Over the past several days, I’ve received a few inquiries as to why some big box stores weren’t stocking Last of the First. I asked my editor whether she could shed any light on the matter. Her response dealt strictly with Barnes & Noble.

Elliot Investment Management bought first the British bookstore chain Waterstones and then later bought Barnes & Noble in 2019 at a time when B&N was suffering severe financial mismanagement. Both chains are now effectively run by James Daunt, who imposed new management practices on B&N in an effort to reduce the cash drain. While those efforts have apparently been successful, certain aspects have adversely affected authors who are not mega-best-sellers.

As it was explained to me, if an author’s previous book shows no sales at a store, then the next book is not ordered for that store, based on previous low demand. But, of course, if the previous book wasn’t ordered, how could there be sales?

One way around this is for readers to order or pre-order that book from that store. Merely asking the store to order it won’t suffice; there have to be physical sales.

Unfortunately, in this world where Amazon tends to dominate book sales, many readers who don’t see a book they want at their local B&N are more likely to order it from Amazon and get it at a lower price. But the only way to change a B&N store’s order pattern for a given author is to physically order his or her books from that store.

While some local managers can order books beyond those selected by the B&N algorithm, from what little I’ve seen local ordering initiative is often not done nearly so much as it was when I was actively touring. But then, the entire publishing industry has been transformed, especially over the last fifteen years.

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).

A number of years ago, I made the observation that “Minds, like parachutes, function better when open, but strike harder when closed.”

This observation is particularly applicable to politics and to almost any political issue. Take immigration. It’s much easier, and certainly politically more popular, to declare immigration is bad and all illegal immigrants should be halted and expelled, and to “support” that with the number of illegal immigrants who’ve committed crimes, especially heinous ones, and then to justify choking off immigration by saying that saves jobs for Americans.

But the issue is far more complex than that. First, the percentage of crimes committed by immigrants is half the level of criminal activity of that by native-born Americans. Second, most of the jobs taken by immigrants are those that most Americans won’t take, and jobs which immigrants often do better.

Beyond that, there’s a deeper problem, and that’s the fact that in too many nations around the world, too many governments, “movements,” or even gangs/cartels threaten and cause death for anyone who disagrees. And then immigration problems – and many others – continue because the violence that creates immigrants only spirals into more violence, creating more chaos, and that chaos requires more armed repression that results in more deaths and more emigrants seeking to immigrate anywhere merely to stay alive.

Here in the United States, extremists on the left seemingly want to give asylum to every persecuted individual, and those on the right seem to want to ban almost all immigrants and the polarization and vituperation gets more and more heated. While we certainly cannot accept all who want to come here, we need immigrants for many reasons, particularly educated and talented immigrants, just not the overwhelming numbers allowed by the Biden administration, yet neither side wants to compromise.

At the same time, what few politicians seem to ignore is that more Americans are leaving and looking to leave the United States than ever before, and that our nearest neighbor – Canada – is tightening scrutiny of would-be American immigrants.

Even though those numbers are small, they should be a warning sign that, while closed minds strike harder, they don’t function that well in complex situations.

I’ve used the same lawn maintenance service for over ten years, ever since I decided (not that my wife the professor didn’t have some say in the matter) that it probably wasn’t the best idea for me to be dealing with heavy lawnmowers on large slopes that approach forty degrees in some places, especially at my then-hardly-young age. Not that I needed much convincing, since, as a teenager I mowed lawns for three long summers, and I’ve disliked mowing ever since.

I’ve always made the point of paying for a month’s service in advance by mailing a check, and I’ve never had any trouble with the service, until this month, when I suddenly realized I wasn’t getting my weekly emailed invoice. Then several sprinklers malfunctioned (beyond simple replacement) followed by a split somewhere in a main water feed.

But when I went to call the service, I looked them up on the internet to check the telephone number and discovered they had a glitzy new website which suggested I use it to schedule the necessary repairs. The only problem was that the “new” system wouldn’t recognize either my email or my street address. The new system’s chatbot was no help, either.

So, I used the old-fashioned telephone, and I got a helpful real person on the line, except she couldn’t schedule the sprinkler repair because I either had to have a credit card on file or fill out and return an email form that she would send to me. She tried four times to send the form. The system said that it sent it, but I never received anything, even though the system had the correct email address.

After more hassles I called back and got another helpful person. He found me on the system, but nothing still arrived by email. In the end, after almost half an hour, between the two of us, we figured out that my mailing street address was “wrong,” that is, that it was listed as “south,” followed by the street name. Five years ago, that was the correct postal address, but then USPS removed the “south,” despite the fact that we’re still “south.” For the most part, that hasn’t been a problem, but every so often, relatives and friends using the “old” address have letters rejected. The thing is: we’re the only house on the street, which is only a half-block long; there’s no other street with any similar name; and we’ve lived here for 33 years.

With that one little change, all of a sudden, the lawn service system could send me the sprinkler request form and all my back invoices.

But it took three human beings over two hours to “solve” what never should have been a problem, and none of us, including the tech on the system, could say why a single word in the database not even associated directly with the email address could block sending emails to me.

And the tech gurus wonder why people are leery of AI?

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.