News & Articles

We knew it from the beginning: 
America is an exceptionable country
I was browsing through a thrift store book section, and I paid a buck for a book The Best of Mike Royko: One More Time, containing a few of the nearly 8,000 columns Mike Royko wrote during a period of 34 years for three large Chicago newspapers, and he was syndicated in 600 newspapers nationwide. 
He had a unique, smartass, entertaining style while covering many critical aspects of life in Chicago and the world. I’m going to use a few short paragraphs from one column he wrote called “Dear God: Why? Address: Somewhere in the Universe” published on May 15, 1981.
“You wouldn’t believe how well loved you are on this planet today and how much is done in your name. I hardly know where to start. So I might as well start in Northern Ireland, where you’ve always been very big. The Irish Protestants are so devoted to you that they do everything possible to make life miserable for the Irish Catholics, because they don’t think Irish Catholics have the right approach toward worshipping you, and the Irish Catholics do what they can to make life miserable for the Irish Protestants for the same reason. In their great love for you, they shoot at one another, bomb one another, set one another on fire, and kill little children, bystanders, cops, soldiers and old ladies, and some are committing suicide by starvation.”

After 400 years of punishing and working poor pregnant Irish girls to death in laundries, when those girls were afraid to walk alone in the halls of schools because of horny “celibate” priests, when one had to go to England to get an abortion, when hundreds of bodies of babies were found by orphanages and schools, the Irish got fed up with that treatment from the holy Vatican, sent the Vatican ambassador packing back to Rome, approved divorce, abortion, same-sex marriages and elected a gay prime minister who is married to a gay medical doctor. 

The Irish finally settled what they called “The Troubles” between Catholics and Protestants.
Royko in the same column wrote about Muslims and Christians, particularly in the Middle East: “They are expressing their devotion to you by killing each other by the hundreds. I guess they figure that if one side can wipe the other side out, they will prove their worshipping you is correct. So every day they lob shells at each other and blow up the usual men, women, children, bystanders, old ladies and stray dogs.” 

With what is happening around the world today in Sudan, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Russia, Iran, Ukraine, Haiti and other countries, one could ask “Is there anything new?” Even the Hindus, Buddhists and other religions are killing each other in India.
Note: Before I continue my column, perhaps you have noticed the word “exceptionable” in my headline. A lot of writers and politicians have called the Divided States of America “exceptional.” That means “above the rest,” according to old dictionaries. Since then, new dictionaries such as Microsoft’s Encarta, have listed the word “exceptionable” beneath it. “Exceptionable” means something that “arouses disapproval and is offensive.” With climate change and authoritarian governments, the DSA will probably never reach the exalted stage of being “exceptional.” When was it “great?” I have been asking the MAGA cult for years and have never gotten an answer. 

We can now clone dogs and horses and sell them, and we can connect a handicapped person’s nerves to prosthetic limbs for smoother walking and navigating obstacles. Yet, we continue to kill each other with religious abandon and hate. We have a Republican Party with its Supreme Court who has filled the streets of our cities with homeless where now they will be sleepless, arrested, fined, and put in jail because of economic inequality! Is that any way to run a “happy” country? 

There’s a cartoon in the 1 July New Yorker that has answers for us. God is sitting at his Creative “Resolute” Desk with symbols of animals on it, but he seems to be sleeping. The caption: “And on the seventh day, God rested. His eyes. Just for a second. He didn’t nap. That would be so unprofessional. He wouldn’t do that while on the clock. Please don’t fire Him.”

Why don’t we clone Franklin Delano Roosevelt and make him king?
Astronaut William Anders was on his fourth loop around the moon on Christmas Eve, 1968, when he snapped that miraculous picture of Planet Earth out there in the inky blackness of space. That picture has been on stamps and reproduced millions of times. 
After his NASA days Anders served as chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, ambassador to Norway, and CEO of a company making military weapons. In his last interview before dying at age 90 when his small plane crashed, he had said: “Earth is the only home in the universe for humans. It’s too bad we don’t treat it a little better.” 

Economic inequality and wealth across the earth is making the earth uninhabitable while we are still killing each other because of race and religion – and doing virtually nothing about climate change.
 Chances are slim to none Homo sapiens will survive many decades of heat and hate – and Slim is currently reading a book with his feet in his refrigerator. Many scientists are studying previous climate changes and how they affected life on earth.
There has been talk of cloning a woolly mammoth for decades after finding frozen  remains of some in Siberia. Woolly mammoths roamed all over Europe, Asia and the northern reaches of North America, but scientists have discovered that global climate change about 12,000 years ago forced them to retreat to cooler climes. They were also chased by hungry human hunters who moved northward with them. Woolly mammoths died out in temperate zones 10,000 years ago, and managed to live another 6,000 years on a cold Wrangel Island, finally dying out completely 4,000 years ago in freaky cold weather and rising sea levels – or some kind of plague. Scientists are still looking for the exact reason.

Perhaps you will remember that Dolly, a sheep, was the first mammal to be born through the cloning process in 1996. She was euthanized after six years because of tumors on her lungs. She had offspring the old-fashioned way with a ram named David. She was “taxidermied” and is at the National Museum of Scotland. 

More than a dozen mammals – including monkeys, cattle, pigs, deer, cats, dogs, water buffalo, camels, horses – have been cloned for many different purposes. Camels have been cloned to run in camel races in Abu Dhabi, horses for polo games in Saudi Arabia, water buffalo for meat, and cats and dogs for familiar and pleasing “companionship.” 

Want your friendly dog forever? A clone will cost $50,000 at ViaGen Pets & Equine Company in Austin, Texas. Since 2005 more than 2,000 dogs have been cloned. ViaGen’s Web site claims: “A cloned dog is simply a genetic twin of your dog, born at a later date.” 
The market is there, but it is expensive. The Divided States of America has about 80 million dogs!  Seoul National University in South Korea has been cloning dogs since 2005 and has created several generations of Afghan hounds from the original. The Big Question is, will the DSA last long enough to clone the best modern president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as king several times? The Supreme Court wants to know.

A historical fact: Empires die of excess wealth, not poverty
Economists who have studied the death of empires such as Egypt, China, Rome and England, have determined that wealth committed the “crime,” not surging poverty. These autopsies were prepared by economists favored by President Harry Truman who said he always favored one-armed economists because they couldn’t say “On the other hand….” 

New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief Ben Hubbard, who has spent decades studying the wealthy petrostates in the Persian Gulf, has reached a conclusion that should scare the hell out of people and politicians throughout the world. 
In an article titled “Rich Gulf States Have Huge Ambitions. Will Extreme Heat Hold Them Back?” He answers his own question: “Yes!” in his opening paragraph:
“The high temperatures blamed for the deaths of pilgrims in Saudi Arabia are taking a broad toll in countries that have spent vast sums to attract tourists and investors. The wealthy petrostates of the Persian Gulf have big plans for the future, hoping to increasingly attract tourists and investors, host marquee sporting events (like golf!), build new cities and diversify their economies away from oil. But they face a booming threat that they cannot easily buy their way out of: extreme and sometimes deadly heat that roasts their countries every summer. Climate change is expected to exacerbate in the coming decades. Sweltering temperatures drive up energy demand, wear down infrastructure, endanger laborers and render even simple outdoor activities not only unpleasant, but potentially perilous. That all will impose a significant long-term tax on the vast ambitions of Gulf countries.”  

Want to argue with him?
Gulf oil countries have made trillions selling fossil fuels, that in the end times, will destroy their own countries. 
Saudi Arabia is spending billions building high-end resorts on the Red Sea coasts and a futuristic city called Neom in a large northwestern desert. 
Qatar spent billions hosting the men’s soccer World Cup in 2023 and has brought in international trade shows and other sporting events since then. 
The United Arab Emirates sponsored an expensive World Expo while constructing air-conditioned buildings (one a complete sports stadium!) to attract the business of superwealthy. 
But climate experts are predicting that many Middle East and Gulf countries will experience temperatures of 132F and higher in a couple of decades. Everybody dies at 125F because one ceases to sweat. 
All of these countries are also water-stressed – they don’t have enough – so they have two choices: import water or remove the salt from ocean water. Both processes are frightfully expensive.
A lesson from history: wealthy Egyptian pharaohs built monuments and tombs to celebrate themselves, employing thousands of workers for decades. Wealthy Chinese did the same thing, one building a 20 sq. mile tomb and monument for himself. Wealthy Roman senators imported slaves, built a huge stadium so the populace could watch gladiators, Christians and lions living or dying by the thumb, and finally superwealthy English who made so much money dominating other areas of the world, finally grew too fat, went home and built huge mansions for themselves and their extended families. 

When you see wealthy Americans spending $180 million for a painting, $40 million for a wristwatch, billionaires paying lawyers salaries of $25 million a year to protect their billions, when you see shareholders of Elon Musk’s businesses paying him $48 billion a year to keep the cash flowing, and when the superwealthy own a superyacht that uses more fossil fuel in a year than the total population of many  countries, how long do you think the American empire is going to last?