Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
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It’s at once amazing and troublesome. I speak of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence application that was launched last November by OpenAI. In a matter of seconds, it can write apparently accurate articles or answer questions on a multitude of subjects. When I asked ChatGPT what it is, it responded this way: “I am designed to understand and generate human-like language based on the input I receive.… My purpose is to assist and communicate with people in a variety of ways, from answering gener...
In 1877, in Munn v. Illinois, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a landmark ruling that, to this day, ranks as one of the most important victories ever rendered for farmers in American legal history. The decision rewarded Midwestern farmers for their broad and sustained political activism in a long campaign to protect their economic interests in a confrontation with the “all powerful railroads.” In a 7-2 opinion for the majority, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, upheld an Illinois statute, one of several “Granger laws” enacted by Midwest...
This past weekend I had the opportunity to do something a little different. The 4-H Shooting Sports and Outdoor Skills Club in Eddy County spent time in the Turtle Mountain region, particularly at Lake Metigoshe State Park north of Bottineau. The trip was organized by club leader Mike Brazil, who believes it's important to get youth outside, experiencing the outdoors. "I look at how we grew up, and then I see how our kids are growing up," Mike said to me Saturday, "and I want them to get... Full story
Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed a dramatic workforce shift. Baby boomers are retiring, while millennials and Gen Z are taking over workplaces across the country. Data shows that these generations of workers are changing jobs every three to four years, on average. The reality is that employers, including the State of North Dakota, will need to adjust for this reality to be competitive. The legislature is currently discussing the state employee’s retirement system, debating whether to implement a 401k-style retirement plan for all new...
Former Vice President Mike Pence plans to invoke the Speech or Debate Clause as justification for challenging a subpoena issued by Special Counsel Jack Smith in his investigation of former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Pence’s claim to immunity from the subpoena shines a spotlight on an important but largely inconspicuous constitutional provision. Article I, Section 6 protects “Senators and Representatives” from arrest “for any Speech or Debate in either House,” and stipulates that “they shall not be questi...
We publish "scam alerts" in this newspaper periodically. Often we receive a press release from the AARP, and other times local authorities notify us that there has been a victim of a particular scam in our area. As I'm sure most do, I receive an endless sea of spam and phishing emails on a daily basis. Some days I spend more time clearing out unwanted messages than I do responding to actual requests from real people. Yesterday took the cake though. Since I began serving on the North Dakota...
Who needs forensics and gunfire? My wife and I have been catching up on episodes of “The Mysteries of Laura,” the 2014-2016 NBC series starring Debra Messing. Forget murders and chases. The real reason the show resonates with me is because as Laura Diamond juggles the duties of a single mother and police detective, she’s understandably a slob with her car. Yes, my poor Altima gets woefully neglected inside and out. It’s a magnet for the abundant tree sap in my yard and the interior is home to...
President Joe Biden’s delivery of what has become the annual State of the Union address fulfilled one of the few constitutional obligations imposed upon the nation’s chief executive. What were the framers of the Constitution thinking when they wrote in Article II, section 3, that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and convenient”? In the Constitutional Convention, delegates spent virtually no time di...
I’ve seen a few Facebook posts from parents and grandparents showing their valentine box-making adventures recently, and just this morning we printed some artwork for one NR-S student’s valentine box. I can’t help but smile and cringe at the same time. I’m not particularly good at crafting valentine boxes, and I remember struggling to help my kids execute their ideas. I like wrapping presents, so the best I could come up with was to wrap an ample-sized box using the back side of some Christm...
The IRS is so kind. Our most beloved federal agency has delayed until next year a new income-reporting law it has carefully designed to squeeze the last drops of tax revenue out of many of us. The new IRS rule is aimed at millions of self-employed people and small business people who sell goods or services on places like eBay, drive part-time for Uber or earn income through social media companies like Airbnb. Right now, the requirement for having to report this kind of side-hustle income to the...
The difficulties that college and university administrators from California to Massachusetts have faced over the past 30 years in protecting their students from harassment, within the context of America’s constitutional commitment to freedom of speech, were brought center stage once more in December of 2022 at the University of Wyoming where a church elder was banned from the student union for harassing an LGBTQ student by name. This most recent controversy was initiated on December 2, when Todd Schmidt, an elder with the Laramie Faith C...
Change is coming to N.D. high school basketball much like a freight train rolling down the track. Sports Reporter Erik Gjovik broke down the details of the latest proposal to move to a three-class system for basketball in a feature story this week. As he was unpacking all the information in the 22-page proposal, Gjovik discovered that the change would also greatly affect our newspaper coverage of area teams. Right now, the New Rockford Transcript primarily covers New Rockford-Sheyenne...
It’s one of the best days of the year and we owe our gratitude to the remarkable man who made it possible. Feb. 1 is National Freedom Day and its origin is as wonderful as is freedom itself. The creation of this day dates back to 1863, during the thick of the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. His proclamation changed the legal status of more than 3.5 million African Americans from “enslaved” to “free.” Following the war, with the passage of the 13...
Questions surrounding news that President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence have disclosed possession of classified documents in their homes justify interruption of this column’s weekly focus on landmark Supreme Court rulings. Curious readers have asked about the constitutional, legal and historical foundations of government authority to classify documents. First things first. Let’s not confuse the voluntary and cooperative disclosure of possession of classified documents by the Biden and Pence camps with the deceit and obs...
Veteran newspaperman Allen Stock has been out of the Independent office for a few weeks now. This is the first time since I purchased the newspaper in October 2021 that he has been absent for more than a few days. Let me tell you, readers, it has been an adjustment. Over the past 45 years, he has answered the office landline in the evening and on the weekends. If he is there when it rings, he picks up the phone. He also drops by the office everyday, even if only to check the building to see...
President Joe Biden isn’t waiting for the Supreme Court to decide on his last $400 billion student loan bailout before rolling out another, even more costly plan (oral arguments are scheduled for Feb. 28, and it has been blocked by lower courts for now.) Biden’s new plan to force taxpayers to pay for other people’s college is as legally and morally bankrupt as his old plan – and may prove even more expensive. The new Biden proposal would force taxpayers to cover the full cost of college, except for nominal monthly payments capped at a maximum...
Half a century later, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969) remains the Supreme Court’s authoritative ruling on symbolic speech and the First Amendment rights of K-12 students to express their political views. Delivered in the context of the widespread social activism that defined the 1960s – anti-racism, anti-sexism and anti-war protests – Justice Abe Fortas’s 7-2 landmark opinion upheld the right of students to wear black armbands in school as means of demonstrating their opposition to the Vietnam War. Justice...
Looking at the tax cut proposals now being debated in the legislature, maybe it’s time to revert back to a territory. Apparently, we don’t want the state to accept the responsibilities of providing minimum support for public services. States are supposed to be communities with common interests. In North Dakota, it seems like frontier thinking of starving the public to benefit individuals prevails in the legislature. The tax cuts being proposed will do nothing to raise the quality of roads, edu...
In the 1980s, I repeatedly watched a recorded copy of the film "Escape from New York" on my family's Panasonic VCR – complete with tuning knobs the size of hubcaps. Little did I know that I would star in my own version of the movie (as a domesticated, tattoo-less and slightly flabby version of Snake Plissken) on a recent holiday vacation to the Big Apple. Of course, my family and I chose to travel to New York City during one of the coldest Christmas seasons on record– so cold that even the sub...
In a tragic, landmark ruling of historic dimensions, the Supreme Court, in 1927, in an opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, upheld the forced sterilization of a Virginia woman erroneously characterized by the state as “feeble-minded,” grounded on the chilling rationale that, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The Court’s 8-1 decision in Buck v. Bell, with only Justice Pierce Butler dissenting, is widely regarded as one of its worst. Justice Holmes’s opinion, just five paragraphs in length, and fewer than 1,000 words...
We’re only a few days into the state legislative session, and North Dakota newspaper publishers find themselves thrust into a battle to protect the public’s access to information. Senate Bill (SB) 2143, a bill that would eliminate publication of insurance abstracts in newspapers, was heard by the Senate’s Industry, Business and Labor Committee last week. Insurance abstracts, or short briefs that illustrate the financial position of insurance companies that write policies in North Dakota, are pub...
"Time Enough at Last." The new year reminds me of that classic "Twilight Zone" episode starring Burgess Meredith as a put-upon bookworm. (No, he wasn't reading on the wing of an airplane! Get your episodes straight, with "The Twilight Zone Companion," for Pete's sake!) True bibliophiles are all the same. Whether our preference is studying the rise and fall of empires or the rise and fall of heaving bosoms, we eagerly anticipate how many volumes we can absorb in the pristine, wide-open next 12...
Congressman-Elect, George Santos’s (R-NY) sweeping distortions of his personal and professional biography has triggered nationwide calls for the House of Representatives to prevent him from assuming his seat in the 118th Congress. Americans have recoiled from his many false claims, including that he is Jewish and that his grandparents fled Nazi persecution, that he is a graduate of Baruch College and that he worked for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. The rising demands to block him from Congress raises anew a question of monumental importance f...
We’re in the last week of holiday break for my college-aged daughter, and I’m wondering how it went so quickly. We’ve gone over her grades from her first semester as a full-time college student, and she’s looking ahead to her spring semester schedule. Over the past three weeks, she’s visited friends and family, helped me with a couple of projects at work, and done a fair amount of cooking and cleaning at home. Man, I’m going to miss that as soon as she’s gone again! By the time many of you read...
Barbara Walters might never have become a powerful force in broadcast journalism had she lacked the chutzpah to extract a promise from her bosses at NBC News in 1973. As she explained it to me, she had already worked at the "Today" show for a dozen years, serving first as a writer and then as the "Today girl" on set - a bubbly balance to the program's male host, the journalist Frank McGee. If McGee were ever to leave, NBC pledged, she would be named co-host, an unprecedented role for a woman....
