News & Articles

Americans should see Emmitt Till’s
coffin and read Ike’s speech
The Divided States of America has more than 1,100 billionaires and is  birthing more each day. Many are involved with professional sports as a major or minor investment.

All NFL and NBA franchises are owned or controlled by billionaires, except for the Green Bay Packers. The city owns it.

There are 777 colleges and universities sponsoring football in 2025-26 and more than 1,000 offer basketball. It would be fascinating to know how many players in those two sports entered transfer portals.

But before we deal with that subject, let’s look at what Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska wrote what a “healthy” university should do when he was being considered for the presidency of the University of Florida. How many “students” looking for an athletic transfer also consider the higher education program of a “healthy” university with a good football or basketball program?

Sasse says: “A healthy university must challenge young men and women with new and even uncomfortable ideas. A healthy university must embrace debate. A healthy university will welcome complicated truths and explore eye-opening perspectives. A healthy university will challenge assumptions and consider alternatives. A healthy university stays humble by understanding that the quest for knowledge and truth is a lifelong endeavor. No wise person ever concludes they know it all. A healthy university affirms the dignity of every human being and builds a community of inclusion.”

Can a university remain ‘healthy’ with ‘transfer portal’ athletics?

States in the Divided States of America have the constitutional responsibility to educate its population. All of our states have failed to do so.

The total student debt is now $1.83 trillion owed by 42.7 million students to the age of 96 (at last count!). Currently 5.5 million students are in default, owing $140 billion. More than $250 billion debt is past due.
And what are universities doing to meet their responsibility? Most are cutting art, music, history, literature and humanities programs to balance budgets.

To gain some perspective of the problem of NCAA transfer portal regulations, we have more than 550,000 college students playing NCAA championship sports. We have more than one million high school students playing football—and 7% go forward to college football.

In college football we have more than 70,000 athletes compete in three divisions in 777 colleges and universities. 

In college basketball we have more than 19,000 men and 16,500 women athletes competing in more than 1,100 colleges.

It is absolutely necessary to find out how many athletes sought to use transfer portals and how many  made a move to a different school. How many millions did it take for Indiana University to win the national football championship? Who has a clue?

European universities decided decades ago to support education, not dozens of athletic programs. That is why many offer free college education to all citizens, and in some cases, to many foreign students!

How many billionaires believe
money is the root of all evil?
A few economists, Wall Street investors and some theologians believe the Bible verse Timothy 6:30: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” About 20% of our billionaires have tentatively agreed to give half their wealth away when they die. Philanthropy.is not on the mind.

The length of their superyachts is a daily challenge and the number of bathrooms in mansions scattered around the world in tax havens is a formidable contest.

Amazon CEO Bezos, who is helping to kill democracy in darkness, has 27 bathrooms in his D.C. mansion. (I have been reading the Washington Post for at least 75 years. I just canceled my subscription because Bezos turned it into a pointless rag.) 

Larry Ellison of Oracle and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta have a passion for owning tropical islands with mansions and disaster bunkers to keep out riff-raff.  They are not concerned about climate change or the planet as they drive their $30 million Rolls Royce Dove Tail, $600 million superyacht and $85 million private jet on land, sea and air. 

Three kinds of evil seem to dominate the love for money: greed, fraud and envy.

They need to know history. In August 2005 the climate change hoax forced New Orleans to evacuate more than half of its population, more than 250,000 people. Almost 75% of the housing was damaged or destroyed. Nothing changed for a year. More than 140,000 blacks have never returned to the city. It took 10 years to get the population up to 80% of  what it was in 2015 — and decline again in the next decade. Hurricane Katrina destroyed 5,400 housing units of the poor – and never brought them back. All public housing was torn down because it was so damaged.

A former resident of the Ninth Ward, which was totally flooded recently, returned for a look: “It looked like Katrina happened last week instead of over 20 years ago.”

By the way, Donald: something new is growing all over the ice cap in Greenland. Dark algae. It will absorb the sun’s rays and melt the ice cap. That means Mar-a-Loco will be under 20 feet of water.
Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote this about superrich Gatsby: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different than you and me.”

Capitalist-Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders often decreed that the United States of America (USA) should not have a single billionaire because they had turned the USA into the Divided States of America (DSA). He always asks them: “Do you think you can get by on $999,000,000?”

It is now a scientific fact that billionaires will destroy Planet Earth, themselves, and all of us with 250 mph winds, 50-foot floods and state-sized fires before trillionaire Elon Musk can fly a Mars rocket that won’t blow up.

Among colleges with athletic
programs we have have-mores, haves and have-nots
I have been a fan of Minnesota Golden Gopher football for 85 years, which has been usually competitive in the Big Ten Conference since 1896.

The Gophers have won seven national championships – 1904, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1940, 1941, 1960 — but no championship for 65 years!

Our family had a touch because my older brother Gordon, who happened to play trumpet in the Gopher pep band, sat next to Leo Nomellini in one of his classes. They became friends.

A big man for the times, Leo was 6’3”, weighed 260 and played both offensive and defensive tackle at the All-American level. He later was a star for years with the San Francisco 49ers.

Bernie Bierman was another reason I followed the Gopher. He coached the Gophers for 16 years. I played high school and college football between 1946 and 1954 and have always had a great interest in the game.

There’s no doubt the NIL transfer portal program dreamed up by NCAA powers with billionaire friends is rapidly turning into a nightmare that might kill higher education in sports.

Europe found that out decades ago. (An announcement by Gopher football coach P.J. Fleck canceling the usual spring football game for fans created and signaled panic (a panic attack disease! Now he has decided to have it April 25.) among coaches in all sports. Fleck does not want third parties, agents, spies and rival coaches from other conferences and skill levels to see any of his players perform. He’s afraid he might be outbid for his players by a “have-more” university.

In fact, he knows he doesn’t have enough money to buy a championship team. He needs a Minnesota billionaire.

Star Tribune sportswriter Chip Scoggins has it figured out: “College sports haven ‘t just changed in the past three years. The whole enterprise has been   thrown into chaos. The Wild West depiction of NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) is real. The NIL concept has morphed into a PFP (Pay for Play) reality, putting boosters and backers of every school in a financial vise that looks something like this: If fans don’t give money to collectives to retain and recruit top players, the team will suffer on the field, leading to poor seasons, leading to coaching changes, leading to turmoil, leading to rival school success.” 

And leading to low enrollment and tighter budgets.

Billionaires ruined democracy —
athletic programs are next
We are due to celebrate 250 years of our government next year. The way things are going, we may be dedicating the first year of a fascist state and government. It might be 50 years too late.

Billionaires have replaced democrats and republicans with autocrats and fascists.

In just three years of paying college players to play games bringing big revenue to college administration, higher education presidents have created a pandemic of evil that is ruining college sports — and is already spreading evil to high schools and middle schools.

Billionaire donors dominate college sports and college presidents and are influencing institutional policies as well as what is in the educational programs.

A person goes to college to prepare to make a living and to enjoy life. Almost all colleges ranked in the top 25 in football and basketball have a billionaire sugar daddy to raid transfer portals across the nation and recruit foreign players who have skills.

Is the user of transfer portals going to major in his or her sport or will they graduate with a degree that encourages search for knowledge, pleasure and accommodation? 

The Gallup Poll has a shocker for our country. In 2010 75% of Americans viewed college as being very important. That position has plummeted to 35% in 2026.

Many college professors blame capitalistic individualism. They claim college presidents and politicians started to treat capitalism as a shared common good instead of a private investment promising personal prosperity.

Will transfer portal members major
in their sport or life?
When I look back at my college football days, as a senior I was co-captain of the MSTC Dragons and selected as an All-Conference offensive and defensive guard by the State College Conference.
I was elected  president of the Student Commission by the student body, which advised the administration about student programs.

I also remember I was the only Broad English Major with Journalism and Creative Writing on the football team of 50 and the only jock in the college choir.

A piece of advice for transfer portal gals and guys: do not major in your sport, Pick a major that has lots of history, humanities, music, art, literature and DEI.

As a farm kid without electricity, I graduated from Morrison Country #54 with two other students. I sang to the cows but I didn’t know I could sing. As a high school freshman, I tried out for the choir. The director listened to me for a few minutes and then whispered: ”You’re going to open the Christmas band and choir concert with a solo.” One of life’s shocks.

But I sang “Jesu Bambino’” at the concert in the Little Falls auditorium. Three years later I was singing tenor in the Little Falls Winter Wonderland Mixed Quartet as part of the traveling show of Minnesota’s Miss America Bebe Shoppe. We accompanied her when she played the vibraharp and had part of the program directed by Cedric Adams of WCCO and Tribune fame.

Such is life.