News & Articles

Every once in a while over the years I have written a column, a potpourri of unconnected, incongruous comments based on items in a little folder I keep. I hope they are interesting—and that they make a point.

1. About 25 states have accepted or are proposing to legalize the use of medical or recreational marijuana—or both. I have often written that it was primarily impossible to keep people from inhaling, ingesting, or using various equipment from bongs to syringes to get drugs into throats, noses, or veins. The drug war is one of our great failures. But it is a also a failure of education. On the other hand Schedule One pot is certainly less dangerous than booze containing that wonderful elixir alcohol. How many pot users have died from overdoses? I’ve never heard of one. Pot has helped to relieve seizures in both children and adults. Friends have used it to regain and maintain appetites after cancer chemotherapy. It appears to be effective in controlling PTSD according to some VA studies. And sometimes pot turns things into gold. Both Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt of Olympic fame have admitted their use of pot. Bolt is from Jamaica where it is often used. Bolt says: “When you’re a child in Jamaica you learn how to roll a joint.” He has nine gold medals in three sprint events won in three Olympics. He has never lost a race at that level. Michael Phelps of the USA won 23 gold medals and several silver and bronze in four Olympic pools.
2. A Minneapolis Lutheran minister wrote a column in the Star Tribune about how religion and sports have switched places in Minnesota culture because we now build sports stadiums instead of cathedrals and churches. For a thousand years until the 20th century the Western world built magnificent cathedrals such as Notre Dame in Paris and the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Magnificent cathedrals were built in Minneapolis around the turn of the 20th: St. Mark’s Episcopal (1910), the Basilica of St. Mary (1914), the St. Paul Cathedral (1915, and Hennepin Avenue United Methodist (1916). What magnificent stadiums have we built about 100 years later? TCP Bank Stadium (2009), Target Field (2010), CHS Field (2015), and U.S. Bank Stadium (2016). The minister asks the question: “Is there anything wrong with that?” What is your answer?  

With over seven billion humans on earth, we seem to be getting angrier, more worried, and confused. It’s very difficult to live in large groups, particularly in cities of over 20 million. Hennepin County District Judge Bruce Peterson might have a partial answer: “For 90 percent of the 60,000 years of behaviorally modern humans, we lived in small groups.  And the evidence is that the vast majority of those groups engaged in constant raiding, feuding and revenge killing. We are not alone in this—we share 99 percent of our genes with chimpanzees, who will generally ambush, kill, and mutilate any individual or small group who strays into their territory. As the groups get larger, they get worse.” Are we too much like our buddies, the chimps?

3.We kill 33,000 souls a year with firearms, wound another 100,000, spend billions repairing and burying bodies with a monsoon of 350 million firearms, lead the civilized and uncivilized world in firearm deaths, and think like chimps in figuring out why. I dedicate the following New Yorker cartoon to the NRA and gun manufacturers who have a long-term lease on Congress. A man is sitting in an easy chair with a heavily bandaged foot and lower leg resting on an ottoman. His wife, sitting on a couch with their dog nearby, says sarcastically: “But now the good guy with a gun has a foot wound.” Evidently he had mishandled his firearm and shot himself in the foot.

The Republican Texas Legislature, which had authorized “open-carry” years ago, passed a new law allowing firearms to be carried on campuses. Many professors and students thought it was a very bad idea because students do get drunk and go out of their minds. The students came up with a unique form of protest. Although it is legal to openly carry firearms on campus, it is illegal to openly carry sex toys on those same campuses. So thousands of students are openly carrying colorful dildos around campuses, begging to be arrested for carrying that “dangerous weapon.” There’s nothing like ridicule to change things.

4. Texas probably has more guns that any other state, and at the same time has 1.2 million residents who are uninsured for health care because the governor and Legislature would not accept Medicaid under ObamaCare. The USA also has the second-highest infant mortality rate among the 31 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Only neighbor Mexico has a higher rate. Texas leads the states in that category with a rate of 35.8 per 100,000. As an example, Germany has a rate of 4.1 deaths per 100,000. Why do we have such a high infant mortality rate? It’s simple. Other countries in the OECD have universal health care. It’s evident we don’t really care about children, either before birth or after.

5. We have about four million children and adults who have allergic reactions to nuts and bee stings, and about 200 die each year of attacks. These lives can be saved with the EpiPen, a device with about a dollar’s worth of the 100-year-old drug Epinephren in a 40-year-old syringe that might cost a couple of bucks to make. A two-pack sold by Mylan Pharmaceuticals can run as high as $900. Disaster capitalism at its worst.                                

6. Maybe Quarterback Colin Kaepernick of the San Francisco 49’ers is the only one who has sung the third verse of the Star Spangled Banner. In the War of 1812 the Brits overran D.C. and burned the White House. We whites owned a lot of slaves at the time, with both Washington and Jefferson owning well over 100 each. Anyway, the Brits recruited many black slaves on the sly to fight for them against their owners. Surprise, some of them did. So in the third verse of Francis Key’s epic the line reads “No refuge could save the hireling and the slave/ From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave/And the star spangled banner in triumph doth wave/ O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”  In other words, our slaves caught fighting for the Brits would be killed on sight.

Another surprise. If you don’t understand why the black Kaepernick should protest the shooting of unarmed blacks in the back, the choking to death of a black selling cigarettes on New York streets by white cops, the killing of black teenager Travon Martin in a white Florida suburb by an armed white vigilante, the killing of unarmed black  teenagers by white police in Ferguson, Chicago, and other places, the mysterious death of a black woman in a Texas jail after she was stopped for a tail-light, the killing of a Minneapolis black lunchroom supervisor when he was stopped for—yes a tail-light, well– you have rocks for brains.


7. Emperor Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty (1672-1727) of Morocco probably was christened with the wrong nickname, having supposedly fathered 1,171 children over a span of 35 years. In 1704 a French diplomat officially reported to Paris that Moulay had 600 sons from four wives and 500 concubines. (Has any Bible nut ever figured out how many children King Solomon sired from—was it 300 wives and 700 concubines?)  Daughters from Moulay’s wives were allowed to live, but daughters from his concubines were strangled at birth by midwives. Some nosy fertility statisticians have figured out he would have had to have sex twice a day for 32 years in order to come up with that number.  And that’s way before Viagra. Wow!

I thought of Moulay when I read that the Irish ban on abortion, known as the Eighth Amendment, might finally be dropped by the Irish Parliament. Kate O’Connell, a conservative member of Parliament from the Fine Gael Party, blasted the Roman Catholic Church for its stand against abortion and the use of contraceptives: “It takes courage to stand up for what is right, to listen to the medical experts and not some self-appointed moral police who look down on the rest of us from their lofty perches, terrorizing Parliament members with threats of hellfire and eternal damnation in the hope this will cause political paralysis. This is not going to work.”  Irish Catholics have long favored the repeal of the Amendment which calls for a 14-year prison sentence for women getting abortions in Ireland. Now, thousands of Irish women go to England for abortions, but travel is expensive—and sometimes they can’t travel because they carry fetuses with fatal abnormalities that need to be aborted to save their own lives.. Are you listening, bishops and priests? You lost this stupid argument at least a half-century ago. If it were God’s natural design as some say, He would have done a better job.

8. Don’t Catholic physicians take the Hippocratic Oath that informs their patients, “First, do no harm?” A Chicago woman went to her doctor’s office in great pain and bleeding from a dislodged IUD but was told nothing could be done because the Catholic hospital network opposes any kind of birth control. What if she were bleeding to death and didn’t have time to go to a non-Catholic doctor? Let her die from that injury? What kind of compassionate, life-saving medical care is this?

9. During the campaign for the Democratic nomination for president Senator Bernie Sanders called for a free college education for all Americans, following the pattern set by some Scandinavian and European countries. Hillary Clinton finally basically agreed with him in order to win the younger vote. Presently 42 million Americans of all ages  owe $1.3 trillion in student loans. Practically all states have failed to fund public universities as they used to a generation ago. As an example, the University of Texas used to get 60% of its operating funds from the state. Now it gets 12%. That’s a shocking decline in support of public higher education. Student tuition has skyrocketed in most states because somebody has to pay operating costs.

So states are now filling the student backpacks with overwhelming debt, now an average of $40,000 per student. I have a shocking proposal. The taxpayers should pay the debts of all students. The reason? National security. We used to lead the world in the percentage of students going to higher ed. We are now 16th. At one point in 2010 U.S. taxpayers spent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion to rescue Wall Street banks and the economy. It’s time to rescue students from debts that may affect them all their  lives. Now, many of these 42 million Americans who live with parents are unable to purchase homes or autos because of monthly loan payments. What a boost to the economy that $1.3 trillion would be to the economy! Imagine, workers buying homes and cars at 2-4% instead of paying student loans at 8%. It would be a great investment for a great country that is in decline. We saved Wall Street banks and the rich with a real load of tax money. Why not save the country’s educational infrastructure with tax money? Great Britain is considering a one-time tax of the rich to cure inequality. We should do the same.

10. A sign of inequality in Palm Beach.  A 61,744 sq. ft. home with a 8,200 sq. ft. tennis house sitting on six acres of beach purchased in 2008 by a rich Russian for $95 million is now a tear-down.

Teenager n Francisco 49’or brains.ck lunchroom supervisor when he was stopped for–yes , and other placesreets, the third verse