Last Word

​The Cultural Cringe has come to North Dakota

September 5th, 2018

UND - photograph provide by UND

by Andrew Alexis Varvel
mr.a.alexis.varvel@gmail.com

“If a piece of equipment purchased in the 1920s is kept up and can guarantee, at present, an operable rate close to 100 percent and if it can bear the production burden placed on it, the machine's value has not declined a bit. On the other hand, if a machine purchased last year has been poorly maintained and produces at only half its operable rate, we should regard its value as having declined 50 percent."

"A machine's value is not…

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​Scenic River Commission Turns Out to Be A Rubber Stamp For Industry

August 29th, 2018

Little Missouri River Bridge and Other Unauthorized Developments - United States Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management Montana-Dakotas

In the halcyon days of the 1970s in North Dakota, when the state was a quieter, kinder, friendlier, more thoughtful place, the Legislature passed a bill, and the Governor signed it, designating the Little Missouri as our state’s only official State Scenic River, and creating a commission to look out for it.

The Little Missouri Scenic River Commission did its job through the administrations of four governors who cared about the Bad Lands and its river—Art Link, Allen Olson, George…

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Farewell statement from Senator John McCain

August 28th, 2018

Senator John McCain - from Facebook page

by Senator John McCain - from Facebook page

“My fellow Americans, whom I have gratefully served for sixty years, and especially my fellow Arizonans,

“Thank you for the privilege of serving you and for the rewarding life that service in uniform and in public office has allowed me to lead. I have tried to serve our country honorably. I have made mistakes, but I hope my love for America will be weighed favorably against them.

“I have often observed that I am the luckiest person on…

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​What To Do About A Bridge That Shouldn’t Be There

August 22nd, 2018

Here’s a piece of the Dunn County Atlas that Wylie Bice submitted to the Corps of Engineers, showing the location of the bridge he planned to build on federal land

The Bismarck Tribune’s Amy Dalrymple’s wrote a good story recently about a marathon Little Missouri Scenic River Commission meeting. I’m going to write more about that later. I’ll just say, for now, be careful what you wish for.

What I’m writing about now is one of the things the Commission discussed—the illegal bridge over the Little Missouri State Scenic River on the Wylie Bice Ranch in Dunn County.

I’ve written about this a few times, but there are new developments and…

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A bridge to nowhere

August 15th, 2018

Photograph provided by Jim Fuglie

Well, after nearly a dozen years of delay, it looks like Billings County is finally going to build a bridge over the Little Missouri State Scenic River north of Medora. The county posted a notice in the Federal Register on October 12, 2006, that it was beginning an Environmental Impact Statement process “for a proposed roadway project and river crossing over the Little Missouri River.”

In late July of 2018, almost 12 years later, the county presented its Draft EIS to the public and…

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Putin’s Plutocratic Puppet and the Specter of an American Gulag

August 15th, 2018

Comic courtesy of Daily Trump Cartoon

“Liberty is a strong food, but a difficult one to digest; it needs a healthy stomach. I laugh at those degraded people who, letting conspirators incite them to rise in arms, dare to speak of liberty, without having even a notion of what it is; who, with hearts a prey to all the vices of slaves, imagine that to be free they need only be rebels.”
– Jean Jacques Rousseau

“If…If…We didn’t love freedom enough.”
– Alexsandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“He would never…

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​High Plains Radicals

August 8th, 2018


By Gary Olson
olsong@moravian.edu

"The sun was shining as I was strolling
The wheat field waving the dust clouds rolling
The fog was lifting a voice was chanting
This land was made for you and me"

— Woody Guthrie

With socialism, even in a diluted and inchoate form, assuming a higher profile, I’m reminded of my early years in North Dakota during the 1950s. On the one hand, it wasn’t the Gestapo-like scenes from Standing Rock, today’s widespread sex trafficking in the booming oil fields…

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​Obituary: The Show Hall in Rocklake, North Dakota

August 8th, 2018

Rocklake's Show Hall was torn down a week ago, on August 2, 2018.

By Mark Rodenbiker
mrodenbiker@gmail.com   

The first brick building had just gone up on the corner of the block. The government built that to house the post office, so it didn't mean so much. Not like this one; for a person to have the ambition to build a brick building of that size was an acknowledgement that Rocklake was no longer a railroad siding. Now, in 1907, Rocklake was a town.

The post office may have made it government-official before that, but the show hall made it…

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​Trump to Republicans: “Wave the Flag, and Waive Your Conscience”

August 8th, 2018

“Hell… is the suffering of being unable to love.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I and the public know, what all school children learn; those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.”
– W.H. Auden, September 1, 1939

“To my knowledge, America has never known any enemy children.” 
– Senator William Langer (R-ND), March 29, 1946

“We ask ourselves what kind of world we live in, but it’s too painful to face the truth. Maybe our worst fears have already been realized -- maybe the…

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More on the ‘Families Belong Together’ Rallies

July 11th, 2018

By Gary Olson
olsong@moravian.edu

Recognition of the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Good on everyone who rallied in such large numbers on behalf of keeping families together. I will generalize and break down the participants into three groups. The first was composed of folks who may have participated in their…

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