Even after being convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records, Donald Trump is claiming he’s a victim of political persecution by a “weaponized” federal justice system, despite the fact that the case was brought by the state of New York and that there was no federal involvement whatsoever – except for the Secret Service agents guarding Trump.

But Trump’s no stranger to lies. The Washington Post followed and documented Trump’s false or misleading claims (otherwise known as lies) during his term as President, which totaled an incredible 30,573. What was more interesting was that the longer Trump was in office, the greater the number of daily lies.

For years Trump trumpeted a grossly exaggerated value of his real estate holdings, which is why he and the Trump corporation were found guilty of falsifying the value of properties in order to get more favorable terms from financial organizations.

Yet with this background and with all the furor about Trump’s conviction, the most striking aspect of the New York hush money case has been almost overlooked by the politicians and media.

That aspect? The case was all about lies Trump made to further his political career. He falsified business records to cover up paying a porn star not to go public about what amounted to a one-night-stand.

Whatever Trump does and wherever he goes, he spouts lies or grossly misleading statements, and the irony in the hush money case is that he wouldn’t have been in legal trouble if he’d told the truth or even if he’d simply not tried to pass off the payments as a business expense.

But Trump’s always played fast and loose with both the truth and other people’s money, and he continues to do, raising funds from political sources to pay off his legal expenses, while claiming that he’s a victim of political persecution.

The truth is that he’s finally the victim of his own lies, not that he or his supporters will ever see that, because it’s so much more satisfying playing the victim than acknowledging the massive array of lies and misleading statements.

The unequivocal “Guilty” verdict in the Trump hush money case has pundits and politicians all scrambling to answer one question: How will that verdict affect the November election?

The problem with focusing on that question is that it ignores a far deeper and more important question and that is how on earth such a profoundly unethical and unscrupulous man is still in contention for the presidency.

Trump had already been convicted of sexual assault, followed by two separate convictions of defaming the woman he assaulted. Now he’s been convicted of thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records. He’s claimed that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. And the day after the latest guilty verdict, the news came out that he’s suing his niece for revealing details of his sordid behavior dealing with his own father’s estate.

That doesn’t even take into account his attempts to turn a mob on his own vice president and his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Or the boxes of classified material he illegally tried to hide at Mar-a-Lago. Nor does it include report after report of his vindictiveness, or his unparalleled record of documented lies.

Yet he’s still in close contention for the Presidency.

Some pundits claim that much of the vote for Trump is more of a vote against the too-liberal Democratic Party. That may be, but Trump’s record on carrying out his professed agenda is abysmal, possibly because his real agenda is simply to obtain personal power. Despite the Trump and Republican rhetoric on illegal immigration, both Biden and Obama actually have done more to slow the flow of illegals than Trump did, but they couldn’t say much because too many Democrats oppose stringent immigration controls. Biden’s done more to bring jobs back to the U.S. than Trump ever did.

Yet Trump is still in close contention for the Presidency.

The right question just might be:

Why is half of the United States so desperate that they’ll vote for a lying, scheming criminal whose greatest skills are wildly exaggerated and fallacious self-promotion and vicious untruths?

Last week Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen took issue with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after she criticized student pro-Palestinian protestors for not knowing enough about the history and politics of the Middle East and, for that matter, history in general. Van Hollen insisted that the protesters understood the current situation.

Yes, they probably do understand the terrible loss of civilian lives taking place right now, if only because that’s what the media is currently emphasizing, but Clinton is absolutely right in insisting that the vast majority of students aren’t all that knowledgeable about in-depth history and politics, including the history and politics of the United States.

Although recent tests of U.S. students’ proficiency in civics and history show a marked decline over the past four years, Americans have never excelled at history, which makes the latest declines even more worrisome. Americans have, for better or worse, never concerned themselves much with the past, as exemplified by Henry Ford’s contention that history was “bunk.” What Americans have always had trouble realizing is that the past determines the future, and our current media-centric concentration on the “now” means that fewer and fewer Americans have the knowledge base to realize just how much the past matters and how it influences the present.

Some of those student protesters have such a short attention span that they seem to have forgotten what happened on October 7th, barely six months ago. Most of them appear to have no understanding of how and why the creation of Israel occurred. Nor do they understand the past brutality of Hamas, or the fact that some two million Palestinians supported or acquiesced in allowing Hamas to take over Gaza with the avowed goal of destroying the only Jewish nation in the world.

Is Israel perfect? Hardly, and Netanyahu is little better than a Mafia don in silk suits, trying to hang onto power by cultivating and placating the worst elements in the Israeli government. But Hamas is far worse, with leaders who’ve made no secret of the fact that they’re willing to sacrifice the vast majority of the Palestinian people in an effort to destroy Israel.

Yet all too many of the student protesters in the United States have little or no comprehension of a history of anti-Semitism that extends some 3,000 years into the past. Not only that, but those so-idealistic student protesters conveniently overlook the fact that the Palestinian people themselves support or allow the subjugation and brutalization of their own women.

As one old saying goes, the past is prologue, but since the U.S. student protesters don’t read history, much less understand it, and apparently don’t want to, how could they know?

As I’ve mentioned upon occasion, my wife the college professor was an opera singer. In addition to singing professionally, she also has taught voice and directed the opera program at the local state university for the past thirty years.

Unfortunately, teaching young singers has gotten more difficult every year, not because she’s gotten older, but because of the increasing restrictions placed on teachers, especially in her field.

Classical music is a small world, where the slightest impropriety or poor behavior is immediately spread, but as a result of the #Me Too movement, any professor who uses those words to warn young singers, true as they are, can face disciplinary action because those words are automatically classed as a threat.

In recent years, more and more vocal competitions have been conducted in the initial stages through video or zoom, which artificially reduces a singer’s full range and overtones, while increasing the importance of appearance, dress, and physical presence.

Yet, at the same time, the university has effectively forbidden professors to even suggest ways for students to improve their attire or physical presentation, because doing so would “belittle” the students. Even though grossly excessive weight reduces vocal capabilities and limits stage performance, and even though singers are also judged on their professional demeanor and appearance, professors cannot even make a bland observation for improvement in those areas.

In addition, constructive criticism, i.e., telling students what needs improvement and why it’s necessary, is frowned on unless surrounded by lots of praise. Heaven help a voice teacher who bluntly tells a student that they’re singing out of tune and that they will not get into graduate school or have any chance at a career if they don’t get the basics down first.

Unsurprisingly enough, at my wife’s university, the popular “cheerleading” professors have far fewer graduates who go on to professional careers in music than those who “tell it like it is,” but the professors who tell it like it is get poorer faculty and student evaluations, despite producing more successful graduates.

So, in effect, by insisting that teachers “protect” the poor delicate souls, these well-meaning administrators (or perhaps those terrified by the thought of legal action) are reducing the ability of professors to improve the chances of their students to compete and succeed, and that’s especially true in the case of less prestigious state universities, which is exactly where undiscovered students with raw talent and little else often end up.

My wife, the university opera director, is always looking for chamber operas suitable for largely undergraduate performers. And while there are more than a few chamber operas out there, she seldom finds many that her students can perform. Why?

First, far too many operas written today, including chamber operas, are far too experimental and musically difficult for undergraduates, and also have limited audience appeal because melody too often takes a back seat to “experiment” and “novelty.”

Second, like most university opera directors, she’s limited in the number of talented male singers with a surplus of female singers, particularly sopranos, yet the vast majority of operas, both past and present, require more male singers.

Chamber operas that are meaningful, musically sound, melodic, and dramatically interesting, with more female roles, are rare. When she finds one, such as The Ghosts of Gatsby, which her company presented in 2023, she’s delighted.

But, as an economist, what I don’t understand is why so many composers today ignore the opportunity presented by hundreds of university opera programs, all of which have “too many sopranos” (actually a title of a good chamber opera). Presumably, given the excess of starving composers, such composers would like to have their work presented and receive a chance at royalties for their effort.

Yet in going through some twenty recently composed chamber operas available for production, my wife could find exactly one where the number of female singers exceeded the number of males.

At some point, this might change, that is, if composers actually want to have their works presented and to be paid.

On a parallel track, of sorts, when I started writing professionally, most writers were male, and most wrote science fiction, as did I. The speculative fiction field both grew and changed, and I changed with it. When I looked at the best-seller lists for the past three months, I noticed that something like 60% of the best-selling books were by women, and most of the men on the list were older. Even Brandon Sanderson is approaching fifty, and I’m certainly no spring chicken.

So… maybe, just maybe, those classical opera composers should think about why so few of them are getting produced.

Sometimes, shopping at Walmart can tell you far more about how life is changing in the United States than all the polls and surveys. Why do I use Walmart? Because the prices on staples are far lower than the other three markets in Cedar City, and since Cedar City is on I-15 – the most direct route to California – the produce is not only better, but far less expensive.

Because my wife the professor works long hours on a regular basis, and I can shop when it’s not crowded, I do almost all the grocery shopping, usually once or twice a week. On my last trip, I had two items on my list that I only need to replenish once or twice a year, if that – black boot/shoe polish and black edge-dressing or scuffcoat.

Except this time, Walmart had neither. And it wasn’t that they were out of stock. That whole small shoe section had been reduced to one shelf, with neutral polish and other items having nothing to do with polish, surrounded by insoles for all sizes of feet.

Perhaps it’s my upbringing, or possibly the years in the Navy, but I’ve always liked my boots to be polished. And I wear boots because almost any kind of shoes, even expensive designer shoes or high-end athletic shoes, get painful within hours, if not a few minutes. Except for my work boots, scuffed and dirty boots or shoes, to me at least, suggest a certain slovenliness or lack of character. It’s not that I particularly enjoy polishing boots, but that I dislike appearing unkempt or sloppy (except when engaged in manual labor, where I can quickly get unkempt).

As I was pondering the lack of shoe polish, I realized another fact – that the local cobbler had closed his shop a month previous, and there was no one repairing or resoling shoes or boots in Cedar City any longer. I’ve had some of my boots more than ten years, and I’m hard on them. So I’ve needed new soles and heels on a continuing basis, but getting them repaired is obviously coming to an end.

So, I suspect, are the days of polished leather boots and shoes, replaced by the ubiquitous sneakers or extraordinarily expensive athletic shoes that wear out quickly, none of which are designed to fit my clearly Neanderthal feet.

And it’s not just me. For years, my wife has bemoaned the fact that it’s almost impossible for her to find shoes that fit, ever since shoe manufacturers simplified their sizing. If a woman has a moderate forefoot and a narrow heel, she’ll end up slipping out of a standard shoe (although some manufacturers supply pads), and any shoe narrow enough to fit her heel will be too tight to accommodate her forefoot.

Yes, the times are definitely changing, from head to foot, especially for feet.

Almost every year in late spring, just about this time, I write about my lilacs and their never-ending battle against the vagaries of the climate here in Cedar City. My lilac bushes are deep purple, and I love their scent – provided I have the chance to enjoy it.

We’ve had a comparatively warm winter, often with rain instead of snow, and by the first of April the daily highs were in the mid-sixties, and it was no longer freezing at night. By the twentieth of April, daily the temperature was flirting with all-time highs. Last Wednesday, the temperature neared eighty, and the lilacs decided that it was time to leaf out and bloom. By Friday night I could smell just a trace of their scent.

By Saturday morning, however, the wind picked up, ranging from twenty to thirty miles per hour, blowing away any scent that the lilacs emitted. Sunday morning, the wind was even fiercer, with cold gusts well over forty miles per hour. Then, around three o’clock we got small hail that turned into sleet, which after fifteen minutes turned into heavy snow. The temperature dropped to thirty-seven degrees and by six o’clock we had some four inches of snow.

For the lilacs, it didn’t get any better, because by ten o’clock the temperature dropped to below freezing and stayed there until sunrise. By then the temperature rose above freezing, although the lilac bushes –and blossoms — were still festooned with snow. By midday, it was clear and sunny, with a temperature of 48 F, and there was no trace of snow on the lilacs, and the blossoms weren’t frost-bitten.

Unfortunately, the combination of wind, snow, and cold destroyed any chance of enjoying the rare chance smelling lilacs in bloom… again.

We all tend to hold memories in which we firmly believe… but sometimes those firm memories aren’t as accurate as we think they are.

For years, I “remembered” when the Denver Broncos opened the season by winning eight straight games, and then lost eight straight and never made the playoffs. But when I checked the actual records, I discovered that no such season ever existed. The closest season to that was in 1962, when the Broncos won six of their first seven games, then lost six of the final seven games. While that was close to what I remembered, obviously my brain wanted to emphasize the magnitude of the Broncos’ collapse, for whatever reason, possibly because of how bad the Broncos were in the early years.

Now, some people have better memories than others. A relative of my wife was a singer and a conductor. More than forty years ago, he conducted university choirs at a program where the late Grace Kelly, the former actress and then the Princess of Monaco, gave a poetry reading. He honestly didn’t remember that, and his former wife had to dig out newspaper clippings to prove he had conducted Kelly’s program there and had even been at the reception. I think it’s fair to say that a former professional musician who cannot recall being on a program with Grace Kelly has definite memory difficulties.

On the other hand, I’ve learned that, if my wife recalls something – that was the way it was, because what she recalls is always accurate, particularly with regard to people and events. She does not remember telephone numbers well, which, as I mentioned some time ago, created difficulties with a financial institution, who insisted she had to remember the telephone number of the house where she lived some forty years ago (back before the era of cell phones).

Despite my mis-recollection about the 1962 Broncos’ season, I’m generally more accurate with numbers and facts, but obviously not as accurate as I’d like to believe, and I suspect that’s true of most of us.

Because I’m originally from Denver, and because my grandfather bought season tickets back when the Broncos were terrible and tickets were actually affordable, he took me to a few games when I was a teenager. As result, I do follow the Broncos, if neither religiously nor obsessively.

I was mildly surprised to see a headline that the Broncos had drafted Bo Nix – the Oregon quarterback who’s gotten a lot of attention over the past few years. I was then even more surprised to learn that, despite the fact that the Broncos desperately need a first-rate quarterback, and not a retread from elsewhere (despite their short success with Peyton Manning), and the fact that Nix was about the top of those available when the Broncos picked, all the football “pundits” decided that the Broncos had made one of the worse choices possible.

I read a bit further and discovered those same pundits had trashed the choices of a few other teams as well, all of which irritated me. Choosing which college players will make it in the NFL is anything but a sure thing, and the pundits are often wrong. Sometimes, players no one ever heard of make it big time. Brock Purdy, the current SF 49ers quarterback, was “Mr. Irrelevant,” the very last player drafted in 2022. Back in 2000, the New England Patriots took the 199th pick in the draft to choose a fellow named Brady.

On the other hand, who remembers JaMarcus Russell, Terry Baker, Tim Couch, Ryan Leaf, or quite a few other high draft picks who never lived up to their college performance and hype?

It’s one thing to judge a professional football player on his NFL statistics and career, or a coach on his won-lost record, but it’s another to second-guess a football team’s picks well before the fact. One of the reasons I don’t like such second-guessing is that almost no one holds the second-guessers to account. By the next draft, everyone’s forgotten inaccurate second-guessing, but the negative impacts to coaches and teams tend to linger.

But then, I’ve never been fond of negative second-guessers in any field, particularly in politics, where all too many of the inaccurate second-guessers don’t have that much in-depth experience, and in writing, where too many second-guesses reflect more what critics and reviewers like as opposed how well the author accomplished what he or she set out to do.

In the April 22nd and 29th issue of The New Yorker, in “How Gullible Are You?”, Manvir Singh writes about “misinformation and the nature of belief.” It’s a decent article, in which Singh discusses misinformation, some of its recent history, and discusses French philosopher and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber’s distinction between “factual beliefs” (i.e., chairs are real) and symbolic beliefs (God is real) as well as the efforts of various theorists who offer ways to combat misinformation.

Singh points out that virtually all efforts to fight false fabrications and misinformation rest on the assumption of human gullibility while ignoring “the far larger forces that drive the phenomenon,” particularly the lack of trust in government and other social institutions. And essentially, that’s where the article ends.

What he doesn’t really or fully address is why misinformation and, for example, Donald Trump’s insistence that major media peddle “fake news” have gained such a hold on so many people.

The answer, as I considered the matter, is actually simple, and, in a way, profound. Much of what the media and the Democrats are pushing is in fact “fake news” to the people who endorse the Trumpist and MAGA rhetoric.

Declining unemployment is “fake news” to people who don’t have jobs and who live in situations where they cannot get decent paying jobs. In more than a few parts of Appalachia, jobs requiring college degrees or even graduate degrees pay less than what coal truck drivers used to make. In fact, one of my wife’s cousins made more driving a coal truck than she did as a tenured college professor. But most of those coal jobs vanished with the closure of the mines, and the inadequate “reclamation” and the massive rains of two years ago have destroyed thousands of homes, with no repairs or replacements. Tell all those people that times are better, and they’ll likely think you’re purveying fake news.

Tell all the young people who’ve mortgaged their future to get higher education and graduate degrees and who can’t find jobs paying enough to service their debt that times are improving, especially when we’re producing more college graduates than we have higher paying jobs for.

Inflation rates are down, but food prices and housing costs are not, and telling people that inflation is down doesn’t agree with what they are paying for groceries and lodging, and that equates to “fake news” in many people’s minds.

The only thing that will change the views of most of these people is real improvement in their lives, and that’s unlikely to occur any time soon, given the multiplicity of factors compounding the problem, ranging from high housing and transportation/relocation costs, the mismatch between skills and/or lack of skills and existing job requirements, to the unwillingness and/or inability of unemployed or underemployed people to relocate.

All that means that “fake news” will remain “fake news” for the foreseeable future.

With all the polls and furor about who supports Joe Biden for President and who doesn’t – and the same for Donald Trump – there’s another question that’s being overlooked.

That question? Who will each of them pick for the White House staff and the Cabinet and how well will those individuals work together and for the next President?

While it’s apparent that Biden has put together an administration that can work together, that wasn’t often the case in the previous Trump administration. Even more telling is that very few people who worked closely with Trump, especially at the highest levels, seem willing to repeat the experience, and the horror stories that have seeped out suggest that Trump is either extraordinarily difficult to work for or that he’s terrible at picking a team that will work together for any length of time… or perhaps both.

This isn’t surprising, given the management style Trump has revealed, which requires absolute one-way loyalty that often is only rewarded until someone disagrees or cannot achieve what Trump wants in the way he wants it. This proved a problem in the Trump administration when Trump demanded acts and/or policies and implementation that were either impossible in a practical way, illegal, or unconstitutional. That hasn’t changed, but is continuing now when lawyers are unable or unwilling to act as Trump directs.

Since Trump shows absolutely no signs of changing his authoritarian leadership and management style, it’s likely that, if he’s re-elected, we’ll have more administration chaos and continual turnover in officials and staff, at least until all those appointees who follow the law and the Constitution are fired or otherwise removed.

You think otherwise? Then why did Trump want his vice-president hanged for following the law and the procedures in place for over two hundred years? What makes you think Trump will change in the slightest?

Recent polls suggest a significant percentage of voters, especially younger voters, may not vote at all in the coming Presidential election, largely because they don’t like either major party candidate.

I can certainly understand people not liking the choices facing them in the coming Presidential election. I haven’t liked the choices presented by either major political party for decades.

But that’s no reason not to vote. In fact, not voting effectively supports the candidate you find most awful, because not voting deprives the less bad candidate of your vote. So does a vote for a non-viable third-party candidate. Throwing your vote away on a non-viable candidate may make you feel good, but the only impact is to support the major party candidate you find most distasteful or least capable.

And voting against an incumbent to “punish” him for not doing all you wanted or taking a single action you disliked intensely can backfire if you vote for a candidate whose record and/or promises are at odds with your beliefs and requirements, because the only person you’re punishing is yourself.

Voting reflects life. Sometimes, we don’t get ideal or even good choices, only a choice of which downsides to accept in jobs, housing, schools, or other areas. The same is true of politicians. The choice is between flawed candidates, because all candidates are flawed to some degree, just as all people are. So, if you vote, the choice is about which flaws you can accept, and which you cannot.

If you decide not to vote, that’s a choice as well, and that’s the choice to let other people decide, which, to me, is a form of cowardice.

Most of America is complaining about inflation, and more than half of Americans blame that inflation on President Biden, but is the President, any President, for that matter, the one to blame?

Federal Reserve research found that “corporate profits contributed a large percentage to inflation in the first year and contributed much less in the second” after the pandemic. In particular, Fed researchers found that corporate profits accounted for all the inflation in the first year of the pandemic recovery (roughly July 2020 to July 2021) and 41 percent of inflation overall in the first two years of the post-pandemic recovery (July 2020 to July 2022).

But that was just the beginning. According to one study, corporate profits hit an all-time high in 2023. Profit margins were above 15 percent – a level not seen since the 1950s. Another found that corporate profits after tax were at 11.08% in the fourth quarter of 2023, compared to 10.93% last quarter and 10.79% last year. This is 54% higher than the long-term average of 7.19%.

In fact, corporations raised prices on consumers – not to offset inflation – but to increase their own profits. In February, Fortune printed a story pointing out that corporate profits drove 53% of inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023 and more than one-third since the start of the pandemic. Comparatively, over the forty years prior to the pandemic, profits drove just 11% of price growth, while, since the beginning of the pandemic, corporate profits as a share of national income have skyrocketed by 29%

In addition, although consumer prices rose by 3.4% over 2023, input costs for producers have only risen by 1%, and in many sectors producers’ prices have actually decreased without corporations passing on those savings to consumers.

In just one example, in 2021 PepsiCo announced that it was “forced” to raise prices, despite record profits of $11 billion. Then in 2023, PepsiCo announced another price increase, of more than 10%. Interestingly enough, PepsiCo’s only major competitor, Coco-Cola, followed a similar pricing model, with its CEO claiming that Coco-Cola had “earned the right” to price hikes because its products were popular. How was that possible? Because, with a combined total of nearly 92%, three companies control the U.S. carbonated soft drink market – Coco-Cola (44%), PepsiCo (26%), and Dr. Pepper/Keurig (22%)

Likewise, in the area of meat products, by the end of 2023, Americans were paying at least 30 percent more for beef, pork, and poultry products than they were in 2020. Might it just be because four companies now control the processing of 80% of beef, 70% of pork, and nearly 60% of poultry?

Such near monopoly power goes beyond soft drinks and meat products. In 75% of U.S. industries, fewer companies control a greater percentage of their markets than they did twenty years ago.

Complain all you want about inflation, but at least place the blame on the largest cause – corporate greed.

Perhaps my wife and I are old-fashioned, or too cautious. It also might be that we find long conversations on a cell phone tiring, but for whatever the reasons, we not only have cell phones, but a landline as well.

This has downsides I never imagined, as when, last week, the handset on my office phone decided that it would no longer retain the cord leading to the body of the thirty-year-old landline telephone in my office. I thought the problem was in the cord and decided to get a replacement cord – only to find that not a single place in Cedar City carried replacement cords. I did find one at the Staples in Salt Lake City, which arrived three days later. Although I’d taped the old cord to the handset in the meantime, that didn’t work all that well, and it turned out that the handset couldn’t hold the new cord any better than the old one had.

So I decided to replace the entire telephone, but, again, although we have CenturyLink, Verizon, and AT&T stores/offices here in Cedar City, none of them carried any landline telephones – even though their websites said that they did. Nor did any of the big box stores, whose websites said they carried them – but didn’t. It also turned out that the second landline phone, from a seldom-used corner of the house, that I’d pressed into use to replace my office telephone also didn’t work particularly well. So I’ve had to order two landline phones.

It also struck me that the landline phone lasted thirty years at a fraction of the cost of the cheapest cell phone, and I’m on my third cell phone in the last fifteen years.

Sheerly coincidentally, the local paper carried a story noting that roughly a quarter of Americans still don’t use cell phones and rely strictly on landlines. That got me to thinking. If I have this trouble getting a replacement landline telephone, who’s going to supply telephones for the roughly eighty million people who still need them? Or do the manufacturers think all those eighty million are suddenly going to switch? Or is this a nefarious plot to force them to switch?

More than a few people know the poem “Ozymandias,” written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which in the days of my youth was part of the English curriculum, not only because Shelley wrote it, but because the poem was considered a parable about how fame and fortune vanish over time.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

What fewer people know is that Shelley and his friend Horace Smith each wrote a poem on the same subject over the Christmas holidays in 1817, and both were published at different times. But where did they come up with the name Ozymandias? In antiquity, Ozymandias was a Greek name for the pharaoh Ramesses II (1279 –1213 BC), who definitely left a great deal of statuary behind.

Interestingly enough, the poem (or poems) convey stylistically an impression of the loneliness and singularity of such an occurrence, when, in fact, more than a few cities great in their time have totally vanished, with numerous references to their existence, but no present trace of their location. The latest issue of Archaeology contains an article on ten cities of the ancient world that have not yet been located, including Agade, the capitol of the Akkadian Empire; Tarhuntasha, the one-time capitol of the Hittite Empire; Serai, the capitol of the Golden Horde; and Wanggeom-seong, the capitol of Gojoseon, the first Korean kingdom.

In addition, almost every issue of Archaeology or Current World Archaeology seems to contain a reference to yet another empire or city (and not just small towns) recently discovered, one of the latest being an extensive urban area in Amazonia revealed by lidar scans.

In fact, one could even say that homo sapiens’ desire to be remembered is only matched by how much rubble we’ve left behind, with so few individuals actually memorialized and recalled over the ages.

Some authors would say that you have to write to please yourself, at least to some degree, because it’s almost impossible to put in the effort and skill that’s necessary to write a novel if you dislike what you’re writing. While that’s accurate, as far as it goes, if you want to be a successfully published writer, your work has to appeal to an audience larger than yourself, and most likely larger than just people like you.

One best-selling writer has created a person in his mind, for whom he writes. He has crafted that person lovingly and in depth, from where she works and what she does precisely at that job, what kind of food she enjoys, what jokes she finds amusing, down to what NFL team her husband roots for. That obviously works that writer, given his sales.

Another published writer tends to tailor each book to a specific person, or occasionally to a type of person. Another might write for a circle of friends… or for his or her writing group.

Some writers obviously “write for the market,” consciously or unconsciously adapting or mimicking wildly popular books, as is obvious from the flood of vampire novels and the number of Tolkien knockoffs. The problem with that approach is that more often than not the imitation is usually not as good as the original. There are exceptions, but they’re rare.

For whatever reason, I never really asked myself who I was writing for. I just wanted to write, although initially my creative efforts were in poetry. When I started writing science fiction, I concentrated on telling a good story with at least some measure of uniqueness. And, as I’ve related elsewhere, when I turned to fantasy, I wanted to write it with economic, technical, and human “realism.”

Along the way, I was asked what my “target” audience was, something I’d never considered defining. When I actually thought about the matter, I realized exactly who I was writing for – and that was for readers who could think and who wanted more “depth” in their fiction.

Some of that depth, I admit, was for me as much as for my readers, as when, in The Elysium Commission, I buried snippets of John Donne’s poetry in the book – since the main character is a consultant/problem-solver-for-hire named Blaine Donne. But there’s far more than meets the eye or the casual read in most of my work, although much of what I write can be enjoyed without having to know or recognize the depth. Not always, however, as in Quantum Shadows, The One-Eyed Man, or Haze.

Donald Trump now selling Bibles? That sounds like a Bill Maher far-out parody or a Saturday Night Live caricature or an Onion headline.

Apparently, it’s neither, but something that’s actually occurring.

Trump hawking Bibles is like Satan endorsing the Almighty or Iblis selling the Koran.

We all know that the Donald is willing to do anything to make a buck, or to avoid paying anyone he doesn’t have to, but Trump selling “God Bless the USA” Bibles might be his greatest feat of hypocrisy yet.

On the other hand, it also might be, in a strange way, the most honest thing he’s ever done, because it blatantly declares that he has no regard for honesty or ethics whatsoever… or for the tenets of the faith that so many of his followers profess to follow.

It also shows the absolute stupidity, gullibility, and/or hypocrisy of his evangelical followers. Trump has broken every one of the Ten Commandments and now is trying to profit from their faith. In addition, he’s also broken the commandment that “you shall have no other God before me,” because, in TrumpWorld, there is no other god but Trump.

Not that any of this matters to the sheep who follow him blindly, as did the clueless children who followed the Pied Piper. Nor does it seem to matter to the majority of Republican officeholders, many of whom privately despise Trump, but who don’t have either the guts or the integrity to oppose him.

I just looked through the latest edition of The Atlantic and discovered an article discussing why popular perceptions about the state of the economy don’t match the statistics. The bottom line in the article was that the statistics don’t match “the reality” the average person sees.

Inflation may have leveled out, but the higher prices it caused remain, particularly for food and home utilities. Also, interest rates for mortgages, car loans, and credit cards are still much higher than five years ago.

Duuh!

I pointed this out four months ago [ https://www.lemodesittjr.com/2023/11/15/prices-vs-inflation-statistics/]

There’s another aspect of this as well. It’s not just about asking the right questions, but asking the right people.

I’m well aware of the increase in food prices, because I’m the one who does the grocery shopping, but I suspect that, in most households, it’s more likely to be a woman who does the shopping… and who’s the angriest about those higher prices.

Some costs don’t hit some people. Someone younger who’s renting or house-hunting is definitely going to be unhappy about the prices of houses or rents. Someone with a fixed low-rate mortgage or who’s paid off the mortgage won’t be as concerned, although they may balk at the price of electricity or natural gas. Likewise, someone trying to get a college education or an advanced degree – or parents helping a young adult – will be more directly impacted than someone not having to worry about education costs.

And, as I pointed out earlier, many of the costs that worry people aren’t fully factored into the “favorable” economic statistics, which is why so many people don’t believe the numbers.

But I do wonder why those smart writers at The Atlantic took so long to figure it out, though.

For the past several years, Republicans, especially far-right Republicans, have trumpeted “immigrant crime” as a massive problem, using specific incidents as an illustration of the magnitude of the problem.

There’s one “small” problem with this claim. U.S.-born citizens are far more likely to commit horrendous crimes than immigrants.

Yes, some immigrants do commit crimes, and once in a while those crimes are horrendous. But a study co-led by Northwestern University economist Elisa Jácome and conducted by a team of economists found that over the past 150 years immigrants were consistently less likely commit crimes than people born in the U.S. They also found beginning in 1960, gap between immigrants and U.S.- born citizens increased enough that immigrants today are 60% less likely to be criminally imprisoned than the U.S.-born.

In another similar study, Stanford University economist Ran Abramitzky and his co-authors also found that for the last 140 years imprisonment for crimes was markedly lower for immigrants, and that, today, immigrants are 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated than are U.S.-born individuals who are white. And when the analysis was expanded to include Black Americans — whose prison rates are higher than the general population — the likelihood of an immigrant being incarcerated is still more than 55 percent lower than of people born in the United States.

So, if the average immigrant is more law-abiding than the average U.S. citizen, why are the Republicans getting away with blaming crime on immigrants, and why have so many Americans bought into this myth for more than a century?

There are many good reasons to restrict immigration, beginning with the simple fact that the U.S. doesn’t have the resources to process the number of people trying to enter the United States, or that we should be allowing more talented immigrants who follow the rules, but claiming that immigrants increase criminality isn’t one of them.

One candidate for President discovered a few classified documents in his files, perhaps even a boxful, and turned them over. The other had scores of boxes of classified documents and tried to hide and keep them.

The first candidate has stuttered since he was a child and makes occasional conversational gaffes… and has for years. The second makes wild misstatements and utters thousands of untruths, almost all of which have been revealed to have little or no factual basis.

The first candidate lost his wife in a tragic car accident, but later remarried, and has a stable home life. The second candidate has been married three times with numerous affairs, including with a porn star, an affair he tried to cover up using campaign funds, and has been found guilty of sexual assault and defamation of the woman he assaulted.

The first candidate has always accepted the results of elections. The second candidate only accepts them when he wins and incited an attack on the capitol when he lost.

About the only similarity is that of age – both are near eighty.

Now… I could go on and on about the basic and important distinctions between Biden and Trump, the clear and obvious differences in character and behavior, which seem rather important to me.

Yet almost half the electorate either doesn’t see these differences… or doesn’t care.

And what does that say about that half?