After tearing down the East Wing,
Hark the herald angels sing.
Who’s the chump?
You… or Donald Trump?

Last week, on Friday, I mailed a book to a relative in a neighboring state. I sent it priority mail from my local post office well before the afternoon mail is scheduled to be dispatched. USPS gave me an expected delivery date of Tuesday.

I suspected it might take longer, but checked the tracking number on Wednesday. It was still “in transit.” On Thursday afternoon, I checked again. Still in transit, but projected to be delivered by 9:00 P.M. on Friday. On Friday, it finally arrived in mid-afternoon.

These days, over ninety percent of our mail consists of political or charitable solicitations, advertising circulars, and catalogues from companies and merchandizers we’ve never used. The remaining ten percent consists of periodic bills and magazines to which we’ve subscribed (since I read them in bits at times and places where it’s not feasible or convenient to read electronic copies). We now also get Amazon package deliveries on Sunday… from USPS.

So why does it take more than a week for USPS to deliver priority mail to a town on a paved state highway less than five hundred miles away?

A reader recently sent me a book to be autographed and included return postage and a label. I signed the book and took it to the post office to send it. The clerk informed me that the zip code didn’t match the reader’s address. Since I was fairly certain that the reader knew her own address, I told the clerk to send it (priority mail) to the address on the label. When I checked to see if it had been delivered, the tracking software told me it was “delivered to the original sender,” if a day later than projected. Since it didn’t come back to me, I thought it was delivered to the reader, which was confirmed later by the recipient.

When we moved to Cedar City, the mail was processed here. About fifteen years ago, the Post Office decided to process the local mail in Provo, some two hundred miles to the north. Around five years ago, they switched to processing Cedar City’s mail to Las Vegas, so a bill from a company in Cedar City makes a four-hundred-mile circuit to be delivered across town. I have a hard time believing that this is cost-effective.

It’s also caused problems with voting, because voting in Utah is by mail, and that means you can’t mail your ballot as late as the day before election because it might not be stamped (in Las Vegas) until after the election. It might not even meet the deadline if you mailed it the Saturday before, according to some reports.

But Amazon packages get here in two-three days.

So… tell me, what’s the priority for the Post Office?

With gala twenties parties at Mar-a-lago
Can a Crash be far to go?
Who’s the chump?
You… or Donald Trump?

Trump rages on about needing to stop drug trafficking, and his Department of Defense/War keeps sinking boats and small ships leaving Venezuela, claiming that they’re drug traffickers.

So why did Trump pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who has been serving a 45-year sentence in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking and who accepted millions of dollars in bribes from drug traffickers connected to the notorious Sinaloa Cartel?

But the pardon of Hernández was scarcely the first pardon of high-profile drug traffickers. Others pardoned include Ross Ulbricht, creator of the dark web marketplace Silk Road a major conduit for anonymous drug trafficking, who had been serving multiple life sentences, and who received a full pardon in January 2025; Larry Hoover, the leader of the Chicago-based Gangster Disciples, who was serving multiple life sentences for crimes linked to his role in a violent, multi-state drug trafficking operation received a grant clemency from Trump in May 2025; Michael Harris (Harry O)the co-founder of Death Row Records, had his sentence for cocaine offenses commuted by Trump in his first term and was fully pardoned in 2025 after endorsing Trump in the 2024 election.

It “might” have something to so with Sunday’s Honduran election, since Trump wrote on Truth Social on administration would be “very supportive” of Nasry “Tito” Asfura’s government if Asfura won. Trump then announced he would be “granting a Full and Complete Pardon” to Hernández. And followed up his words by pardoning him.

But when the ongoing election vote-counting results shifted to favor the centrist candidate, Trump vowed there would be “hell to pay” and immediately claimed “election fraud,” because, of course, any election that doesn’t go the way he wants must be fraudulent.

The situation so far – pardons for convicted drug kingpins and heads of state bought by drug money, but total destruction for boats merely suspected of carrying drugs, and apparently a tight election see-sawing back and forth between the Trump-backed conservative and the moderate centrist candidate while Trump continues efforts to sway the results of the ballot-boxes.

With friends like Victor, Xi, and Vlad
How could Donald be so bad?
Who’s the chump?
You… or Donald Trump?

Over forty years ago, I was a political appointee at the Environmental Protection Agency during the first years of the Reagan Administration, with the position level of deputy assistant administrator for Legislation and Congressional Affairs.

At that time, in a similar fashion to what’s happening in the second Trump Administration, newly appointed cabinet officers – staunch Republicans all – were out to “get control” and “rein in the excesses” of government. And like now, most of them had no idea how the federal government worked or in the worst cases, how it didn’t. Some few of them had worked in state governments, and they thought that the federal government would be similar. Back then, it definitely wasn’t.

Unlike today, at that time, Congress was controlled by the Democrats, and they weren’t in the slightest pleased at the way the Administration was handling environmental matters, and various congressional committees began calling hearings. As the head of Congressional Affairs for EPA at the time, I counted up the hearings, and, as I recall, there were two different hearings every week for a good portion of 1982 – just for EPA-related matters. Virtually all those hearings were civil, yet acrimonious.

I suggested, very politely, to the White House that fighting with Congress over environmental matters was a bad idea and most likely a losing proposition. I was politely told that I had no idea what I was talking about, even though at that time, I’d already spent over ten years as a senior congressional staffer.

In the end, largely because of public opinion and congressional outrage, the EPA Administrator, the Deputy Administrator, and all the Assistant Administrators (the officials in charge of specific programs, such as Water, Air Pollution, Solid and Hazardous Waste, Research and Development, Legal Enforcement, etc.) were removed or effectively required to resign, as was the Secretary of Interior. I got off lightly, in that I was demoted to regulatory review. A year later, I managed to get a job with a Washington, D.C., consulting firm as an environmental and energy regulatory specialist.

The second Trump administration is unlike the first Reagan Administration in two major areas, in that, first, a number of key White House advisors do in fact know exactly how the Executive Branch works (although most of the lower-level MAGA appointees don’t) and, second, Republicans control the Congress. Whether these factors will delay or mute the impact of public outrage, I have no idea, but I do know that, in the past, when Presidents have greatly angered Congress, it often hasn’t gone well with them.

Will this time be different? You tell me.

Ban foreign students by the millions
And pardon criminals with their billions.
Who’s the chump,
You… or Donald Trump?

Senator Mark Kelly, a former astronaut and a retired Navy captain, joined with five other Representatives and Senators, all Democrats, who had served the nation either in the military or the intelligence community in releasing a statement that said military officers had the right to refuse to carry out “illegal orders.”

Trump immediately denounced the six and called their actions “seditious” and supported the idea of hanging all six. Subsequent to that, Secretary of Defense/War Hegseth began action to “court martial” Senator Kelly.

First, none of the six suggested disobeying an existing law. They only expressed an opinion that the Constitution laid out rights and duties and that military officers should not obey orders by the President that were illegal under the Constitution.

Trump and Hegseth are taking the position that any order by the President is, by definition, legal, despite the words of the Constitution that suggest that a President is not omnipotent. In the case of Richard Nixon, the Congress clearly rejected Nixon’s contention that any action by the President was, de facto, legal.

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech. In addition, the Constitution clearly states that the opinions of Senators and Representatives in pursuit of their duties are protected speech.

Trump had a temper-tantrum over being told that it was possible that not everything he “orders” may not be legal, and that if he issued illegal orders, senior officers had the right to refuse such orders. Hegseth then followed up with a statement that all members of the military should presume that ALL orders are legal and should be followed and that those who did not agree would be investigated under military law.

When a President declares that opinions and advice contrary to his beliefs and wishes are seditious and treasonous and should result in capital punishment, particularly when those opposing his views are citing the Constitution, he’s not behaving as the President of the United States but as third-world dictator. And, of course, loyal lackey Hegseth immediately followed orders to prosecute Senator Kelly for exercising his rights as a citizen and a Senator.

That should tell Americans something, but will it?

Pardoning the national turkey dinner,
Even if he’s not a millionaire sinner.
Who’s the chump?
You… or Donald Trump?

Proposing a peace for Ukraine,
But all of it for Russia’s gain.
Who’s the chump?
You… or Donald Trump?

Some eight years ago, I wrote a blog post about the swallowing of Thanksgiving by the commercialization of Christmas. From what I can see, at least here in Cedar City, Thanksgiving has almost vanished, and Christmas decorations are proliferating in early November, along with greater hype of special buying days like Black Friday, Black Monday, and cyber-whatever-the-hell-day it may be.

Now that the Christmas commercialists have vanquished Thanksgiving, which isn’t totally surprising, given that Thanksgiving is based on expressing thanks and gratitude for what one has rather than spending more and more on everything for longer and longer, those self-same Christmas commercialists appear to have taken aim at Halloween.

Or perhaps some other group has, and the Christmas commercialists are merely taking advantage of it.

We’ve lived in the same house for thirty-two years, and, on average, the number of trick-or-treaters has declined over this period. Part of that I attributed to the aging of the homeowners in our area, but for at least the last five years, more and more younger families with small children have been moving in, yet the numbers of trick-or-treating children have reached the point to where we had exactly two this year, leaving us with an inordinate amount of individually wrapped candy.

I’ve wondered if it was just a cultural peculiarity of our area, but I did an informal canvass of friends in Cedar City and of our offspring spread across the United States (if predominantly on the coasts), and they’ve all noticed the same phenomenon.

Now, possibly this diminution of Halloween decoration and trick-or-treating may also be the result of internet-created isolation, ICE-induced fear of public spaces, and growing public paranoia, or it just might be an outcome from internet-created laziness, because trick-or-treating requires costumes, parental supervision (at least for small children), and lots of walking, and candy can be ordered with a mouse click or iPhone tap and delivered to the door.

Whatever the reason, from what I can tell, there definitely is such diminution, no doubt to the delight of the accountants of the Christmas commercialists.

Over the past two months, I’ve had email after email from various “book clubs,” each praising a book of mine recently published and saying that it really deserved more acclamation and attention. While I had to agree with that (what author wouldn’t?), it was clear that these were blatant scams, some even suggesting that paying a few “influential readers” would spur greater attention. Others were more indirect in their initial “inquiry,” not that I pursued any of them.

The most recent, and most ironically amusing, came from an individual purporting to represent the Washington [D.C.] Science Fiction Association and declaring that WSFA wanted to highlight Haze and The Hammer of Darkness for the association’s 2025 “Autumn Author Spotlight.”

Having lived in the Washington D.C. area for nearly twenty years, at time when I was active in attending WSFA conventions – primarily the long-vanished Disclave, I was rather skeptical about an “Author Spotlight,” given that WSFA doesn’t promote books except through its convention.

In addition, I’ve retained loose ties with individuals prominent in area conventions and was the Author Guest of Honor at Balticon in 2024, where a number of convention functionaries were also involved with WSFA, and it would be highly unlikely for them to spotlight me so soon after Balticon. Add to that the fact that conventions take a year or more to organize of fans and someone offering to “spotlight” me for a fall event this year was preposterous. Then add that the book they wanted to spotlight was a mass-market paperback reprint published nine years ago that contained two novels – The Hammer of Darkness (first published in 1985) and Haze (published in 2009). At the time, Tom Doherty thought that the reprint would be a good idea, because he thought neither book had gotten the support it should have, but even then, there wasn’t that much publicity.

And, finally, WSFA had to put a warning on the WSFA website that scammers were impersonating WSF.

Obviously, these scammers are targeting authors who don’t seem to be best-selling authors and are playing on authorial vanity, and no author is without some vanity, including me. But scammers annoy me, and as a semi-public service, I thought I ought to bring up the matter.

Criminals strike in the dark
But ICE patrols the sunlit park.
Who’s the chump?
You… or Donald Trump?

Most of the people in the United States, if you asked them, would say that they’re for individual freedom.

The first problem we face in maintaining freedom lies in the definition of “freedom,” because each individual has a personal definition of what freedom should be, and that makes it difficult for government to come up with laws define liberty or freedom in a fashion satisfactory to all Americans.

The second problem lies in population density and the need to maintain order.

As Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers pointed out, one cannot have freedom without an ordered society, and the greater the population density, the more restrictions that are necessary to maintain order.

Those restrictions don’t have to be imposed by law, and, in fact, in the past many restrictions maintaining order were socially imposed through manners and customs. Those manners and customs were essentially based on British culture, and as more and more Americans come from other backgrounds and/or question “the old ways,” customs have become less effective in maintaining social order.

So, governments impose standards of behavior through laws. This has created a growing attitude of believing that, if something isn’t prohibited, it’s acceptable to do it, an attitude taken to extremes by Donald Trump and many of his followers. As I’ve pointed out before, this trend leads either to anarchy or authoritarianism.

It also leads to more people wanting to use government as a means of imposing their beliefs on others, contrary to the views of the founding fathers that government should provide a basic framework of laws, as opposed to a legal structure regulating every aspect of life.

Such an all-encompassing legal structure, of course, effectively limits freedom, yet few people seem to realize that, if we just behaved ourselves and respected others, we wouldn’t need so many laws and regulations.

The problem with that is that there’s always someone who wants money and/or power and has no respect for others, or for what others have built or created, and believes that they are entitled to do anything that isn’t prohibited… and when they get away with it, it encourages others.

All of which is why Benjamin Franklin said that the founding fathers had created a Republic… if future Americans could keep it.

In this time of shutdowns, continuing inflation, and economic and political news so complex that even learned savants can’t simplify matters, I’ve decided to post a short four-line poem every Monday that simplifies an issue. The first one is more general, but after that, they’ll get more specific.

Sporting overlong red ties
And endless overflowing lies,
Who’s the chump?
You… or Donald Trump?

P.S. Feel free to share.

Recent data and reports by a number of economists and financial institutions tend to confirm what last Tuesday’s election results also suggested – that the United States effectively has an economy with two branches, one for those who have decent-paying jobs and financial reserves and another for those who have neither, a condition described as K-shaped, where the same financial conditions have differing impacts for different people.

Higher interest rates and rising stock prices benefit those who can save and invest, but those higher interest rates punish those with mortgages, credit card balances, and student loan debt. Higher interest rates also discourage businesses from hiring and encourage streamlining and economizing, which usually means layoffs.

The youth (ages 16-24) unemployment rate increased to 10.5% by this past September, and that’s three times the rate for Gen X and Millennials. Average new car prices topped $50,000 for the first time ever, and an indication of the impact on the less fortunate is car repossessions, which have increased 16% over last year and are at the highest rate since 2009. Add to that the rising cost of student loan repayments, which have increased by six percent over last year.

When you consider that the average cost of a basic one-bedroom apartment in New York City is $4,000 a month, that might just explain the results of the recent mayoral election.

On the other side, the gross profit margin of the pharmaceutical industry is over 70%, compared to 2% for the pharmacies that dispense and sell those prescription drugs, which might explain why the pharmacy clerks are having a hard time of it, while the drug company executives are rolling in dough… and why more than a few people, primarily younger adults, still openly back Luigi Mangione… and why Zohran Mamdani managed to attract over 90,000 largely youthful volunteers to support his successful campaign for NYC Mayor.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen more than a few complaints about the cost of books, particularly the cost of mass market paperbacks. So I did a little analysis. My first book, The Fires of Paratime, was published in 1982 as a mass market paperback, for a price of $2.95 (which would theoretically cost $9.81 in today’s dollars). In 1993, Tor published The Towers of The Sunset (the second Recluce book) in mass market paperback format for $6.99 (costing $12.50 in today’s dollars).

But those comparisons fail to take into account the length of books. The Fires of Paratime was only 239 pages long (for a price of 1.2 cents per page), while The Towers of the Sunset was 536 pages long (for a price of 1.3 cents per page).

Over the next ten years, the price of my books increased fairly consistently at the rate of inflation while the price per page rose to around 1.5 cents. That per-page-price remained around that level until 2023, when it jumped 33% to 2.0 cents per page. Even so, that increase didn’t cover inflation. When my last mass market paperback was published (Contrarian in 2024), it listed at $14.99, but for Tor to cover the increased inflationary costs would have required a price of $16.25, which most readers are unwilling or unable to pay without sacrificing something else.

Historically speaking, the price of paperback books has pretty much tracked inflation over the past sixty years – until 2023. While a mass market paperback still remains the same in inflation adjusted dollars as it has for the last twenty years, the income of the average middle-class or poorer American hasn’t kept up with inflation.

And that’s not a problem that the publishing industry can solve, because the industry is low margin, where the majority of editors make less than legal secretaries.

Until recently, i.e., until the arrival of Donald Trump and his MAGA clones and the Woke speech police, the United States was a democracy legally balanced (more precariously than most Americans realized) between law and long-standing custom.

Over time some of those customs were changed by law or codified into law, but far from all of them. Although the separation of church and state is mandated by the Constitution, that separation was maintained as much by custom as by law.

What we’ve seen over the last few years is a war between the extremists of the right and the extremists of the left, a war exploited for his personal benefit by Donald Trump, which is bad enough, but what is even worse is the tactic he’s used to great effect.

That tactic is simply seeking out customs and practices that used to have a certain force, almost of law, and overriding them because they’re not enshrined in law. This is nothing new. It’s happened before, but never on the scale pursued by Trump.

Trump tears down the east wing of the White House because there’s no law specifically forbidding it. He orders the militarization of national guard units and attacks on foreign boats and ships as part of a “war” against supposed drug cartels, because there’s not a clear legal definition of “war.”

The U.S. legal system was never designed to have to respond to such acts on a short-term and timely fashion, which is one of the principal reasons why he’s getting away with so much.

The other reason is because extremists control too much of each major party, and the two parties are deadlocked because the party leaders are effectively controlled by their extremists, even though most Americans don’t want the extremes of either party.

As a result of Trump’s tactics, even without Trump, the U.S. will still face the problem he’s exploiting, and that’s the fact that, at present, it appears as if corporations, presidents, and bureaucrats can damn well do anything that’s not definitively prohibited by law – and that to stop that will effectively require an authoritarian state controlling everything because the majority of Americans either don’t care, don’t understand the problem, or support one or the other extreme.

I suspect we all have TV commercials that rub us the wrong way. I know I do, one in particular. It not only irks me, but I find it offensive and dangerously subversive at the same time. For those who can’t guess from the blog title, it’s a commercial for an insurance company that tries to ridicule the behavior of “parents” and ends with a statement along the lines of “we can’t save you from becoming your parents,” but we can give you good insurance.

Admittedly, some “parental” behaviors are easy to caricature and ridicule. After all, who doesn’t have or know of a parent who has gone to excesses? The other aspect of the commercials is that all of those I’ve seen feature men becoming their parents.

But just as there are parents whose behavior is either abominable and/or laughable, there are those who have done well by their offspring. I also don’t know any parents who are perfect, who never made a mistake.

What bothers me most about this series of commercials is that it presents grown men (unless I’ve missed those that feature women) who adopt mannerisms and behaviors (supposedly from their parents) as foolish, out of touch, and laughable. The first time I saw and heard one of these commercials, I found it slightly amusing. After months, if not years, of repetition, I find the series both disturbing and dangerous.

That’s not to say that parents haven’t done foolish things – and in too many instances dangerous and criminal acts – but ridiculing an entire generation in order to sell insurance irritates me. More important, this approach also contributes to the ongoing practice of polarizing society, in the sense that it implies that older people are inept and foolish and that younger people should know better.

While insurance companies have the right to advertise their product in any fashion that doesn’t defame specific individuals, this kind of sales pitch strikes me as a “softer” version of Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans.

But then, I’m an “outdated” parent and grandparent.

Let’s see. For the moment, Trump’s latest dictator-like act is to rip the east wing off the White House, supposedly the “people’s house,” without any authorization from Congress in order to add a palatial ballroom that may well dwarf the rest of the White House complex.

At roughly the same time, Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth attempted to require news reporters to sign an agreement not to print anything he hadn’t approved or to lose their Pentagon access. Virtually, all the reporters refused, turned in their press badges, and left the Pentagon. In return, Hegseth then issued an order to all military that no military personnel could speak to or provide any information to the press, Congress, or apparently anyone else that the Pentagon Office of Legislative Affairs had not approved.

The Trump Administration is citing a 1956 law as the basis by which the Secretary of State can unilaterally deport virtually anyone who the Secretary finds poses any danger to the U.S., without any recourse for an individual so cited, even if they’re a citizen or a legal immigrant.

Hegseth is ordering the Navy to attack and sink “suspicious” boats in the Caribbean before ascertaining what they really might be transporting.

Trump is still pressing for the Supreme Court to allow him to federalize state national guard units and to approve his “declaring war” on cities he doesn’t like, without the vote of the Congress.

ICE continues to round up large bodies of people, including U.S. citizens, on the slightest provocation.

Trump continues to fire federal employees that he doesn’t like, with little or no legal basis, to selectively defund federal activities he dislikes, while shifting funds, again illegally, to programs of which he approves.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is choosing which recently-elected members of the House he’ll swear in immediately and which he won’t – and all the Republicans were sworn in expeditiously, and the sole Democrat is still waiting – possibly because she represents the vote that would require Johnson to call a vote on a measure to immediately release all the Epstein files.

That’s just what I know, but even that sounds an awful lot like what goes on in a dictatorship, and what I want to know is why so many Americans don’t even seem to care.