​Wealth without wisdom

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Will we move up from Homo sapiens to Human empathians?

The big question is, will the world’s billionaires who are now Homo sapiens gain enough human empathy to save the world from themselves — and heat? The world currently has more than 3,000 billionaires and many millions of multi-millionaires who want to move to the level of Bezos and Musk, the trillion dollar man. A very strong majority of both have the attitude expressed by New York City billionaire John Catsimatidis. (His current worth is $4.5 billion)

“If you’re a billionaire, you want to stay a billionaire,” said Catsimatidis. “I worry about America and the way of life we have. I support Trump and want to influence the course of American politics, given the wide divergence between the Democrats and Republicans.”

As an oligarchical plutocrat as defined by Senator Bernie Sanders, he definitely has no clue what most Americans experience as a way of life. The current estimate is that one human in the world dies every minute from heat. I think it’s a lot more. Hundreds of other humans die every minute from tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, huge waves, landslides, water pressure, rip tides, avalanches, fires and other disasters caused by the extremes of climate change.

When will the tropical zone be too hot for human and animal life?

The evidence is not encouraging that the oligarchical plutocrats who got to be billionaires by drilling, digging, transporting and using fossil fuels do not want to change their way of life of super yachts, mansions, space missions, and private jets to reduce climate change.

At the 2025 United Nations COP30 meeting in Brazil on climate change, there was so much disinformation put out by fossil fuel lobbyists paid by billionaires that the 200 countries attending the meeting were asked to sign a separate “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change.” Signees would agree to challenge and address climate disinformation, promote transparency and protect journalists, scientists and environmentalists from fear and “accident.” (Incidentally, just before the conference opened, the host country Brazil granted licenses to state oil corporations to explore and drill near the mouth of the Amazon River, the largest water source in South America, for additional sources.)

Although almost 200 countries had signed the original Paris agreement on climate change in 2015, only 21 countries pledged to tell the truth about climate change and global warming! Perhaps the billionaires at the conference should have been reminded of the words of French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau: “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”

Who has got to Bill Gates, usually in the top five of the richest men in the world? The Microsoft billionaire has insisted for years that global warming and climate change demand urgent and immediate political action. Before the Brazil conference started, Gates put out the message that rising temperatures represent a problem, but climate change will not be the end of civilization.

A couple weeks ago, Kansas and Oklahoma had hundreds of tornadoes — and it isn’t even the season. Gates thinks now that poverty among the world’s poor is the world’s biggest problem. He says innovation will be able to contain the planet’s temperatures.

In a recent week, Cyclone Ditwah hit Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam and killed more than 1,350 people. Hundreds are still missing.

“We need to confront climate change effectively,” Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto said. “Local governments must take a significant role in safeguarding the environment and preparing for the extreme weather conditions that will arise from future climate change.”

A Minnesotan has the answer to the challenge of climate change

President Obama was one of the few world leaders to fight hard to get the Paris agreement on the front page in 2015. In 2025, President Trump (or anyone from his administration) didn’t even show up for the COP30 meeting in Brazil to learn something about the “hoax,” even though the Divided States of America is one of the leading polluters in putting Planet Earth in the Universe Hospice.

The only nation to take on Trump and his ignorant dummies was Tuvalu, a Pacific nation of atolls and reef islands with about 11,000 people. President Maina Vakafua Talia was the only leader to publicly attack Donald Trump’s “shameful disregard for the rest of the world by withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement and attempting to halt climate action,” and implying that leaders were afraid to confront Trump because they were afraid of retribution. He continued his attack: “We look to the US for options, for peace, but it seems they are going to the opposite direction, and we should hold them accountable. Just because the U.S. is a bigger country doesn’t mean we have to be silent. What matters to us is our survival.”

Finally, Farhana Yamin, a British lawyer in attendance who had helped put the Paris agreement together also publicly backed Tuvalu’s position. “I think countries are afraid of speaking up because if they step out of line, especially smaller countries, vulnerable countries you never know when the next erratic increase in tariffs will come,” Yamin said.

Here comes another question: Why is the Republican Party so terrified of their Great Leader Donald Trump?

Bob Dylan of Minnesota fame, who surprised everybody but me when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature although he is primarily an entertainer, singer, and songwriter, has the answer to climate change in the third stanza of his poem “The Times They are A-Changin’.” It’s a powerful message to the Know-Nothings and the Do-Nothings in governments around the world.

Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call

Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall

For he that gets hurt will be who has stalled

The battle outside ragin’ will soon shake your windows

And rattle your walls, for the times they are a-changin’.

The fourth stanza has Dylan’s plea for action:

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land

And don’t criticize what you can’t understand

Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command

Your old road is rapidly agin’, please get out of the new one

If you can’t lend a hand, for the times they are a-changin’.

White House Grift Mall sells MAGA caps, regulations, pardons…

In the last couple decades of the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer of England wrote “Canterbury Tales,” a long poem about a group of English pilgrims traveling to Canterbury Cathedral to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket. It was a long walk and ride, so to pass the time spent together, they agreed to a story-telling contest, with the winner of the contest getting a free meal. Each person was to tell two tales on the way and two on the way back. There are 24 tales told by fascinating people representing many different professions. If Chaucer were alive today, he would be running the best nighttime show on television, interviewing interesting guests and telling amusing tales. He’s better than Jon Stewart.

In the tales, he explores social and economic classes, tales about religious corruption, love, the battle of the sexes and human nature in stories told by fascinating people such as the Wife of Bath. She is a sexy woman saddled on a horse who has been married five times to a mix of men, the last one about 20 when she is in her 50s. She is a good teacher to the young man, teaching him all kinds of interesting things about married life.

Another storyteller is the Pardoner who sells indulgences to sinners who want to shorten their time in Purgatory before they see Saint Peter at the gate. I’m going to concentrate on him because he reminds me of King Donald who adds to his billionaire status by selling pardons to anyone who has the cash.

I first heard of indulgences when I was a young Catholic boy about 75 years ago. Our old French priest told us in class we could buy an “indulgence” for five bucks and we would spend six weeks less in Purgatory suffering for our signs before we went to Heaven. He said that good deal had been around for at least a thousand years. It seemed the Vatican came up with the idea when it was running out of cash building expensive churches and buildings in Rome. Not only would constituents lessen their time in Purgatory, the middle ground between Heaven and Hell, they would generate revenue to build buildings to save more souls.

The Catholic Church used indulgences to raise cash for 600 years. But, then came Martin Luther with his 95 points and his bad thoughts about indulgences.

An indulgence reduced the amount of punishment one has to undergo for sinning. It was temporal punishment for already forgiven sins. Life in Purgatory (not a particularly nice environment) was shortened considerably by cold cash. Men called pardoners were authorized to sell indulgences. Chaucer came up with an interesting character to represent pardoners in his great historical work.

Chaucer’s description of his well-dressed and groomed pardoner

Chaucer: “This pardoner had hair as yellow as wax, hanging down smoothly like a hank of flax. In dribbles fell his locks behind his head, down to his shoulders which they overspread. He wore no hood upon his head. He had the same small voice a goat has got, His chin no beard had harbored nor would harbor. I judged he was a gelding or a mare (castrated or female!).”

What was the gender? Was this pardoner, who would appeal for money from the two major genders, transgender? The Pardoner is indeed fashionable and effeminate. It’s both puzzling and entertaining to consider the Pardoner is not only dealing with local priests, he is representing the Vatican! Was Chaucer writing about a heterosexual, a homosexual, a nonbinary individual, a bisexual, a demisexual or another one of the 74 sexual orientations? There is also plenty of evidence in historical records that Saint Joan of Arc who was burned at the stake was a transgender person.

Question is, how many millions is Trump making selling pardons?

The Lyin’ King Donald, the king of the pardoners in the world, suffers from brain rot and malignant narcissism, which has turned him into a ranting, demented old fool. He keeps adding to his cesspool of a brain.

His recent Oval Office “White Power” vicious, insane racial rants about Somalis and his lying defenses of his “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth are way beyond puking stage. If you think he is not selling pardons to high bidders, you must think climate change is really a “hoax” while floating down a river that was a street a few minutes ago.

Soon you must recognize your Great Leader is not only a racist, but he is a sexual predator, jerk, prick, asshole, malignant narcissist and combination socio-psychopath. And now that he is also charged with being a war criminal like Putin and Netanyahu, he will win the Ignoble Prize for the most immoral corrupt human on Planet Earth.