loss of civic virtue among…

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​Dogma and Karma of Trumpianity

January 23rd, 2022

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Insanity, Racism, Bigotry, and Narcissism Have Created a New Religion

Up until the presidential election of 2016 there were an estimated 2,600 religious denominations in the world. On November 3, 2016, enough White Power Christians morphed into Trumpians to make 2,601. As a person who has been involved with both Roman Catholic and Protestant denominations for 82 years after going through First Communion at seven, I was not surprised that a recent Gallup…

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​Can We Have Both Estates and Parks?

January 20th, 2022

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Photo by Sabrina Hornung

When Will The Do-Nothing Congress Fund Parks for The Ninety-Nine Percent?

The Raymonds are state and national park people. Our farm was four miles from Lindbergh State Park along the Mississippi River at Little Falls. We spent many a wonderful weekend and holiday under the huge pines and fishing for northern pike and walleye in the river above and below the dam.

The park, formerly a farm of 110 acres, was given to the state in…

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​What Serves the Common Good?

December 20th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Is It the Common Good for Billionaires to Sail $500 Million Superyachts?

The new Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln set out 161 years ago to save the United States from break up. James Russell Lowell, The Atlantic magazine’s first editor, wrote: “The Republicans know that true policy is gradual in its advances, that it is conditional and not absolute, that it must deal with facts and not with sentiments.”

I have been a reader and subscriber to…

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​National Guard Equals Constitutional ‘Militia’

December 4th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

When Will It End? Gun Culture Has Killed 1,500,000 Americans in 50 Years

On Thanksgiving Day, 25-year-old Philadelphian Edilberto Miguel Palaez Moctezuma was eating his turkey dinner with his family at their dining room table when a stray bullet hit him. He was quickly flown to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. There was an argument among some neighbors about missing liquor which resulted in an exchange of gunfire.

On November 29, a Fargo…

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​Black Marble Dumbbells

November 28th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

The Spread of Luxury and Poverty in the Middle of a Pandemic

The wealth gap between the top ten percent and bottom ninety percent has reached staggering proportions. In 1970 the wealthiest families owned about 20% of the nation’s household wealth. Today they own more than 35%. Elon Musk, who often pays no federal income taxes, made $38 billion in one remarkable day on the New York Stock Exchange. In the first 19 months of the COVID-19 pandemic U.S.…

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​A Great Economy? For Whom?!

November 21st, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadly@gmail.com

Onward, Christian Soldiers, Marching as to War, With the Flags of Trump…

The North Dakota Legislature enshrined itself in theological Trumpocracy by passing a bill to prevent the teaching of Critical Race Theory, attempting to protect innocent White kids from the embarrassment of learning the actual history of the Divided States of America.

Trumplican lawmakers said it would not prevent teachers from teaching historical factual “events.” Let’s…

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​It Can Happen Here

November 20th, 2021

By Ed Raymond 

fargogadfly@gmail.com

How Did Germany Recover From Committing the Holocaust?

I have been asking this question for decades after reading such books as “The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich” by William L. Shirer, still the definitive history of Hitler days, particularly 1932 to 1945. I was in eighth grade when Adolf and Eva committed suicide after murdering more than six million Jews,…

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