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?

Apparently, if the polls are correct, a slim majority of Americans believe that life was better during the last administration, even in the depths of the pandemic, when we had a President who seriously considered injecting bleach into people’s veins as a treatment for COVID and who later tried to overturn an election.

For all the uproar over immigration, no one seems to remember or understand that the Biden Administration has deported more illegal immigrants than did the Trump Administration. And while the Trump Administration talked about bringing jobs back to the U.S., the only thing the Trump Administration did was grant a minuscule tax cut to the average American and a whopping tax cut to the wealthy and corporations, while the Biden Administration passed legislation resulting in the building of high-tech factories in the U.S. They also forget that Trump’s spending policies set off the inflation that they hate, and that inflation rates have come down under Biden.

And those fond “memories” seem to omit the fact that Trump paid hush money to a porn star, and drove small companies and contractors out of business because he wouldn’t pay his bills. Or the fact that he was convicted of tax fraud and sexual assault, or that there’s a recording of him illegally soliciting votes. Or that he did nothing for four hours while police were fighting for their lives in the Capitol. Or the fact that lawyers won’t work for him unless they’re paid in advance.

Nope. None of those memories seem to count… or even be remembered.

Apparently, inconvenient and proven facts don’t seem to have much weight against well-delivered bombastic rhetoric that paints an overly rosy picture of a past that never was.

Exactly what does whom the Fulton County (Georgia) Attorney General might be sleeping with have to do with whether Donald Trump tried to solicit some 11,000 votes illegally from the Georgia Secretary of State?

For that matter, why have both the Georgia State House and Senate passed measures that would create an appointed commission to discipline or remove district attorneys, measures that removed oversight by the state Supreme Court, and which would in fact allow the Republican Party to dictate which district attorneys should be investigated and disciplined.

Might it just be that all that effort is designed to halt a state court prosecution of the great Donald Trump because, even if Trump is elected in the fall, he can’t stop a state prosecution nor can he pardon himself if he’s convicted?

From what I can tell, whether the district attorney is sleeping with a prosecutor has very little bearing on whether Donald Trump tried to use the power of his office to illegally solicit votes. It appears that digging up dirt on Fani Willis is simply an effort to remove her from prosecuting Donald Trump…. or at the very least, to further delay his trial.

While I sincerely hope that someone accused of murder would not even be allowed to bring up unrelated personal matters and have them be considered as relevant to the guilt of an accused murderer, it appears that, in fact, if one has enough attorneys and money, he can try defense ploy after defense ploy to string out the case either for years or until one of those ploys succeeds.

Does that represent justice? For Donald Trump, it obviously does.

The other day, my wife was in the university parking lot, about to drive home. Then out of nowhere, a car pulled up two spaces away, and suddenly she could hear nothing except rap music that totally drowned out her classic easy rock music. Both her windows were closed, but those of the other car were open, and the volume of the “music” from the other car was enough literally to vibrate her solid but modest SUV.

I own a somewhat larger SUV, used primarily once for book tours and currently to carry opera props and sometimes sets, as well as for occasional trips around southwest Utah. Yet I’ve also experienced the unpleasant and definitely unwelcome sonic assault and/or or the involuntary full-body sonic massage.

We live on a fairly quiet street, but we still get the occasional sonic bombardment from so-called music, even with our well-insulated windows and walls – and our house isn’t even that close to the road, and there’s a five-foot tall, four-foot wide thick pfitzer hedge between the sidewalk and the grass.

What’s become even more prevalent is the sound of barely muffled large diesel pick-up trucks, except they’re more like monsters that tower over my standard-sized SUV, and the majority of these behemoths don’t appear to be working trucks, not with all that chrome and nary a splat of mud or so much as a dent in sight, and seldom even with any cargo.

Sound pollution is increasing everywhere in the world, and it’s not as though trucks and music have to be that loud. So why is it happening?

Studies show that human beings regard high levels of sound as a form of power, a way to dominate the space around them. Certainly, we can see this everywhere, even in politics, where demagogues from Hitler to Trump have ranted and raved at high volume and amplified that volume as much as possible.

But what it signifies to me is obnoxious boors who ought to be stuffed into a sound-proof chamber and subjected to their own noise at volumes high enough to burst their eardrums – except then they’d just increase the volume more.

For some reason I get bombarded with political emails, from both the left and the right, but the right sends almost ten times as many as the left. Here is a representative sample of the message subject lines of those from the right.

The Left is Coming for Us
Drunk Kamala Goes Viral
Riots Break Out- National Guard Deployed
Veterans Sacrificed for Migrants
Leftist Protesters Threaten My Home
President Trump to Win Nobel Prize
Say a Prayer for the January 6th Prisoners
US Days Away from Major Terror Attack
Stop Biden’s Deep State Apparatus
Jack Smith Hides Trial Facts
Joe Biden’s Cognitive Failure Even Worse!
White House’s Dereliction of Duty!
The Woke Mob Removed Founding Father’s Statue

And here are some of the message subject lines from the left.

Undecided Voters Not Breaking for Me
$7 Million in Negative Ads from SuperPac
Planet for Our Future
Our Numbers Need to Improve
Did you get the Invite?
We’re being Outspent by Dark PACs

Notice a certain difference?

Those from the right are pointed and eye-catching, and every one is somewhere between an exaggeration and a gross misrepresentation of the facts.

Those from the left tend to be more factual – and boring.

I can assure you that for months the tone and substance of the ads from the left and right haven’t varied, but it does strike me that the ceaseless eye-catching exaggerations are bound to have some effect.

Over the last decade, there’s been a fair amount of verbiage expended on income inequality, and how the rich are getting even richer. And that’s unfortunately true.

But all that verbiage has tended to obscure another growing inequality – and that’s an inequality that afflicts the U.S. system of justice. While there’s been lots of heat and light focused on law enforcers at all levels, there’s been little light and even less progress in dealing with the inequality in the courts created by lack of resources and exploited by wealth.

While the delay between the time a defendant is charged and when the case is tried varies considerably by state and locality, statistics show that, on average, that delay has been increasing steadily since 1990, to the point that in some of slowest areas, such as Chicago, someone charged with murder will wait four years before going to trial. Some cases have been delayed a decade.

Part of the problem is political, because Congress deadlocks over appointing federal judges as each party wants its judicial candidates, with the result that ten percent of federal judge positions are vacant. Also, the number of judges hasn’t kept pace with population growth.

These resource shortcomings play into the hands of unscrupulous litigants for whom every day of delay offers a benefit. The delays also punish innocents without financial resources, some of whom have been held in captivity awaiting trial for years. This creates pressure to plead guilty to a lesser offense… and the result that someone found innocent might spend more time in jail than someone found guilty.

In the higher profile cases, such as those involving Donald Trump, all the endless motions and extended litigation provide illustrated example after example of how those with wealth and accomplished (I wouldn’t use the term “good” here) attorneys can thwart and string out prosecution and trials for years.

And often even when they lose, at least in civil cases or cases involving fraud and white-collar crime, the cost to them is less than to what they’ve gained.

Large corporations can do the same in dealing with the government, as well as in civil matters against individuals or small companies creating legal proceedings that can bankrupt those without extensive legal resources.

Yet, even as the Trump legal spectacle fuels Trump’s re-election campaign funding and furthers his political ambition, few seem to grasp the impact such tactics have on those who can’t afford those kinds of attorneys.

There’s been a hue and cry about Joe Biden’s age, mental confusion, and age-related memory problems. But some of this has little to do with age. He was stuttering from childhood, made the occasional verbal gaffe when a senator or as vice-president. Are those gaffes increasing? They’re apparently more frequent, but I’d submit that they’re not as much more frequent as the media reports, simply because, now that the issue has been raised, every media reporter anywhere is looking for slips or gaffes, especially since Biden recently turned 81.

But, at age 77, and about to turn 78 in four months, Donald Trump is no spring chicken, either. The other day, I watched a montage of recent Trump misstatements, and gaffes, delivered at full Trump volume, and, outside of that one report, I’ve neither heard nor read any significant media concern about Trump’s mental readiness for the Presidency.

Why might that be?

I’d submit that, first, Trump delivers most of what he says forcefully and emphatically, which creates the illusion that he actually knows and understands what he’s talking about. Add to that the fact that too many American voters care more about HOW someone speaks more than they care about what they say. Second, Trump lies and misstates so much that it’s effectively impossible to sort out the gaffes and errors from all the lies and misstatements. Third, because his basic themes are always on the same subjects, he’s seldom challenged on new subjects or areas in the way that Biden routinely is. And when he is, he seldom says anything even close to profound, but merely repeats the soundbites on which he’s always campaigned.

Unless, of course, he promises to turn over to Putin any country that he thinks doesn’t spend enough on its national defense. That’s not a gaffe, but a policy position with frightening consequences, yet it’s already been almost forgotten, if heard at all, by the gaffe-hunters, who are far more interested in easy and often meaningless pickings than in truly frightening mental slippages.

One aspect of comments by readers about both books and politics is the number of false/inaccurate generalizations that crop up, often because the commenter is extrapolating from too few examples.

If one takes Lerris or Creslin from the Recluce Saga, for example, they’re both woefully ignorant of the greater world, not because they’re stupid, but because they grow up in a restricted and sheltered environment. On the other hand, Cerryl has to claw his way to power from the bottom of society and has very few illusions about people.

Yet I’ve seen comments that imply all my main characters are “almost criminally ignorant” or that they’re all “ruthless” or excessively competent.

The same sorts of ignorant generalizations also show up in the political arena, where so many rightwing politicians portray immigrants as criminals – yet study and after study has shown that the percentage of criminals among legal and illegal immigrants is far lower than the percentage of criminals in the overall U.S. population.

My wife the university professor gets extremely irritated about the generalizations that that universities are hotbeds of liberalism and university professors are all liberals, perhaps because she teaches in a university that’s anything but liberal in a state where almost all colleges and universities are predominantly and extremely conservative. While she’s a moderate Democrat, she’s so outnumbered by conservatives on both the campus and in the town that she rarely offers political opinions (nor do I, except on paper).

Yet I must admit that she’s also generalizing from experience, because, perhaps by chance, most of the ten colleges and universities where she has taught for over fifty years tended to be conservative, if not very conservative. Yet study after study has shown that while “liberal” professors make up either the plurality or a slight majority of university/college professors, depending on the study and data, moderates and conservatives comprise the rest, which statistically reveals that far from all college professors are liberals. Except for the 75 so-called “elite” colleges and universities, especially in New England, where conservative professors are indeed rare.

Yet people continue to draw generalizations from their own experiences, even though most people’s experience in many areas isn’t broad enough to be accurate, at the same time ignoring more representative statistical findings that conflict with their feelings and personal experience.

For years, Republicans have been crying and screaming about the need to fix the immigration problem.

And now that a bipartisan Senate initiative has been developed (in large part by a conservative Republican senator) that would tighten up the system significantly more than in twenty years, if not more, what’s the reaction of Congressional Republicans?

Waah, waah, waah…it’s not enough. We want it all our way or we won’t play.

The bipartisan immigration proposal is far from perfect, but it would definitely address some aspects of the immigration problem.

As I’ve said before, and as this reaction proves, Republicans, especially House Republicans, are the party of “no.” They’re not in the slightest interested in fixing problems. They’re totally invested in exploiting grievances. Whether those grievances are real or imagined, it makes no difference, because they have no interest in actually addressing the problems and no workable plans for solutions. They just want to create anger against the Democrats.

It’s so easy to propose “solutions” so extreme that half the population won’t and can’t accept them and then to say that the other side is uncooperative or that the other side created the problem. Proposing cutting social programs while pushing tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans doesn’t lead to cooperation, but polarization.

That, of course, isn’t surprising, because, at least for now, the Republicans and the far right seem to believe that polarization benefits them… and realistic political solutions don’t… as witness the reaction to the bipartisan immigration proposal.

I’ve mentioned recently the deluge of political emails I’ve gotten, but I haven’t dwelt on the underlying subject behind the vast majority – money.

They all want money, whatever I can give, in order to be elected or re-elected to stop the evils of their opponent or the other party.

One of my initial reactions is, why should I give you more money when all you seem to do with it is bad-mouth your opponent? [I realize there are a few candidates who don’t, but VERY few.]

The senders of these emails also all seem to think that people, individually and collectively, are a bottomless and endless source of funds, either for campaigns or for government. Or in Trump’s case, to pay his seemingly endless legal bills.

Once upon a time, I thought that the simplest campaign reform measure would be to allow unlimited contributions to specific candidates – but only from individuals whose names had to be public. But then, with the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, corporations effectively became persons, at least in the legal sense, in being allowed to contribute unlimited sums to entities not legally linked to political parties or candidates. On top of that, those “dark-money entities were also allowed to spend unlimited amounts in supporting or opposing specific candidates.

Then, too, recent events have convinced me that people only care about who spends inordinately on electioneering when it’s someone supporting the other side.

So, as I read the FEC rules, while an individual is limited to contributing $3,300 to a candidate for a primary election and another $3,300 for the general election, corporations can and do pour far more into “independent” political action committees and those committees can spend unlimited amounts in political ads or activities benefiting or opposing candidates for office.

In the 2022 election, United States House and Senate candidates running in the 2022 election cycle reported raising a total of $3.1 billion and spending $3.7 billion between January 1, 2021, and September 30, 2022. That averages $4 million per seat – for a job that pays $174,000 annually.

But what I want to know is with all that money floating around, why is every candidate claiming they don’t have enough funding?

The other day, I read a comment about my portrayal of women in a Recluce book, which said that my political leanings resulted in an unrealistic view of women in a lower tech society. This isn’t anything particularly new, although such comments are not common.

I definitely understand that sources of power, particularly physical power, affect societal relationships, but there’s also another, often overlooked, factor. For at least the last few hundred years, particularly in western cultures, there’s been a misrepresentation of what women actually did and accomplished on our planet in earlier societies and cultures.

Far more women were battlefield warriors than are mentioned in either historical tomes or most historical fiction. The remains of more and more earlier societies are showing that women were anything but “fireside sitters” and cave homemakers. The Mongols used quite a number of mounted women archers, and the female elders managed the logistics of one of the most effective fighting forces in history, and from fairly close to the fighting. Scythian tombs containing remains of warriors, once thought to be men, have been determined to be women. The same has also been found in Celtic and other tombs. In the early years of Islam, there were women scholars and rulers. In the early United States, Benjamin Franklin’s wife Deborah, ran and controlled all of his enterprises in Philadelphia for most of a period of twenty years, and who ran all those plantations and farms during the revolutionary and civil wars?

I’m not saying that the “traditional” gender representation was “wrong” so much as it was woefully incomplete and created an inaccurate portrayal of societal structures and gender roles in many instances. There have always been women who didn’t fit the stereotypes largely created by men; it’s just that the mostly male historians and politicians overlooked or actively tried to erase the records of their accomplishments.

In addition to that, while accomplishments in any society are indeed affected and shaped by power, in fantasy worlds, the scope and use of magic should also affect roles and power, just as technology is reshaping gender and sexual roles today. At the same time, while brute force can impose gender-based roles on a society, history shows that such imposition usually handicaps that society.

So, in commenting on any fictional view of a society’s structure and gender roles, it’s more accurate to look at real history and/or the way the author has structured the basics of his/her world, rather than relying on inaccurate and fact-outdated stereotypes or beliefs.

Yesterday, the House Homeland Security Committee approved, along party lines, two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. A floor vote is likely within the next week or so.

Republicans charge Mayorkas didn’t uphold immigration laws, exceeded his authority, risked public safety, made false statements to Congress, obstructed congressional oversight and impeded construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Many, if not all, of the charges are likely overstatements of the situation, if not false.

From what I see, Mayorkas – and anyone in his position – is in an impossible situation. The U.S. currently doesn’t even have a legally consistent and unified position on immigration. Neither party has an actual policy that could be legally implemented at present, nor does Homeland Security have the resources to find, stop, process, or reject the vast number of illegal immigrants.

The Republicans are right in demanding a workable and effective immigration policy, but impeaching Mayorkas won’t do anything to improve the immigration mess, because the proceedings are effectively admitting that Congress has failed for decades, under both parties, to deal with the problem, and making Mayorkas a scapegoat for long-standing Congressional failure won’t do anything constructive.

A Senate coalition is making an effort at a comprehensive bill to at least start in dealing with the problem and what do the House Republicans do? Try to impeach a bureaucrat who’s saddled with inadequate resources to deal with the overwhelming number of illegal and legal immigrants, conflicting laws, and a Congress that doesn’t really want to make hard choices.

That’s political posturing, not leadership.

I have a long history of political involvement. My father was an attorney and a local city councilman, as well as acting mayor for a time. My mother worked in local politics. Both were Republicans, although in the 1990s, my mother left the Republican party because of its growing misogyny.

My college degree was in political economy, and after my time as a Navy search and rescue pilot during the Vietnam War, I went into the business sector, first as an industrial economist and then as a real estate salesman. At the same time, I got involved in grassroots politics, as a Republican precinct committeeman [about the time I sold my first story]. That led to working as a paid research director on a successful Republican congressional campaign, after which the congressman hired me as his Washington, D.C., legislative assistant. When he became a senator, I was hired by his successor as his staff director. When the Reagan Administration took over, I became the head of Legislation and Congressional Affairs at the U.S. EPA. After three years there, I moved back into the private sector as a senior manager at a Washington, D.C., consulting firm for another seven years.

Stress and associated health issues prompted me to leave D.C. and the high pressure, but I continued political and regulatory consulting for another three years, until my writing finally provided enough income. But I continued to follow and comment on government and politics.

And after fifty years of political involvement, I can honestly say that I have never seen as great a disdain for the facts as is now evidenced by almost the entire Republican Party. While U.S. political parties have never been known for their strict adherence to the facts, in the last century, with the blatant exception of the McCarthy years and until the last ten years, they tended to limit their excesses to selective omission, modest misrepresentation, implied connections to problems, non-verbal visual allusion, and the like. There were always some outliers, but they were the definite minority.

From what I can see and read, the Democrats have intensified the old tactics, but there’s still a certain accuracy there, if not so much as there used to be.

As for the Republicans, and especially the far right and the Trumpists, accuracy and truth have largely ceased to exist. There was no insurrection, just a peaceful demonstration. Trump didn’t do anything wrong; the Democrats and the left invented it all (despite court convictions that are likely to increase). Hillary was behind a porn/sex ring in the basement of a pizza parlor (except the pizza place didn’t have a basement). Democrats will confiscate every gun in America (except that the Supreme Court has effectively ruled that they can’t).

The list of blatant lies is endless… and Republicans could care less. They’re so invested in their anger and their grievances that they’ll not only shred the truth, but the entire country, and democracy with it.