In an article published in The New York Times, on May 7, 2026, dealing with possible causes of the declining birthrate in the United States, the economist Claudia Goldin cited two factors: (1) the unpredictable shifts and low wages that have barely kept pace with the cost of living for less-skilled workers and (2) so-called “greedy jobs,” positions that demand far more of an employee than can be accomplished within “normal working hours.”

In fact, today most U.S. workers face three possibilities for work: no available jobs, jobs with wages/hours insufficient to pay the bills, or “greedy jobs.”

I’m more than a little acquainted with “greedy jobs,” since every political or consulting job I had for the eighteen years I worked in Washington, D.C., took far more time than nine to five and had requirements that went far beyond the job description.

Sometimes, financial circumstances also create “greedy jobs,” particularly the costs of higher education. A junior degreed professional – doctor, engineer, lawyer, dentist, and others – who leaves graduate school with a high level of student loans may well find his or her job barely able to provide a living wage after making student loan payments while another junior degreed professional whose family supported them through college and graduate school won’t have near the financial problems.

As for tenure track/tenured university professors, whether a position is “greedy” depends on the university and the field. At least at my wife’s university, the pay is higher in certain areas, such as business, and the hours are shorter. In the performing arts, especially in music, the pay is lower, the hours longer, and on average, music professors work six-day weeks. And to add to that, the administrative and paperwork requirements have effectively doubled over the past decade as a result of politically required documentation. As a result, many senior professors are retiring earlier, and taking lower retirement benefits, and they’re being replaced by much younger and fewer professors and more low-paid part-time adjuncts without benefits, especially health benefits, creating “greedier” full-time positions and more underpaid and insecure part-time positions.

But very few analysts – or politicians – seem to realize that current economic pressures are turning more, if not most, available jobs into either those that can’t pay the bills or barely do and those that are “greedy jobs.”

Is this really the future we want?

West of Cedar City, on land grazed by herds of sheep in the not-too-distant past, apartment and condominium buildings are springing up seemingly everywhere. That’s unfortunately not too surprising, given that last year Iron County tied for the fastest county population growth in the state of Utah. And those numbers understate the actual number of people, because the enrollment at Southern Utah University has doubled in the past 11 years to almost 16,000 students, and most of them (roughly 70%) don’t come from Iron County/Cedar City.

One aspect of all this home building I find most interesting is that, from what I can tell, over 80% of those apartments/condominiums are constructed of pseudo-stucco, i.e., a thin layer of mortar over one half inch OSB (Oriented Strand Board) clad in Tyvek (waterproof plastic). In my opinion, this isn’t exactly terribly permanent, but this growing impermanence in housing mirrors impermanence elsewhere.

This is especially true in the book business. I have a collection of mass market paperbacks, many of which are over forty years old. Some of them are a bit fragile, admittedly, but they’re readable.

On the other hand, since my publisher went digital, I’ve created back-up files for each book in place of hard copies. The only problem is that many of the back-up files are essentially “lost,” since the earliest were on thin floppies, the next were on 3 ½ inch hard floppies, the next on CDs. I never kept the older computers for obvious reasons. All of which means that, effectively, those fragile paperbacks are outlasting the electronic formats.

As others have pointed out, at least some of the data and records from the Mercury and Apollo space programs has been “lost” because the systems with which to read that data have been replaced by newer systems using totally different codes.

Somehow it seems rather amusingly odd that someone can read the words and songs of the Sumerian poetess/priestess Enheduanna written some 4300 years ago on a clay tablet, but more and more data and history are being recorded on electronic media that will vanish far sooner, either from power failures or planned obsolescence. One of the greatest cultural losses is likely to be in the area of classical music where the failure of the copyright system means that thousands of works are slowly moldering away because few have the time and/or resources to preserve them, and even those preserved “electronically” won’t last that long.

As for the semi-temporary apartments springing up everywhere, in the global scheme of things, they’re no great loss – except to whoever owns them when they collapse or are demolished in the comparative near future.

Sometimes, propaganda is blatantly false; sometimes it’s a mixture of truth and misinformation; and sometimes, what’s perceived as blatantly false is largely factually accurate.

Ted Koppel of CBS News revealed on Sunday, May 24th that Iranians are flooding the internet, and the world, with skillfully rendered, AI-generated, anti-American, and especially anti-Trump media, often featuring AI-rendered Trump Lego figures.

Koppel talked, if via a translator, with one of the individuals behind at least some of the anti-Trump renderings, asking that individual about the assertion that Israel had blackmailed Trump into making the attack on Iran by threatening to reveal Trump’s more direct connections to Jeffrey Epstein. The Iranian, predictably, claimed that the report was, in fact, accurate.

Whether or not that assertion is accurate, the fact that it’s been made public and that the Iranian anti-Trump propaganda has been disseminated so far to near a billion people worldwide are disturbing. Even more disturbing in this context is the fact that roughly half of the Epstein documents remain undisseminated and that much of the material that was disseminated is so heavily redacted as to be unreadable.

Given the stakes of the Iran conflict, the fact that Trump and his administration acted without any long-term plan or strategy and given how unwilling Trump’s Department of Justice is to comply with the court order to disseminate all the Epstein files, merely dismissing the Iranian assertion as false is hardly sufficient to remove the cloud of doubt created by that assertion, particularly given Trump’s long record of misstatement and prevarication and the slavish devotion of the political appointees running DOJ.

Trump’s continuing statements about a pending solution to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are hardly reassuring, particularly given the pace of Iranian rearmament. While the growing threat of Iranian-backed terrorists in the Middle East and Iranian progress in developing a global nuclear threat provide some rationale for the initial February attack on Iran, none of those deal with the question of why the U.S. joined Israel almost immediately for a second attack, especially since it’s clear that Trump has been unable to provide any comprehensive reason for the second attack, beyond claiming that Iran should never be allowed a nuclear weapon.

So…whose claims are true, and to what degree, and which, if any, are blatantly false?

The Trump administration announced last Monday the creation of a $1.8 billion fund to compensate those who claim they were targeted by the Biden Justice Department and by Democrats. This act would forge a pipeline to funnel taxpayer money to President Trump’s allies.

The fund was created just after Trump withdrew his lawsuit demanding at least $10 billion against the Internal Revenue Service as an effort to skirt oversight by the judge on the case, who had expressed concern that the lawsuit against the IRS represented self-dealing between the president and a department run by his former defense lawyer, Todd Blanche.

Trump’s and Blanche’s moves stripped Judge Kathleen M. Williams, who had been overseeing the IRS case in the Southern District of Florida, of her appointed role in approving a formal settlement agreement. By dismissing the case in its entirety, Trump could reach an agreement with his own appointees without risking the rebuke of an impartial and independent arbiter.

Trump, his two sons and his family business, who sued the IRS together, would receive an apology but not be paid out of the new fund, officials said.

Trump and DOJ’s leadership have repeatedly accused Democrats of weaponizing federal law enforcement against their enemies, but they have failed to provide evidence of illegality, or political animus, in the two federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump or in investigations into his allies. Judge Williams had been considering dismissing Mr. Trump’s IRS suit on her own because Trump effectively controls both his personal lawyers bringing the complaint and the government lawyers who are supposed to respond to it.

In short, Trump is using Blanche to get a settlement for a lawsuit that never should have been brought and, if brought, would likely have lost, and settlement will direct $1.8 billion of taxpayer funds to whomever Trump and Blanche choose (if through a five-person board whose members Blanche effectively controls).

And to top it all off, the DOJ action blocks any IRS attempts to audit, investigate, or prosecute any tax matters involving Trump, the Trump family, or any Trump company… ever.

In terms of corruption of the legal system itself, this tops anything I’ve seen.

Over the years, even over the past century, there’s been an ongoing discussion/argument about technology, and whether it’s beneficial for society as a whole. It’s certainly beneficial for those who can reap its benefits, but the degree to which individuals can reap those benefits is largely determined by their education and physical resources.

What’s so often overlooked about technology is that its greatest function is as a multiplier. For me as a writer, computers were a godsend because I wrote barely legibly and got writer’s cramp after a few hundred words. Typewriters were better, but I was a lousy typist and went through bottles of Wite-Out. Computers definitely multiplied my writing accuracy and output, but I had the advantage of a good education and the resources to afford a computer.

The fact is that technology multiplies the skills and productivity more for those already enabled to a great degree.

Another factor is that technology is amoral. It can more greatly enable those who do work to improve society, and it can improve the ability of individuals who wish to destroy, either people or societies.

The third factor is that technology enables its users to create change more quickly, often more quickly than many, if not most, people can effectively adapt to. That becomes a destabilizing factor in any society because only a minority of people in most cultures can deal effectively with rapid change. Yet each improvement in technology increases the rate of change in a culture.

One area where technology has already changed the social structure of the United States is the replacement of brute physical strength in a range of jobs across the United States with computerized/mechanized systems, where precision and detail are increasingly important, and where women tend to handle such detail more effectively. That technological change has begun to reduce jobs demanding physical strength as well as to reduce the pay of such positions, which causes social and income erosion for men who used to fill those positions at higher pay.

Wider and more intensive communications convey more effectively and intensively the lifestyles of the rich and famous, if you will, and this increases social unrest among those less economically advantaged, which further increases already growing social unrest.

So far, the United States, as I see it, is failing to fully comprehend the magnitude and speed of changes created by ever-advancing technology and their possibly devastating effects (in a science-fiction sense, that just might be why we don’t see signs of highly intelligent life out in the universe).

As anyone following politics should know, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, and Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, brought charges in the Eastern District of North Carolina against James Comey, the former head of the FBI, claiming that Comey threatened the life of President Trump by posting a video consisting of seashells spelling out “86 47.”

Blanche claims to have other evidence, but given the fact that “86” is actually a restaurant term used to strike an item from the menu because the kitchen’s run out of that item, Blanche is stretching more than a little bit.

This is the second attempt by Trump to prosecute James Comey, and Blanche apparently is doing so because the Donald ordered him to do so, and after what happened to Pam Bondi once she failed to successfully bring charges against Trump’s so-called enemies, Blanche isn’t wasting any time.

Even some Republicans, including Senator Thom Tillis, are skeptical.

As for Comey’s being charged with threatening the President for merely expressing an opinion that Trump ought to be removed from office,whatever happened to First Amendment rights?

Unhappily, what else can you expect from a President who demands that comedians who make fun of him and his wife be fired? Or who discharges without a legally valid cause a highly commended career federal attorney merely because Trump hates her father?

What’s even more disturbing is that Trump can threaten anyone and everyone he doesn’t like, including to destroy an entire culture if those leading it won’t immediately capitulate, but takes umbrage in the slightest satire or mockery. He’s also delayed or withheld disaster aid to states that didn’t vote for him in the last election.

If any Democrat President had done half of what Trump has, they’d have long since run afoul of Congress, but superannuated adolescent Republican Representatives and Senators who once gloried in Trump’s braggadocio are now clueless chumps or sniveling cowards, unwilling to hold their bullying leader to the requirements of the Constitution.

I have mixed feelings about protests. While I definitely support non-violent protests and the right to speak out under the provisions of the first amendment, I have to confess I’m skeptical about the effectiveness of non-violent protests. At the same time, it’s fairly clear that non-violent protests that result in violent suppression efforts by authorities have sometimes been effective in moving society, not always for the better, and sometimes seem to have had little or no impact.

In my life, I’ve been involved in exactly one protest at a single time. In 1965, when there were more than a few antiwar protests on college campuses, and I was a senior in college, four or five of us decided that the motivations of quite a few of our contemporaries who were protesting were, shall we say, less than pristine. In our youthful ‘wisdom,’ we organized a counter-protest just to prove that one could get attention with only a few people and a catchy slogan.

So, we — all five of us, as I recall — invented the “Student Committee for Restricted Escalated Warfare in Vietnam” or SCREW in Vietnam, as an attempt to point out that even a few students with a ridiculously oxymoronic name could get publicity. We had just five people, two posters, and a few hangers-on while we protested the protestors, just once.

That one single counter-protest received mentions in the local college paper and TIME magazine, and I didn’t realize it until much later.

I’ve often thought of that over the years, especially when seeing how large and even well-funded non-violent protests often seem to have little or no effect, even when there’s significant public outrage.

The other morning at breakfast, I happened to read, actually read, the “guarantee” on the side of the waxed cardboard container containing cream, which promised that my satisfaction would be guaranteed or I’d either get my money back or a new container of cream, whichever I desired. All I had to do was to send the empty container back to the company.

Except the cream cost $4.95, and the empty container weighed about four ounces. So to mail a five ounce package back to the company, according to the U.S. Postal Service calculator, would cost $2.72. Since I don’t have a postage meter, and the only stamps I have are first class forever stamps, I’d either have to go to the nearest post office, roughly two miles away, or use four stamps (totalling $3.12 in value). So… if the cream had been spoiled, I’d end up paying $4.95 for the cream originally, then spending either $3.12 or $2.72 (with additional driving costs and time), to recover the $4.95. I’m not desperate enough to spend all that time to recover a little more than two dollars, and I suspect someone who’s really poor, assuming they’d even consider purchasing a large container of cream, wouldn’t have the time or possibly the resources, either.

So, for practical purposes, the “guarantee” is almost meaningless, at least to me.

But how many products have a similar guarantee — your satisfaction guaranteed or your money or a replacement back?

The Federal Trade Commission has a whole set of regulations dealing with guarantees, and they’re fairly detailed, and I suspect they’re moderately effective for larger items from reputable sellers, but even if the seller abides by the regulations, in the case of small items, the buyer may not want to go thorough the hassles of trying to obtain the guarantee.

In the case of the cream, there’s almost no downside to the producer making the guarantee, because the guarantee boosts the company with a minimal downside.

As a member of the so-called Silent Generation – not that friends or family would ever call me silent – I’ve occasionally been called “set in my ways” (i.e., old and stubborn), but there’s a reason for that. After you’ve been around a while, you tend to get irascible when you watch the younger generations make the same mistakes their parents and grandparents did. Especially when those mistakes cost billions of dollars and get thousands or tens of thousands of people get killed.

We had a Civil War, once upon a time, and over 600,000 young men were killed, because it was not only a civil war, but a culture war. One culture thought people were not born equal and that those born white were superior; the other culture believed that people were created equal. The “equal creation” culture won the shooting war, but they’re still fighting the guerilla tactics of the white nationalists over a hundred-fifty years later. And this is in a theoretically democratic culture.

Then there were the two world wars, in the first of which a bloc of countries that believed in authoritarian rule took on a group of nations that, in general, did not. The second world war followed the same general pattern, as did the Korean War.

All that, while real to me, is ancient history to virtually all Americans.

More recent history, if still ancient to the younger generations, includes the Vietnam War, in which we sided, in fact, with an abusive colonial-derived authoritarian regime against a popular and also abusive but local communist uprising.

Then came the Middle East mélange, a series of conflicts where the United States attempted so-called nation building as an alternative to abusive sectarian/authoritarian regimes in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now, once more, Iran.

And somehow, everyone is surprised, again, that the truly abused peoples in these lands really don’t want to “fight to the death” against their home-grown abusers. They’ll accept them, if reluctantly, in a way that they won’t accept foreign (to them) western democratic systems. And, in a way, they’re right to reject our style of governing for their cultures.

After all, we’re still fighting guerilla actions here at home resulting from a conflict that theoretically ended over a hundred and fifty years ago.

Donald Trump’s popularity is at an all-time low, which is hardly surprising, given the fashion in which he’s managed to diagnose accurately the concerns of the majority of Americans and then adopt solutions that have managed not only not to solve those problems, but to worsen them, likely with more terrible “solutions” to follow, possibly including a long-standing Iran mess.

Despite this, popular support of both political parties is even less than the support for Trump. Yet neither political party seems able to recognize this or to craft and/or implement any solutions. The Republicans continue to drink the Trump Kool-Aid, while the Democrats campaign on the anti-Trump bandwagon, failing to recognize just how unsteady and uncertain that position is.

Given Trump’s vengeful and vindictive nature, it’s easy to see why Republicans have fallen into line like sheep, even if that line may well lead to the electoral slaughterhouse.

But why have only a handful or two of incumbent Democrat politicians also been near mute? Right now, there are 214 Democrat Representatives in the House, and 45 Democrat Senators (not counting two independent senators who usually vote with the Democrats). But I follow politics moderately closely, and I can only come up with possibly 20 Democrats who seem to be taking visible public stands against the idiocy of so many of Trump’s failing policies.

Part of that may be that the national media doesn’t cover those politicians who have taken such stands in their states and districts. Another part is fear of incurring Trump’s public wrath, which can be costly, especially for those who must defend themselves against Trump’s vicious and frivolous lawsuits. But what I find most interesting is, from what I can tell, that many of those Democrats who have stood up aren’t exactly the wealthiest of individuals.

For example, Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who has been quite outspoken, is anything but wealthy. Nor are Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan and Jason Crow, all of whom joined Slotkin and Mark Kelly in pointing out that military officers are required not to carry out illegal orders, all of whom Trump singled out for reprisal.

Unhappily, that leaves quite a few Democrat Senators and Representatives who’ve not been particularly outspoken or active against the various Trump idiocies. But while the Republican members of the House and Senate may be wise, in terms of personal political survival, by keeping their heads down, I don’t see that strategy benefiting Democrats that much, especially after the coming mid-term elections.

But then, few politicians think beyond their next election.

Long-time readers may recall the on-going saga of the lilacs. I love lilacs, both their vibrant purple flowers (mine are, although many varieties are not) and their intense fragrance, but while growing lilacs in Cedar City isn’t particularly difficult, growing lilacs and being able to appreciate their full beauty and fragrance is more than a little problematic given the vagaries of the weather at 6,000 feet in the mountain west.

This year, I thought, there might be a good chance to enjoy the lilacs in their full glory. Begining in late January, the weather was so unseasonably warm that every day, the high temperature either flirted with the all-time high for that day or exceeded it. By early March, the nightly lows were above freezing and the daily high temperatures were in seventies (fahrenheit) or even the eighties. Snow and frost were non-existent.

The lilacs, usually slightly cautious, finally decided to start to bloom by around mid-March… and then just as the intensely purple flowers began to blossom, on the last Thursday in March… you guessed it, we had three nights of hard frost… immediately after which the temperatures returned to unseasonably high levels once more.

Perhaps half the lilacs sort of bloomed, and looked beautiful. The other half remained stunted and didn’t open, and none of them emitted even the slightest trace of the ineffable lilac fragrance.

What I’d like to know is, again, why the weather gods so delight in teasing me with the lilacs.

Cuba is inexorably crumbling. Its infrastructure is deteriorating, and no one appears to be willing or able to address the root cause, which is that the private sector doesn’t see any return on public service investment, and that the country’s too poor to raise taxes for capital investment and operation. This is the result of years of abuse by essentially unregulated private sector agricultural exploitation followed by decades of equally abusive pseudo-communism.

In the United States, there’s a similar conflict, but here, the scions of the private sector have amassed billions and aren’t happy with laws and policies restricting their operations and exorbitant profits, while those working for them feel more and more exploited as the costs of living increase faster than their income.

Both sides cite their ideals, but there’s sometimes a fine line between the earnest idealist and immovable ideologue, and, unhappily, the more one attacks someone’s beliefs, the more likely that person is to become the immoveable ideologue. And ideologues invariably want to force others to comply with their views.

It’s often been said that, while figures don’t lie, liars figure. That’s true about history as well, in that historians often see what they want to in history, as do politicians, especially Donald Trump and the rabid MAGA types. But it’s also true about everyday people. I have neighbors, good, solid people who are anything but idiots, and who’d do anything to help, who honestly believe that Trump hasn’t lied about anything, that the Somalian “mafia” control the state of Minnesota, and that most people on any form of government financial assistance are freeloaders.

I also know people who insist that police officers are the enforcement arm of the Patriarchy, that children should be bombarded with literature about gender identity before children are even old enough to understand gender identification and its ramifications, and that everyone has a right to more than minimum government assistance, regardless.

The problem with these inflexible true beliefs on a larger scale is that societies get less and less flexible and more and more rigid and polarized. And the less flexible a society or country is, the less likely that pressing problems get addressed as the country becomes increasingly authoritarian… and less free.

Over the weekend, I watched the last quarter of the Duke/UnConn NCAA basketball game.In something less than ten minutes, Duke squandered a nineteen-point lead, then gave up the ball on an unwise pass by freshman phenom Cameron Boozer that led to a last-second three-pointer by UConn that won the game. How did it happen to young Boozer, touted all year as the best first year, “one-and-done player” in the NCAA?

It happened because Boozer is an extremely talented, highly skilled FRESHMAN, surrounded by other freshmen. This is second year that this has happened to Duke. Last year, Duke had Cooper Flagg, another one-and-done phenom, and lost to Houston in the Final Four by blowing a fourteen-point lead.

In the UConn game, all Boozer had to do to guarantee the win was hold on to the ball, but he didn’t seem to realize how closely he was guarded and threw that unwise pass. Now it wasn’t all Boozer’s fault. In those last ten minutes, his largely freshman compatriots took unwise shots and made poor decisions.

For most of the year, such comparative sloppiness hasn’t been a problem because Duke’s overall talent level meant that Duke could simply overwhelm its opponents, but when a team gets to the sweet sixteen, just a few poor decisions and occasional sloppiness can do in a team like Duke, filled with an incredible amount of talent, but without commensurate experience and discipline, because young highly talented players have a tendency to think that their ability can compensate for that lack of experience and in-depth understanding. (There was a reason why first year college students were once called freshmen.)

But what’s happened to Duke two years in a row is just one example of a problem that extends well beyond basketball.

Over my lifetime, I’ve seen more young phenoms than I can count or remember burn out and crash because they relied far too highly on just their talent/skill.

My wife has seen the same thing in the field of classical singing, which is likely quietly but just as competitive as basketball. The most prestigious competition is the Metropolitan Opera Competition, in which this past year 1700 singers competed, with just six winners. Their rewards? Twenty-thousand dollars each and the exposure.

And I’m certain that my more experienced readers can come up with examples from their fields, all of which raises the question as to why there’s so much emphasis on young or fresh faces in so many fields.

At present, we have three dachshunds. I’ve almost always had dogs, initially largish dogs, including a Siberian Husky, a vain and near-brainless Samoyed, several other canines of mixed parentage, and then Toffee, aka Toffee Royale, a pure-bred female chocolate Labrador retriever, who weighed almost eighty pounds without an ounce of fat on her and who could and would retrieve tennis balls longer than any of my teenaged offspring could throw them (and all of them were athletes). Toffee even broke up a local softball game in New Hampshire by “retrieving” the softball and refusing to surrender it.

But until I met and married my wife the professor and opera singer, I’d never made the acquaintance of any dachshund – except in passing. I just thought they were short-legged, often obnoxious, bark-boxes. After Toffee’s passing (at seventeen, no less), my wife longed for another dachshund, because her last dachshund had died before we met. We found a rescue long-haired red dachshund puppy we immediately named Siegfried. He was cute, playful, affectionate – and an escape artist. To this day, I often could never discover how he got out on more than a few occasions.

One of us would have to go out and call him… and then, suddenly, he was right beside whoever took on recovery duty with this expression that proclaimed, “What’s the fuss? I’ve been here all along.”

Because dogs really do better with other dogs, especially according to my wife (and I will not- quite-grudgingly admit that they are pack animals), we soon added a black and tan smooth-coat miniature dachshund named Hildegarde, who was incredibly sweet to people, and a ferocious defender of her territory, all ten pounds of her. She and Siegfried chased off German shepherds and all manner of intruders -– although they never actually bit any person or dog. (And yes, it’s that Hildegard I inserted into The One-Eyed Man.) Hildegard was, however, a bit of a “breedist,” that is, she would only be social with other dachshunds. Other breeds were to be distained.

Our next dachshund was, and is, Buddy Mozart, who was supposed to be an English cream, but turned out to be a wheaten short-coat dachshund (i.e., half wirehair dachshund and half longhair dachshund). He was the inspiration for Rudy, the protagonist of “The Unexpected Dachshund.” He arrived at our house shortly after Dolly, another rescue from a puppy mill. Dolly is incredibly sweet and gentle, and when Buddy Mozart was a puppy, she never barked. So, his requests to us, to this day, are whines, as opposed to barks (which is also crucial to the story).

The latest addition to the dachshund pack is Wolfgang, now only ten months old, affectionate, and an incredibly beautiful English Cream longhair, with razor sharp teeth designed to “de-squeak” any squeaking dog toy known to man or woman, which leaves Buddy Mozart often forlorn because he likes to play with the squeaking dog toys (especially miniature rubber pigs), rather than destroying them, while Wolfgang’s sole mission in his young life seems to be to de-squeak Buddy Mozart’s pig toys. While I try to put the pigs out of reach when Buddy Mozart is finished, I often fail, especially when I’m writing, and that’s I why order the pig toys in large quantities.

NOTE: This post is for a faithful reader who requested anything, even about dachshunds, that didn’t deal with horrible occurrences in the U.S. political arena.

I seem to be missing something. As I write this, TSA employees are unpaid, and consequently many TSA agents can’t pay their bills and are quitting or calling in sick/unavailable. The administration’s latest proposal appears to be sending ICE agents to airports, as if ICE presence could do anything other than make the situation worse.

The Democrats refuse to allow consideration of TSA and other DHS funding until the funding legislation contains legal requirements for ICE agents to wear name badges, carry body cameras, NOT wear masks, and have legal judicial warrants to break into houses and buildings. In other words, to operate under the same legal requirements as all other U.S. law enforcement agencies.

Yet the Republicans and the President find these modest requirements so repugnant that they’re willing to paralyze scores of major airports rather than agree.

In short, the Republicans and the President are demanding funding for a federal law enforcement agency that is exempt from the protections embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, effectively supporting an agency that provides the President with the powers of an authoritarian dictator.

What I fail to understand is why all the law-and-order Republicans are supporting something that is essentially unlawful.

Oh, yes… I suppose it’s no different than ignoring that the President remains a convicted felon and that the man who ran on not getting us into foreign wars has gotten us into Gaza, Venezuela, and Iran, as well as attempting to annex Greenland, Canada, and now Cuba. Did I mention spending a billion dollars a day bombing and otherwise assaulting Iran and its proxies, without even going to Congress in advance? And with no real plans for actually stopping Iranian terrorism or for ensuring we’re not in another long-running war?

But… according to the Republican Congressional leadership and the President, the Democrats are the unreasonable ones for insisting ICE adhere to the Constitution.

Tell me how that’s unreasonable.

In my experience, a great number of Americans tend to think of economists as either ivory tower pedagogues or unrealistic ideologues, while classifying business executives as practical and down-to-earth. Both government and business have number-crunchers, but government numbers’ types are usually economists while business prefers accountants. One reason for this is likely because public policy economics and business economics differ in their basic structures and aims.

In business, an individual or a business provides a good or service to another individual or organization for a defined price. If the revenues from those prices do not cover the operating costs of the business, sooner or later the business must cut costs, raise prices, go bankrupt, or be bought by another business.

In government, a department, agency, or commission provides a service for the public, for which the Treasury provides reimbursement from funds appropriated by Congress to provide that service. While government may buy goods, those goods are bought for use in providing a service. At least, they’re supposed to be, although one might question whether multi-million-dollar DHS productions of Kristi Noem on a horse constitute a public service, even if it turned out that she was riding into the sunset.

In business, the goal is to make a profit, hopefully by providing a solid product or useful service, but in practice any cost-cutting that’s not illegal is allowable, particularly where it comes to wages, and it’s left to the consumers to determine whether they want to pay for the product. Of course, from the beginning of human history, businesses have attempted to corner their market so that the only choice buyers have is to pay an exorbitant price or do without. This was and is known as “free market economics.”

Not surprisingly, that hasn’t changed, which is why the U.S. government ended up regulating business, and why businesses complain about excess government regulation and continue to push for government to be run like a business.

So when politicians talk about running government like a business, voters should be wary. For example, Trump sold himself as a practical businessman. In his case, practicality has primarily translated into amassing funds by shifting costs onto others, failing to fully pay subcontractors, and using his office to enhance family-related businesses on an unprecedented scale. That doesn’t even include trying to gut social programs to finance a war that he promised he wouldn’t ever get us into.

His rhetoric and that of others tend to ignore the fact that failure of government to rein in business excesses in seeking to maximize profits results in more people who need to rely on government income and medical support because they can’t make a living wage on what businesses are paying.

And,so far, I’ve seldom ever heard an accountant consider such economic considerations, and any economist who points them out is considered unrealistic and anti-commerce by those who think government should be run like a business.

The good news (of sorts) is that I once again successfully managed to get our federal and state tax forms completed and filed, albeit with the assistance of tax software.

The bad news is that certain aspects of it took a lot longer because of the trend toward going “paperless.” As a writer I have a lot of varied small expenses, and a great many of them I pay by check, the remainder by credit card. My bank used to send me monthly copies of my checks. I sorted out the ones for business and filed them. Except my bank went paperless and no longer provides copies – which means I have to sort through bank statements and print out copies, except that some businesses convert the checks electronically, so that there’s no real way to get a copy of those checks. Another bank now charges $3 a month to provide a monthly paper statement for a non-interest-bearing checking account.

Add to that that because we no longer have a Staples—or any other office supply business – within 60 miles, I have to order office supplies online, and that also means that I have to print out the receipts myself.

The outfit that maintains the website bills electronically, and that means I have to print out those bills as well… and so it goes. Everywhere I look, there’s pressure to “go paperless,” which may be fine for the companies involved, but it shifts the printing costs and time to me, and I don’t see any corresponding reduction in the prices charged by the companies going paperless. I do notice, in general, that their profits are increasing.

All of this is an acceleration of a trend that likely started more than sixty years ago when gasoline “service stations” (which then used to pump the gas, clean the windows, and check the oil) transitioned to self-service stations.

More and more grocery outlets are offering self-checkout options, as is Home Depot, which are really a choice between standing in line or doing the work of a checker yourself. Some fast-food restaurants now “offer” electronic ordering or ordering through an “app.”

While companies and providers all tout the convenience and cost savings of going “paperless,” and checking yourself out, it seems to me that they’re the ones getting the majority of benefits, while the rest of us do more and more of what they used to do and pay higher prices to boot.

In practical terms, Iran is a theocratic equivalent of the Third Reich, except it has far greater internal control than Hitler and his minions could ever have dreamed of. Iran is governed by an absolute autocrat, whose rule is enforced strictly and often violently by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Over more than 40 years, the IRCG has established itself as not only an armed social control force, but also as an independent military/paramilitary force of more than 90,000 men with its own independent ground, naval, and air units, as well as the elite Quds Force, which is responsible for “extraterritorial operations,” essentially organizing and supporting all the Iranian guerilla proxy groups across the Middle East. The IRGC also has the ability to call up another 500,000 men. At present, the IRGC Navy is now Iran’s primary force exercising operational control over the Persian Gulf, serving as a de facto coast guard, which suggests that the Strait of Hormuz is unlikely to be opened to oil tankers any time soon.

While the “regular” Iranian armed forces (the Artesh) are theoretically independent, and the Artesh is primarily the force assigned for national defense, the regime has continually embedded ideological and political representatives within the Artesh to ensure loyalty to the Supreme Leader.

In addition, because of various sanctions and embargoes, most of Iran’s military hardware is domestically manufactured, and Iran became an exporter of arms by the 2000s, particularly of missiles and drones, many of which have gone to Russia for use against Ukraine. The Iranian drones are far easier and less expensive to manufacture than the vast majority of weapons being used by U.S. forces against Iran.

The U.S. has so far lost three F-15 fighters (if to Kuwaiti air defenses) at a replacement cost of $90 million per jet. A single Patriot (MIM-104) missile, specifically the advanced PAC-3 MSE variant, costs approximately $4 million to $5 million per interceptor. A newly produced Patriot battery, including radar, control station, and 5–8 launchers, costs over $1 billion. Even “cheaper” U.S. missiles can cost $1-3 million each.

By comparison, Iranian Shahed drones, which are so slow that high tech systems have trouble detecting them, each cost from $20,000 to $50,000 or less. In addition, Russia is now building more sophisticated Shahed drones and has ramped up production enough that it conceivably could export them for Iranian oil.

So… what happens when the U.S. runs through all its expensive and lethal weapons?

A short war? Really?

Although Trump and Bondi hope that “Operation Epic Fury” will fade their faults and overshadow all the domestic unrest, the fact still remains that two peaceful protesters were killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis. A disabled woman was dragged from her car even though she wasn’t part of the protests and was on her way to a medical appointment. She is a U.S. citizen, but she was removed so violently that her shoulders were injured, possibly permanently. None of the ICE agents have been investigated, let alone charged in any of these incidents.

As a follow-up, the disabled woman attended the most recent State of the Union Address as a guest of her Congresswoman and was arrested for disturbance even though she said nothing and bore no signs and did nothing to create a disturbance.

Yet Attorney General Pam Bondi has charged thirty-nine protesters for disrupting a service in Minneapolis at a church where one of the pastors was an ICE official, even though no one was injured or hurt. Bondi claimed that the protesters “attacked” a house of worship and stated that if any such protests occurred again, “we will find you, arrest you, and prosecute you.”

Contrast the reaction to a peaceful protest against a pastor who is an ICE official with the lack of Department of Justice response to the killings and violence perpetrated in Minneapolis by ICE agents.

Disturbing a church service merits charges against 36 protesters and three media types who were trying to report on the protests, but ICE killings and violence against peaceful protesters doesn’t merit investigation and charges?

What does that tell you not only about ICE, but also about the power of the religious right in the United States?

Another stunning Department of Homeland Security revelation surfaced this week. Last year, Corey Lewandowski, one of DHS Secretary Noem’s top aides, entered the cockpit of a government jet uninvited during the post-take-off period, when entry to the cockpit is legally restricted, complaining because Secretary Noem’s blanket had been left behind when the crew and passengers, including Secretary Noem, had to switch aircraft for mechanical reasons.

The crew notified Lewandowski that he could not remain in the cockpit during climb-out, and Lewandowski left. Later in the flight, Lewandowski asked who should be fired because Noem’s blanket had been left behind, and the pilot in command took the responsibility. Lewandoski fired him, but the agency had to reinstate the pilot because, at Noem’s destination, there was no one qualified to fly the aircraft back to Washington, D.C.

So, not only did Noem’s people try to fire a pilot for leaving a blanket behind, but no one apparently considered the ramifications.

Apparently, Kristi Noem can’t even hang on to her own blanket and then had an aide break federal aviation rules to complain before going on to fire someone else for either her forgetfulness or that of her staff.

Over a blanket, yet?

And this is the woman in charge of the Department of Homeland Security?