Last Friday, the Texas State Board of Education approved the required reading of Biblical stories and Bible verses as part of the state’s K-12 English and literature curriculum. While the Biblical “literature” requirements do not take effect until 2030, part of the new requirement is that any literature selection on the required list must be “read in its entirety.”

This follows last year’s requirement for all classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, a law recently upheld by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

While the U.S. Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” it’s pretty clear that the Texas State Board of Education has either not read the Constitution or believes that states can disregard its provisions.

According to the Pew Research Center, 67% of Texans identify as Christians; 6% identify as believers in other non-Christian faiths; and 26% are religiously unaffiliated, which means that more than a third of Texas students will be required to read religious tracts contrary to their beliefs.

Maybe I’m a bit old-fashioned, but I don’t believe that freedom of religion includes using the government, either federal, state, or local, to require students to read religious texts of a specific faith “in their entirety.”

Those Texas “Christians” (and others) got rather violently opposed to even the thought of students studying other faiths, but they’re more than willing to force their beliefs on others?

But then, the “true believers” have always been willing to force their beliefs on others, or at the least, to look the other way when the zealots did the forcing.

The legal process in the United States has always been slow, in part because it involves checks and balances at every level. Today, as I’ve previously noted, it’s slower than ever.

In an effort to bend all branches of government to the President’s will, the current administration has launched an all-out attack on policies, rules, laws, and even the Constitution itself, as well as on longstanding judicial case law and precedents.

These Executive branch actions, whether legal or not, can be ordered almost instantly. One of the latest is Trump’s withholding various sources of federal funding from states or cities refusing to follow Trump’s demands involving immigration, many of which have been rejected by federal courts as being unlawful.

While news sources have often failed to point out is that, in the majority of lawsuits, the Trump administration has either lost the initial suits or had the Administration’s powers curbed to a degree, but because the Administration appeals everything to the Supreme Court, the process of employing the courts to force the President to comply with the Constitution is long, time-consuming, and expensive.

In the meantime, the Trump Administration continues adding “initiatives” of dubious legality to hamper or punish cities, states, organizations, and individuals who oppose Trump’s power grabs.

The result is a sort of “race,” where the Trump Administration keeps trying to cut federal programs and services legislated, authorized, and funded by Congress, as well as engaging in hiring and firing practices clearly legally questionable, faster than the courts can handle the lawsuits asserting the illegality of previous Executive branch actions.

Unfortunately, this particular race not only overloads the judicial system, but weakens the checks and balances instituted by the framers of the Constitution, something clearly understood by those manipulating the spoiled narcissistic superannuated toddler who calls himself the most powerful man on the planet.

Although Donald Trump is often correct in pointing out problems facing the nation, all too many of his “solutions” make the problem even worse. Part of the reason for this is that Trump has several operating patterns that can’t help but make matters worse, which is why many of his solutions may come to haunt him.

His first generally unhelpful pattern is to look for an apparently simple solution to a problem and immediately attempt to implement that solution, without looking carefully at the situation, especially for longstanding problems, such as the foreign trade balance, immigration, excessive federal spending, education, and, of course, Iran.

The second pattern that magnifies the first is to find a person or people to blame when matters don’t go the way he thinks they should. It doesn’t matter whether the people blamed have any real connection to the problem, just that they’re somewhere near the problem… or that they’re someone Trump dislikes.

The reflecting pool mess is a good illustration. Trump identifies a real problem, that the reflecting pool has become unsightly and needs cleaning up. But does Trump bring in anyone who knows anything about the problems of fixing a stone structure unwisely built on what had originally been swampy ground? Hardly. He promises a fix, quotes an unrealistically low price, then contracts for repairs with an open budget and a 20% profit margin (i.e., cost plus budget) and gives the contract to a company with no track record in dealing with such problem facilities on a large scale, and which attempted to kill off the algae with hydrogen peroxide, not the best idea since hydrogen peroxide can, in certain conditions, act as a paint remover. Then, when matters go poorly, and sections of the coating come loose, Trump blames apparently non-existent vandals, berates the press for pointing out the lack of evidence for vandalism, and then says that it’s really the fault of previous administrations.

The questions facing Trump – and the US – are, first, if and when Trump will run out of plausible, but overly simplistic solutions and, second, when or if the American people will ever tire of the blame game and decide they want real and workable solutions.

My paternal grandmother always said that bad things happened like triplets, three at a time – three deaths, three accidents, etc. Needless to say, I was rather skeptical, although I recently looked up the idea as a possible folk saying and discovered that the idea is in fact an ancient superstition rooted in pattern-seeking psychology. In spirituality, the number three is generally a symbol of wholeness, creation, and the cyclical nature of life (birth, life, death), rather than just misfortune.

My grandmother, of course, never said, at least not to me, that good things also come in threes, but that might be because she’d gotten a bit cynical by the time she mentioned the idea to me. Part of that might have been because her husband (my grandfather) was a mining engineer who, as the family puts it, “made a million dollars three times and lost it two and a half times.”

Even so, I hadn’t thought of her rule of three until this past week, when two sprinklers in my system froze in place, both in locations where, at my age, I didn’t really want to dig. So I called the sprinkler tech associated with my lawn service, and he replaced them. Then three days later, a main feed pipe to the sprinkler system broke. I called the tech. He replaced the pipe, but two days later one of the valves attached to the associated controller sprang a pinhole leak and the system developed a short in another control box. I called a different tech. He fixed both for much less.

Now, I’ve had the sprinkler system for almost twenty years and only had one semi-major repair in that whole time. But, all of a sudden – three semi-separate failures in a week and a half?

It almost gives credence to my grandmother’s belief about things happening in threes, at least for sprinkler systems

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, since 2021, Gross Domestic Product has grown by roughly 11% annually. During the same period, corporate profits have more than doubled, increasing on average nearly twenty percent annually. Hourly wages have increased a little over four percent annually with lower increases in the past two years, and workers’ share of corporate income has decreased by 8% to an all-time low of 71%.

Those numbers provide an overall suggestion that corporate profits are definitely improving far faster than are workers’ income, a fact highlighted by a recent Economic Policy Institute (EPI) study that found that while worker productivity increased by 92% over the past 45 years, average hourly worker compensation only increased by 34%, with that gap widening more each year.

These figures, or variations on them, have been cited for some time, but there are other aspects of adverse economic change affecting Americans that, while obvious, have not been quantified in terms of their impact.

I occasionally watch (mostly listen to) CNN and other video productions for quick updates, usually in the kitchen while I’m preparing food, and it struck me that I was seeing/hearing far more commercials, sometimes as many as five or six back-to-back, along with the misleading phrase(“we’ll be back after a short break”) introducing those commercials. So, I did a little research and discovered that, while the FCC has mandated limits on how many minutes of commercials can be inserted into children’s programs (12 minutes every hour on weekdays and 10.5 on weekends), there are no restrictions for other programming.

As late as the early 1970s, the “standard” ratio for television/cable programs was 51 minutes of content and 9 minutes of commercials for an hour program. Today that “standard” is 42 minutes of content and 18 minutes of commercials, and at times “news hours” at CNN consist of as few as 33 minutes of content and 27 minutes of ads. With that ratio, it’s no wonder that viewers are abandoning “mainstream” broadcasting.

Unfortunately, in the search for more advertising dollars, now satellite/cable providers are inserting commercials almost willy-nilly into movie channels and other programs, which means that viewers who originally signed up to avoid or minimize commercials are now paying for commercials on a system they chose to avoid commercials. And that means users are getting less for their money than they used to, particularly since cable/satellite fees continue to increase. Those Americans who can barely afford a television, let alone cable or satellite service, are stuck with commercial maximization.

Just another example of how the insane search for more and more profit hurts all consumers, one way or another, except for the ad agencies (already one of the most profitable industry segments).