CEO turnovers are up — considerably, at possibly the highest rate in years.

One of the reasons cited by analysts is that while the profits of the “Magnificent Seven” (Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia, Meta Platforms, and Tesla) have ballooned in recent years, the returns of other corporations, while perfectly decent, aren’t keeping pace, and the corporate boards of other corporacions are demanding more from their CEOs.

So… everyone wants more profits, and CEO’s who don’t deliver get sacked or are forced out.

At the same time, there are only three ways to increase profits – be more innovative, cut costs, and raise prices. Being more innovative usually means using knowledge and technology to do more with fewer people or less material. Fewer people means more stress on those who remain, and even more stress on those who lose jobs. Less material means less durable products and higher costs to customers over time. Cutting costs means paying people less or paying fewer people and/or paying suppliers less.

In short, pushing for more and more profit screws pretty much everyone (and sometimes even CEOs) except large shareholders.

Or put another way, when is more profit too much? Or is it ever too much?

So often in my life, I’ve heard, or overheard, phrases along the lines of, “It’s not personal; we need to make a change…” Or it’s not personal because corporate headquarters, or the state legislature, or someone else cut the funding. It might not be “personal” because the business is failing.

But whatever the cause, to the person or people affected, it’s personal; it’s very personal.

And for large corporations, such as United Healthcare, it’s definitely never personal. It’s just about the need to maintain profit, and whether the so-called “impersonal” axe falls on employees being let go or policyholders not getting the benefits they paid for, the corporation seldom, if ever, considers the personal costs.

Yet, in a way, many of the “personal decisions” are in fact personal, just not in the way most people would consider personal. Corporate profit increases tend to boost the price of the stock, and, in the case of most CEOs, increasing profits and stock prices increase their compensation. According to the latest publicly reported information, Brian Thompson was paid slightly more than $10 million annually. But his salary was only one million dollars. The rest, 90%, came from stock, stock options, and bonuses.

So those decisions on how to raise profits had a decidedly personal effect on Mr. Thompson. He may not have considered the algorithms “personal,” but they not only increased the negative effects of healthcare denials and delays on policy holders in order to increase profits., but also significantly increased his personal compensation.

Not personal… really?

In the case of Brian Thompson’s murder, there’s been a decidedly strong reaction on both sides, and that clouds the underlying issues that led to his death.

According to all reports, Thompson was a devoted and dedicated husband and family man, and a respected and well-liked colleague by those in the health insurance field. The healthcare industry is clearly stunned by the public reaction and how many people viewed his death with little or no sympathy.

But the fact is that Thompson was also a cold-eyed, analytical, profit-maximizing executive who clearly had no difficulty making decisions and implementing programs and systems that devastated thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of families in order to maintain or increase corporate profit margins. During his tenure as President of United Healthcare, Thompson raised profits from $10 billion to $16 billion, a sixty percent increase in three years. During that period, UnitedHealthcare was rated the worst of all U.S. healthcare firms in denying claims, turning down 32% of all claims, twice the industry average of 16%. For this, he was paid over $10 million last year.

What I find disturbing is the “mainstream” news media’s emphasis on Thompson the family man and nice guy persona, who was unjustly murdered. I’m not condoning the murder or the murderer, who appears to personify anti-establishment zealotry, and represents, on the other side, the same lack of humanity that Thompson represented professionally in his time with United Healthcare.

Just because Thompson was a loving devoted family man in his personal life and a good professional colleague doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a cold-blooded bastard in designing, implementing, and using methodologies designed to deny healthcare to people who had already paid for what they believed was adequate coverage.

At least one media newscaster made a comment along the lines that Thompson was just doing his job, but what was his job? Was it to effectively fund the healthcare of millions of Americans so that they could receive proper medical treatment, or was it principally to increase the profits of United Healthcare? That 32% rejection rate and 60% profit increase strongly suggest that the health of United Healthcare’s Medicare Advantage and other patients came in a distant second place to increased profits.

And the healthcare insurance industry is stunned by the reaction to his murder?

Utah state legislators are “renowned” for talking out of both sides of their mouth. One of their proudest achievements is reducing state income taxes for four straight years, by more than a billion dollars. But what they’re not telling constituents and taxpayers is how little those tax cuts really mean… and what they actually cost.

For example, the latest tax cut was estimated to reduce the tax bill of Utah taxpayers by $167 million, which sounds significant, but isn’t. The lowest quintile of taxpayers would only get a $24 tax cut. Upper middleclass taxpayers, those making $200,000, would receive $174. In addition, Utah is one of only eight states to tax Social Security income.

In the meantime, the legislature just mandated a fifteen-million-dollar budget cut for the university (SUU) where my wife works and a hiring freeze, as well as comparable cuts for all state universities. Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz, a Republican, recently stated that, in addition to that cut, the Legislature was exploring cuts of around ten percent across all sixteen of the state’s public colleges and universities in 2025.

This might make some sense if enrollment were declining, but Utah is the only state in the union where non-immigrant population is growing, almost certainly because the Mormon faith continues to emphasize large families. In response, SUU’s enrollment grew by 1,000 students this school year (up to nearly 16,000), and total public university enrollment grew by over 8,500 students, one of the largest increases in years.

Yet the legislature is mandating that universities accommodate more students and provide more services with less funding. This is at a time when an increasing percentage of teaching employees are leaving the field because of comparatively low pay and increasing bureaucratic and administrative loads having nothing to do with teaching. One of the unmentioned side effects, also, is that the legislature mandated a 3.5% tuition increase for the 2024-2025 school year, so that students and their parents pay more (roughly $300 per student just this year ) while the state funds a smaller and smaller percentage of the costs of running the universities.

But the politicians continue to trumpet near-meaningless tax cuts.

The real question facing Democrats is whether they want to be a successful political party or whether they want to emphasize an ideology that most Americans believe is excessively liberal.

From what polls show and from what I’ve observed, most Democrats don’t fall into far left/woke mindset, but the far left tends to be far more active politically and socially than the more “mainstream” Democrats, and thus tends to have influence out of proportion to its actual numbers.

Recent poll analysis by The New York Times suggests that one of the reasons Kamala Harris lost was that something like seven million Democrats who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 did not vote in 2024. That alone wouldn’t account for her loss, but that combined with more liberal voters who oppose what they see as excessive support of trans/LBTG+ initiatives very well might. Nor did ads suggesting that wives hide their votes from their husbands help, since any woman so inclined didn’t need the ads, and any woman thinking about it would likely be worried that the ad would prompt inquiries by husbands and boyfriends.

Like it or not, a majority of Americans, for whatever reason, are leery of women running for the presidency, and the combination of a woman who was perceived as liberal was also a strong factor in the campaign.

The fact that the Democrats actually made a very slight gain in their numbers in the House of Representatives (if only by one member) at a time when they lost the presidency and the Senate suggests that Democrats who addressed the issues in their districts could be very successful, but that the national ticket had too many negatives.

Not that anyone is going to change their mind based on my observations.

I recently read a reader’s comment about Overcaptain, a statement that he wasn’t about to pay trade paperback prices for an ebook. And yes, the initial publication ebook price is $15.00, but the trade paperback price in roughly eight months will likely be around $21.00, if not more, since the U.S. is the largest importer of paper in the world and most of that comes from Canada. Now that Trump has declared he’s going to impose a 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico for all imports, I suspect any such tariff will increase the price of printed books.

Inflation is hard on everyone, and it prompts recollections of the past. I can certainly remember when eight-ounce bottles of Coke were a dime and you could get a hamburger and fries at McDonalds for a quarter. But back then, the minimum wage was seventy-five cents an hour.

In the real and present world, inflation isn’t going away. So long as Americans insist on not paying enough taxes to cover the costs of what we want (collectively) while complaining about the government “stuff” the other guys and gals want and bitching about who is and who isn’t paying enough taxes, and wanting someone else to pay for it, we’re going to have inflation.

Also, just because something costs more doesn’t mean that those who provide it are getting rich. What too many readers don’t understand is that publishing is a low profit industry. Legal secretaries in New York can make 30-40% more than a senior fiction editor. One long-time very senior and successful F&SF editor (with a Ph.D. in comparative medieval literature) I knew used his expertise to find undervalued rare books and resell them in order to make ends meet. Most authors can’t make a living off their writing. I worked long hours in D.C. for nearly 20 years after first getting published (while writing on the side and selling every novel I wrote) before I could live off what I made as a writer… and I’m one of the fortunate few who’s managed to do so for an extended period of time.

So, while I can reminisce about inexpensive Cokes and hamburgers, I can also remember classmates wearing braces from polio, acquaintances with vision damaged by measles, a swimmer I knew dying from an automobile accident before seatbelts were required, and a whole host of other recollections far less pleasant, most of which kinds of unpleasantness no longer occur because of government regulations.

But nostalgia about the past, anger about the rising costs of inflation, and blaming the rest of the world and imposing tariffs on ourselves are so much easier than actually dealing with the causes of that inflation.

One of the skills my wife the professor and her colleagues attempt to develop in her voice students is the ability to learn how to sing from sheet music. It’s not easy. It requires piano skills, the ability to sight-read music, the ability to pronounce foreign words (which they’re theoretically required to develop by using the international phonetic alphabet), working out the timing and breathing to fit their own voice, and a great deal of hard work. Most students resist doing the work. Instead, they find a UTube video of the piece and sing along until they think they’ve learned the piece.

Except… they haven’t. Many of them won’t even study the lyrics, even when the words are in English, at least until prompted, because they don’t even consider how they’re going to convey emotion, particularly in a foreign language, if they don’t understand the full meaning of the words.

That’s just the beginning. Even if they find a video sung by a truly great singer, it doesn’t that mean that particular version suits the student’s voice, especially if the student is young and the recorded singer is fully mature. It also doesn’t take into account that even good singers make mistakes, or the fact that even accurate copies are less vital and accurate than the original. Add to that that “copying” a range of singers will keep the student from truly developing their own voice.

And, of course, there’s the “small” problem that the student can’t learn music that someone else hasn’t already recorded, not to mention that not all recordings, especially off UTube, aren’t that good.

But “copying” is so much easier.

Unhappily, this tendency isn’t confined to would-be classical singers. All one has to do is listen to current pop singers. Until about twenty-five or thirty years ago, listeners could identify singers within a few bars. Now, the majority all sound the same.

The “copy culture” isn’t limited to music, either. There’s rough “copying” in writing as well. The advent of the computer, combined with the internet, has spawned widespread and persistent plagiarism. At the same time, I’m seeing more and more grammatical and technical errors in commercial and semi-commercial material appearing on the internet, suggesting a lack of basic technique.

One of the reasons why I wrote the first Recluce novel [The Magic of Recluce] was because all too many fantasy novels at that time were set in pseudo-medieval cultures and the magic systems were largely based on spells or tradition folk magic, and I didn’t feel like “copying.” That’s also why each of my fantasy series has a unique magic system.

But because the “copy culture” is far cheaper than good solid originality, it’s growing and invading everywhere. And what does that say about society?

Last week, when I was watching a news story on the results of the election, a particular news item caught my attention – that a number of ballots cast by young people in Nevada were being scrutinized because the signatures on the ballot didn’t match the signatures on file.

Fraud, you might ask. Apparently not.

The signature on the mail-in ballot or in some states on the voting register has to match the signature on file, and that is noted on the ballot, and the signature on file has to match the name on whatever legal document was used to register.

That’s true here in Utah as well, so while my friends know me as Lee Modesitt, and I write under L.E. Modesitt, Jr., the signature on my mail-in ballot has to be my full legal name – Leland Exton Modesitt, Jr. Otherwise, the ballot will be questioned, and possibly thrown out, or I might have to prove to the County Clerk that I’m the one who cast the ballot.

This is spelled out clearly, but the ballots of more than a few ballots of young voters in Nevada were being scrutinized for inadequate signature matches, according to the news.

I’m hardly surprised. Too many of my wife’s college students don’t read the syllabus (and often don’t listen to the same information imparted orally), and then protest that they didn’t know an assignment was due or that a test was scheduled for a given date. So it’s not exactly shocking that some young voters didn’t read the ballot instructions, either.

The American people voted decisively to “restore” a past that never was and to again reject a qualified woman candidate in favor of a male misogynistic convicted felon and sex offender, in part because they desperately wanted certainty and put their hopes in a traditional (but highly flawed) male authority figure.

No matter who was elected, there will be no permanent certainty, possibly not even temporary certainty, given Trump’s past instability and narcissism and given the unstable world political climate, but the American electorate has always been susceptible to the appeal of charlatans, to a greater or lesser degree, especially those who appeal to the idols of nostalgia and prosperity.

One unspoken problem with the Democrat campaign was the excess baggage of the far left and its woke agenda. Most Americans still don’t like to be told which pronoun is “proper” or that they should support Palestinian people who firmly deny that Israel has a right to exist, and the Trump campaign capitalized on that, and on the fact that not all women want to be liberated from the patriarchy.

Not least of all was Trump’s appeal to less educated males, not just white less educated males, who see modern technology, globalization, and educated women as threats to their social and economic future, a threat, in a way, personified by Kamala Harris herself.

The supreme irony of it all is that many of the acts and laws pushed by the Biden Administration are just now beginning to bear fruit and likely will be recalled in the future nostalgically as the wonderful second Trump term (assuming Trump takes credit for those initiatives rather than torpedoing them).

The question ahead is whether Trump can be magnanimous, and merely revel in his success, or whether he’ll vigorously pursue his enemies, as he’s threatened, and whether the Congress can or will rein in his excesses.

These days, my wife the professor has observed that rigorous tests in education are fewer and less rigorous than ever before – and the majority of students are less prepared and more fragile when they don’t perform well on tests or in class, and too many administrators worry far more about feelings than facts or competence. Unfortunately, this trend isn’t limited to students.

Yet tests are a necessity in a technological society. We require people to pass tests to obtain drivers’ licenses, pilot licenses, medical licenses, legal licenses (even if it is called a bar exam), and the like.

The one area where native-born Americans don’t have to pass a test is to vote. All that’s needed is citizenship, registration (no test required these days, unlike for African Americans in the past, particularly in the South) and being a local resident of legal age.

Benjamin Franklin said that the Founding Fathers had created a “Republic, if you can keep it.” At that time, the United States was the first large, self-governing nation in the world. But the test Americans face is, as Franklin put it, whether we can maintain that heritage.

Unlike authoritarian regimes, democracy is messy, and it requires citizens to make choices that are often complex and far from ideal.

Most people, however, want simpler choices. They don’t want to look at an array of facts, or look deeply into much of anything, particularly the background of political candidates who strongly appeal to their beliefs and prejudices.

When a candidate lies, and admits that he created a false story to dramatize an issue, as J.D. Vance has with his tale of immigrants eating pets, doesn’t that suggest both oversimplification and a willingness to say anything in pursuit of power?

Americans have always been leery of politicians who change their mind about issues, calling them flip-floppers. The senior President Bush declared at one point, “Read my lips. No new taxes.” Then several years later, faced with a fiscal crisis, he changed his mind and increased taxes. He lost the next election because he changed his mind, but his judgement was correct, and his taxes balanced the federal budget for years. No president since then has shown that kind of courage.

Trump has remained steadfast in wanting lower taxes, especially for billionaires. He’s also been steadfast on other issues, including stricter abortion laws and punishing tariffs, and in denigrating any woman in a position of power who opposes him, while praising dictators, and promising to be one. He’s been steadfast in declaring he won an election he lost, one declared fair even by the vast majority of local Republican election officials.

Kamala Harris has moderated her positions on a number of issues, mainly in the environmental area and immigration, and she’s been attacked for changing her stance on those issues, while remaining steadfast in terms of personal rights and freedoms.

But is changing positions to reflect reality bad? Is remaining steadfast or lying about bad policies and election results good?

This coming election is in fact a test, like it or not.

The test of democracy is whether voters will look beyond the obvious, beyond their confirmation biases, to pick the better candidate based on the facts or to stick blindly to what they find comfortable.

And, always, the certainty of autocracy can seem so much more comfortable than allowing people greater personal freedom.

What we choose is a test, and we’ll have to live with the results for at least four more years, possibly far longer if too many voters choose unwisely.

American males in the 18-29 age group favor Donald Trump disproportionately. In today’s United States, that shouldn’t be a surprise.

In a way, Trump represents everything that most young males want – money, the ability to have their way with women, the apparent ability to tell the government to stuff it, the ability to avoid adult supervision, and the ability to put down women, especially strong women, at will, all without repercussions – not to mention the ability to complain endlessly about how everyone is against him.

I’m certainly not the only one who’s made that connection. There was a New York Post story earlier this week about Trump’s “unabashed machismo vibe,” and its effective appeal to 18-29 year-old American males.

But the appeal goes beyond that. Too many men are still boys. As they get older, their toys just get bigger, and more expensive. I see it all the time – small houses with powerboats almost the size of the house, families with multiple ATVs and multiple trail bikes, but who plead poverty and can’t or won’t provide health insurance or help their children with college expenses. Male students driving late model cars or pick-up trucks who claim they can’t afford textbooks.

When men complain that their wages haven’t kept up with inflation, and that housing is too expensive, I have to wonder. The mortgage rates they complain about are lower than any mortgage I was able to get for more than forty years. The only time they were lower was after we’d slaved to pay off the house, but as an adult, you have to realize that matters don’t always go your way, no matter how long and hard you work (the odds are just far better if you do)…and that most women get tired of boys who never grow up (which might help explain why more women oppose Trump).

Back in 2016, Donald Trump said, “I love the poorly educated.” That was after polling showed that less educated voters contributed to his winning the Nevada caucus during his 2016 presidential primary campaign. Voters who are poorly educated about the facts of key issues — including inflation, immigration, and violent crime – are much more likely to vote for Trump than Democratic rival Kamala Harris, according to new research released last Thursday by Ipsos’ political tracking team.

Analysis shows that voters’ primary media sources strongly determine their voting preferences. The primary news sources for less educated Americans are the Fox News Channel and other conservative media outlets – and/or conservative social media. Followers of such media sources were and are markedly more likely to incorrectly answer fact-based questions about inflation, the stock market, FEMA’s hurricane aid, violent crime, and illegal immigration.

The irony of this is that the primary purveyor of false (factually incorrect) news in the United States is Fox News and the greatest beneficiary of that false news is Donald Trump, who is trying, and often succeeding, in convincing Americans that the more accurate news sources are peddling false news.

It’s fair to say that Donald Trump and Fox News are a marriage of convenience and misinformation, because neither Trump nor his supporters are in the slightest interested in factual news that conflicts with their views.

As I cited earlier, a recent Gallup poll found that while 85% of respondents reported that they were doing well, only 17% of those same respondents thought the United States was doing well. This apparent irrationality permeates the entire electorate, but especially the Trump supporters.

Donald Trump has declared bankruptcy something like six times, been found guilty of 34 counts of business fraud, been found guilty of tax fraud, increased the national debt by $8.4 trillion (compared to $4.3 trillion for Biden), stiffed contractors who worked for him, and fired people who worked for him on a whim, yet almost half of the United States thinks he’ll do better with the economy than a woman who has risen from nothing to Vice President… and never declared bankruptcy.

Trump has called the 1,800 Marines killed at Belleau Woods in WWI “suckers,” stated that the Presidential Medal of Freedom was better than the Congressional Medal of Honor because most of the Medal of Honor winners got killed, declared that Senator John McCain, after 5 ½ years of being tortured, “was not a war hero” because “I like people who weren’t captured,” and avoided military service during the Vietnam era through deferments and “bone spurs.” He later stated that “Only suckers went to Vietnam.” He impugned many of the high-ranking officers who served under him when he was president and declared that “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had, people who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” He even said that if the election didn’t turn out the way he wanted, he’d use the military to set things right (apparently forgetting that on election day, he wouldn’t be in charge of the U.S. military forces).

Yet far too many people are willing to elect Trump as Commander-in-Chief, conveniently ignoring his long history of belittling the military, from the lowest-ranking soldiers and sailors to the most senior officers, and his total lack of understanding of military capability and culture.

SO WHY DO SO MANY AMERICANS SUPPORT THIS IRRATIONALITY?

Because technology and globalization have destroyed the comparatively higher-paying semi-skilled jobs of the 1950s and 1960s, and American industry can’t afford those pay rates for semi-skilled work in a global economy, and nothing will change that.

Because, for every bright and capable woman who gets a high-paying job, too many Americans believe there’s a man who doesn’t (ignoring the fact that he’s less capable).

Because, for every minority who struggles and succeeds, they believe there’s some white male who likely doesn’t.

For every woman who wants control of her body, there’s a man who doesn’t want her to have that control.

For these reasons, and quite a few others, a significant segment of U.S. society wants to destroy or drastically cut back the current system, and they see (consciously or unconsciously) Trump as the way to do it. But Project 2025 is effectively a blueprint for restoring white wealthy corporate dominance, not for restoring a past that never was.

Trump won’t totally destroy the system; he’ll only make it less fair, less fiscally sound, more fragile, and far more accommodating to the rich and powerful… and, in the process, increase the hate, anger, and polarization while blaming everyone else for doing so.

But his supporters don’t care… and won’t or can’t listen to facts or logic. In the spirit of the old movie Network, they’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore, even as they try to burn down the nation around them.

A significant number of Donald Trump’s supporters cite the state of the economy and the need for fiscal sanity. I understand the concern about fiscal sanity. But for the last twenty years or so, regardless of which political party has controlled the Legislative Branch, Congress has continued to spend more than it receives in tax and tariff revenues.

However, in recent years, the Republicans have actually spent more than the Democrats, astounding as that sounds. Both Harris and Trump have promised more “tax relief,” but Harris has actually promised far less than Trump and her promises are targeted more at the middle and working classes, while Trump offers far more “tax relief” for the wealthy.

Prior to this past week, the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculated that the costs of Vice President Harris’s plan could range from having no significant fiscal impact to a debt increase debt of $8.10 trillion through 2035, while Trump’s plan could increase debt by between $1.45 and $15.15 trillion. In other words, Trump’s plan is far worse than that of Harris.

The Washington Post just ran an analysis of Trump’s plans for Social Security, which shows that under Trump’s plan, in six years Social Security would be unable to pay full benefits.

And those costs don’t include Trump’s newest proposed tax cuts — to make car loan interest fully tax-deductible and an additional tax cut for Americans who live abroad.

Now… some will say, “That’s just Trump’s rhetoric. He won’t or can’t do all of that.” And they’re probably right. But if that’s the case, attacking Harris’s spending plans is not only hypocritical, but also deceptive and lying, because Trump again won’t keep his word while attacking someone whose plans are more fiscally sound than his are… and yet almost half of the United States feels (I can’t say “think” here, for obvious reasons) Trump is more financially sound, despite all the calculations to the contrary.

The latest tactic by the Republicans is, whenever Kamala Harris proposes something, especially something that makes obvious sense, to say, “You had four years. Why didn’t you do this already?”

Unfortunately, this simplistic question resounds well with simplistic minds, who don’t seem to understand either the Constitution or the structural limitations of the office of the vice-president.

The simple and accurate answer is: Because the Vice President has NO power to do anything like that. The President is in charge, not the vice-president.

Harris is in the difficult position of wanting to change things, but if she says that she in any way disagrees with the Biden Administration, then she’ll be attacked as ungrateful and a traitor of sorts.

All she can do is to present her plans and let people see what they are and decide on them.

She can present an immigration reform plan, as she has, but the Republicans immediately shout, “Why didn’t you do that already? You had four years.” Of course, that ignores the fact that Donald Trump scuttled immigration reform, by persuading Republicans in the House and Senate to kill the reform plan so that Trump could run on that issue. Trump already had four years and couldn’t get an immigration law passed when he was in charge, but that’s conveniently overlooked.

Blaming Harris for problems in the Biden administration is like blaming Mike Pence for Trump’s flaws and failures or pinning on Dick Cheney the blame for the sub-prime mortgage financial crisis that occurred in the second Bush administration.

Not that the far right has much acquaintance with either logic or facts.

According to scientists, human beings are genetically programmed to home in on the worst possible news in the present, but to primarily recall the best aspects of our past, barring of course massive trauma or PTSD-causing events.

The reasons for this are obvious, if one thinks about it. In most of human history, failing to pick up on even the smallest hints of danger could be injurious, if not fatal. Likewise, remembering everything negative in the past would likely drive one to self-destruction over time.

Unfortunately, at present, those primordial traits have some distinctly negative implications, particularly when dealing with the media and elections. Right now, a huge number of Americans are recalling, quite favorably, the Trump years, and comparing them to the present, which they regard less favorably.

But the figures show that since 2019 until now, while prices are up 19%, wages are up 21%. If one looks at the yearly figures, the greatest increase in prices started in the years when Trump was President, yet Biden is blamed for the inflation?

Currently, according to Gallup polls, 85% of Americans feel that they’re doing well financially, but only 17% of Americans believe the economy as a whole is doing well. Rationally, that makes no sense.

So why do Americans believe the economy is doing so poorly? Might it be because the media algorithms are directing the media to emphasize the negative to get better ratings, by appealing to our genetic predilections?

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hourly wage of employees was $26.00 when Trump took office in January 2017, and $29.90 when he left office. Currently, that figure is $35.00. While that increase hasn’t yet covered the price spike of 2022-23, inflation is moderating, and wages are continuing to increase.

What’s also forgotten is that, from April to September 2023, corporate profits drove 53% of inflation. Historically, for the 40 years prior to the pandemic, profits drove just 11% of inflation. While prices for consumers have risen by 3.4% over the past year, material/input costs for producers have risen by just 1%. Corporate profits as a share of national income have skyrocketed by almost 30% since the start of the pandemic.

Yet, somehow, these figures get buried, and instead of reporting a more accurate and balanced view, the media emphasizes the negative to boost ratings, and the Republicans emphasize the negatives to gain votes, while ignoring the sizable impact of corporate greed and capitalizing on all too human nostalgia.

The other day, Donald Trump falsely charged Kamala Harris with transferring funds from FEMA to fund aid to illegal immigrants.

Not only was this false, but as president, in 2017,Trump delayed disaster aid for hurricane-devastated Puerto Rico and diverted money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency in order to finance an effort to return undocumented migrants to Mexico. Then just weeks before the 2020 election, the Trump administration released $13 billion in aid to Puerto Rico, which triggered an investigation about why the funds had been delayed for years.

In essence, Trump falsely charged Harris with (1) doing something that she did not do and could not have done even if she’d wanted to (since the vice-president doesn’t have that authority) and (2) doing exactly what he did when he was President.

Last week Trump also charged the White House with not giving aid to North Carolina because the state voted Republican didn’t support the Democrats.

That was also false, so false that the governors of the impacted states, including senators and congressmen, have stated publicly that they are getting aid and that any delays are because roads have to be cleared to reach some areas.

But again, the past reflects Trump’s charges. Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after deadly wildfires in 2018 because of the state’s Democratic leanings. Trump only changed his mind when his staff pulled voting results to show Trump that heavily damaged Orange County, California, had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa. So… once again Trump charged his opponents – falsely – with what he tried to do for real.

So… not only is Trump spewing more blatant falsehoods, but he’s also revealing how he thinks and falsely projecting his own vindictive behavior on others.

We have an acquaintance whom everyone would call a good person, and he is. He and his wife are retired, and they live comfortably, but not extravagantly. They’re churchgoers, and are very supportive of the community initiatives, not only those religious and charitable, but also those involving education and other fields.

But what I couldn’t understand was how someone like him could support all the lies, misinformation, and corruption coming from Trump and his campaign. That is, until I recalled that our acquaintance had been a very effective and successful salesman and sales executive… and then the pieces fell into place.

Good salespeople believe in the product, and to be good, they have to believe in the product. Therefore, almost anything that sells the product is useful, and if they believe in the end product, the end justifies the means.

The problem that “good” salespeople tend to forget is that, especially in the political field, lies, misinformation, and corruption have side effects, often disastrous ones. J.D. Vance’s lies about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, resulted in bomb threats and more unrest that continues to unsettle every facet of civic life there. Trump’s latest lie, about Kamala Harris’s purported misuse of FEMA funds (to which NO vice president has access to, directly or indirectly) vilifies FEMA and makes its mission even harder at the time of one of the greatest natural disasters in the south, particularly when FEMA is already short of funds (thanks to Trump’s Republican supporters in the House). Trump’s lies and misinformation on January 6th resulted in not only a riot, but police deaths and injuries to hundreds of people. Trump’s encouragement of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville led to more unrest and death.

What all the “good” salespeople who believe in what Trump promises, and more often than not fails to deliver, do not seem to understand is that, especially in politics, you cannot separate the ends from the means, and inciting violence through ever more blatant falsehoods foreshadows exactly how Trump will govern. Equally important, he’s made no secret of it – he’s said that he’ll govern like a dictator and seek revenge on his political opponents by all possible means as President.

I just wish those with the “sales” mindset would take a closer look at the “product,” the real product and not all the deceptive promises and “sales brochures.”

As I’ve written before, technology effectively multiplies everything where it’s applied. The first automobiles were painstakingly hand-assembled, and only the wealthy could afford them. That was also true for a vast array of consumer goods and machines, so that a middleclass American lives in greater personal luxury (except for vast grounds and huge cold or too hot palaces and being able to order people around) than did Louis XIV of France (the Sun King).

We take much of this for granted, and many seek even more in the way of comforts, goods, and conveniences. That, after all, is a supremely human trait.

But there’s one application of technology that human beings handle supremely well, alas, and that’s the development and application of weapons. There are more than a hundred commercial small arms manufacturers in the world, and more than fifty of them are located in the U.S. According to the 2017 Small Arms Survey, there are more than one billion firearms in the world, with almost four hundred million held by civilians in the United States. Most “standard” AR-15 type rifles can take magazines holding up to 100 rounds.

As mass shootings in the U.S. have demonstrated, weapons light enough for 14-year-olds and those even younger can wreak havoc in seconds. And on the military level, the President of the United States and the President of the Russian Federation can, at least theoretically, each launch up to 5,000 nuclear warheads within a matter of minutes, which in practical terms would effectively destroy civilization on the planet, along with the vast majority of human beings.

Not content with creating these weapons, “creative” geniuses are working on ways to weaponize our communications systems, improve autonomous weapons systems through AI, and investigate biological weapons of various sorts.

Is the culmination of human evolution and creativity to come up with weapons effective enough that a single individual can destroy the entire human race (or most of it) with one push of a button, one release of software, or the creation of one killer virus? Possibly without even a human being directly involved?

And if we survive that, will the next step be to invent a way to pulverize the planet?

These questions aren’t quite facetious; human beings are awfully good at weaponization of almost anything, and we’re getting better by the year.

There have been more than a few articles about how rigid anti-abortion laws have increased the medical and health problems or pregnant women. For instance, the maternal death rate in Texas surged 60% as a result of the Texas anti-abortion legislation. And we’re seeing horror story after horror story about women dying or losing the ability to have children when a normal pregnancy goes wrong, and doctors won’t give them treatment because they fear losing their licenses and/or going to jail.

Bad as that is, there’s another negative aspect of those laws that’s only mentioned occasionally in national media, and that’s the adverse economic impact on women and their families. Denying access to abortion and reproductive health care places the greatest economic burden and significant health risks on low-income, often minority women, increasing both poverty and inequality. Interesting enough, allowing freedom of reproductive care decreases poverty… and also lowers the tax burden on both states and the federal government.

But the economic impact goes beyond poor women. It affects all women and their spouses and children, in ways that often aren’t recognized. If a working woman wants to live and work in a state where she has control of her own body, that can limit her economic opportunities, because there are at least eight states where she cannot work without putting her own health at risk. Men don’t have to choose between giving up bodily autonomy and economic opportunity; why should women?

This also has a familial impact, because two thirds of all children live in households where all available parents work.

In states like Idaho, obstetricians are leaving the state because they fear that giving necessary care to pregnant woman could land them in jail. Those leaving Idaho, Texas, or elsewhere aren’t being replaced. In addition, fewer medical school students are choosing the obstetrics field. This not only has a negative impact on individual doctors, but on communities and states as a whole, particularly in economically depressed areas, at a time when we already have a national shortage of physicians.

Yet all the downsides of thoughtless anti-abortion legislation, including the negative economics, are ignored or brushed aside by banner-waving pro-lifers who only consider the “unborn,” who, for them, are sacred and inviolate, while ignoring women who will die without proper medical care, girls raped incestuously, and women forced to bear children, often as a result of spousal abuse, children they do not want and cannot properly care for (and whom the right-to-lifers won’t care for, either).