Every human civilization has some amount of corruption. Corruption exists because humanity always has a proportion of people who are less able and less honest and who want to be paid or make money regardless of the cost to others, or who promise more than they deliver.

There’s also the very real problem of defining corruption.

Unfortunately, defining corruption is a bit like defining pornography. Everyone knows what it is, and everyone can recognize it (if in their own terms), but few can agree on a concrete definition.

A simplistic way of defining corruption might be: any activity that biases the outcome of any economic transaction or activity to grant an advantage to a party on the basis of factors other than price, cost, availability, and quality or (2) any legal or regulatory determination arrived other than through equal application of the law and standards of the land.

Corruption can negatively impact the economy directly, through, for example, tax evasion and money laundering, as well as indirectly by distorting fair competition and fair markets, and thus increasing the cost of doing business.

Studies have shown that, in general, countries where free markets and economic opportunities prevail tend to have less corruption, but the problem with totally free markets is that monopolies tend to proliferate, working conditions are poor, and economic inequalities grow. To mitigate those problems, societies such as the United States and European democracies regulate a fair amount of their economic activity in order to ensure that foods and medicines are safe, that dangerous working practices are outlawed, that industrial pollution is reduced or eliminated, that consumer products are not dangerous to the user when employed properly… and so forth.

Such regulations raise the cost of doing business, and businesses have always tended to oppose them, find ways around them, or ignore those regulations. That means that regulatory bodies not only have to spend funds to assure enforcement but also have to devote resources to explain and defend what they do as well as guard against bureaucratic and legislative attempts to dilute the effectiveness of laws and regulations. Such attempts could often be classed as another form of corruption in that they’re designed to reduce costs by foisting diseconomies on customers and society under the guise of lowering costs to the producer of goods or services.

As a consequence, government organizations tasked with protecting the public have a tendency to grow as economic entities attempt to evade or challenge regulations. In addition, each advance in technology also creates downsides that, if not controlled and regulated, can have massive negative impacts on health and the environment.

Unhappily, the situation isn’t any better in non-free market or authoritarian societies, because protecting the health and safety of the population is at best a secondary goal and because economies that are less market-driven are even more susceptible to corruption. First, in such regimes, loyalty is more important than competence. Second, because conformity, obedience, and loyalty are more important than profit, most economic entities are less efficient than in market-driven economies, and ability by outsiders is at the least minimized. Third, innovation tends to be stifled in most large organizations and overlooked or squashed in smaller ones. Fourth, the more prevalent the practice of bribery, the more likely that resources will be directed to less efficient uses, including to padding the incomes of middlemen/women.

So… societies effectively have a choice, either pay excessively to enforce standards and reduce corruption or fail to address standards and allow corruption, with the result that everyone pays excessively in terms of less efficiency throughout the society and in terms of far greater income inequality.

You’re going to pay. The only question is whether you want more government or more corruption.

As indictment after indictment of former President Trump occurs and more appear likely, a considerable number of Republican office-holders (and at least one of their attorneys), including a number of those seeking the nomination for President, are commenting on the indictments by saying that there’s “no evidence” that Trump is guilty.

No evidence? Really?

Now, it’s clear from history that people charged with crimes, sometimes even when the evidence seems overwhelming, are sometimes found innocent, but the idea that there’s no evidence in Trump’s case is absurd. The January 6th attack on the Capitol was widely televised. So was the recording of Trump asking Georgia officials to “find” him more votes. So were Trump’s statements conveying the idea that he wanted Mike Pence to illegally overturn the election So were the pictures of boxes and boxes of documents stored all over Mar-a-Lago. Not to mention the indictment of false electors in Michigan. The Trump Corporation and the Trump Payroll Corporation were convicted 17of felonies, including tax fraud and falsifying business records, over fifteen years.

Whether these instances and others constitute sufficient evidence to convict Trump is up to the courts and the juries, but there’s definitely evidence everywhere.

So why are these particular Republicans saying that there’s no evidence, I mean, besides the fact that they’re opportunistic cowards who don’t want to anger Trump?

Possibly because that allows them to avoid saying that Trump is innocent of wrong-doing, and avoids their having to take a position? Or, if Trump is convicted, possibly leaves them with the chance to say that the prosecutor was hiding evidence, and thus shift “blame” to the prosecutor? The latter is a good possibility because the Trumpists have been attacking DOJ and state prosecutors from the beginning. And, of course, since the die-hard Trumpists will believe anything that Saint Donald says, this will become another Trumpist mantra woven into the vast tapestry of lies.

But still… no evidence?

Now that the federal courts have indicated that an indictment of the former president for attempting to overturn the results of the last presidential election is likely, Republican officer-holders, among them several individuals seeking the nomination, have intensified their attacks on the Department of Justice, primarily by claiming that DOJ has weaponized the law to unfairly target Trump and by pushing the idea of “returning” to a system of justice that applies equally, regardless of party.

What’s not in question is that the mob attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6th forced its way into the Capitol and attacked Capitol police and others in an effort to overturn the election. What’s also not in question is that Trump incited the riot and attack.

Scores of those in the mob have been prosecuted and convicted. Not prosecuting Trump for inciting the mob and for other actions to illegally overturn the election would not be a return to equal justice, but a return to the dual standard of law that has tacitly been practiced for at least a century, where those with wealth and power tend get off far more easily than those who are poor and disadvantaged.

As for the Hunter Biden case, most tax evaders who pay the back taxes are let off and serve no time in prison – and the firearms charge is almost never invoked if there wasn’t a crime of violence involved. DOJ prosecuted Hunter Biden far more vigorously than has been the custom or fact in the past, and yet the Republicans claim that his sentences weren’t sufficient.

So the Republican charges of “weaponization” really amount to a statement that they don’t want the rich white man who tried to overturn the government to be prosecuted, possibly because he’s their guy and they fear him, and that they want a return to the way of enforcing the law that’s easier on those who are rich and white and harder on everyone else.

So Hunter Biden and the rioters who followed Trump’s inciting all get punished under law, but the Republicans want Trump off scot-free?

Besides being blatant hypocrisy, that’s hardly equal justice by any definition.

The Associated Press has just published a poll showing that while 71% of Democrats believe the next election will be counted fairly, only 22% of Republicans believe it will be.

Cynic that I am, I personally believe part of the Republican view represented is that no election in which they do not prevail is fair, regardless of what an accurate count reflects.

But the majority of Republicans believe what they do primarily as a result of two factors, the lying persistence of Donald Trump and the combination of cowardice and profit seeking at any cost on the part of the media.

Trump is totally devoid of ethics and also understands clearly that most people want to hear what they believe, regardless of any facts that conflict with those beliefs, and the more often they hear what they wish to believe, the more that false belief is reinforced.

This is true of both Republicans and Democrats, but the Democrats lack a messianic prophet, while the Republicans have Donald Trump continually playing on their fears and trumpeting the falsehoods so many Republicans want to hear.

In their pursuit of profit, the media repeat and replay all of Trump’s falsehoods, rather than essentially cutting him off and saying, “At the rally, Trump repeated his proven falsehoods.” By giving coverage to those falsehoods, even while pointing out their falsity, the media keeps Trump’s campaign and presence in the forefront on the media news shows and on the front pages of the various tabloids.

The media also does this with crime and mass shootings, but since the shooters are always different, the effect of repetition doesn’t keep an individual in the media spotlight, but creates an underlying feeling of doom, which, in turn, indirectly supports Trump and his falsehoods.

Perhaps not the “perfect storm” of negativity, but definitely an unholy alliance.

The other day my wife discovered that she couldn’t get her yearly eye check-up until September, because her ophthalmologist was booked up that far in advance. Dental appointments need to be scheduled a month in advance, except for emergencies. So do yearly health check-ups. The time-lag for all of these health-related matters has been creeping up year by year.

The reason is simple. While few are talking about it, the population of the United States is growing faster than the number of physicians. Some of this has been disguised/alleviated by nurse practitioners and physician assistants providing some services, but there are more and more areas of the country without physicians, with more than 80 million people in the US living in areas in which access to a primary care physician is scarce or non-existent.

In many fields, higher pay creates more incentives for people to get the training and experience, but in medicine in the U.S., the number of doctors is limited by the number of medical schools and the number of openings for residency positions available. Currently, almost 1,000 medical school graduates every year cannot obtain a residency position, and those numbers are growing. Without successful completion of residency, those medical school graduates cannot be certified to practice medicine.

Residency programs are expensive to operate, and most hospitals rely on federal support, but the number of federally supported positions has been fixed at the current level for several years, which isn’t adequate to provide training for all the M.D./D.O. graduates, particularly since 35% of all current physicians will reach retirement age over the next five years. At the same time, because of the increased work-load, including more and more paperwork, doctor “burn-out” is increasing, and more doctors are retiring earlier and/or cutting back on working hours.

The most obvious result of the high cost of medical school and the shortage of residency positions is that inner city and rural areas are the most impacted. That impact is reflected in the fact that while the U.S. spends more than twice as much on health care per capita as do other high-tech societies, that spending is disproportionately targeted to advanced medical systems and technologies. For all that technology, the U.S. has the highest number of hospitalizations from preventable causes, the highest rate of avoidable deaths, and the lowest life expectancy among the 11 OECD nations… and one of the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality of all developed nations.

Studies from all over the world show that the availability of doctors makes more of a difference in the health of most people than a plethora of high-tech medical technology that primarily benefits the well-off or fortunate, and, not surprisingly, the U.S. also has fewer physician visits per capita than in most other developed countries.

And unless matters change, the situation is going to get worse.

Almost 70% of U.S. households have pets, representing more than a twenty percent increase over the past 25 years. The vast majority of these pets are dogs and cats, but there isn’t a great deal of research on why Americans have become more likely to have pets.

There are studies that show that people who have a pet, especially a dog or cat, are in generally better physical and mental health as they age, as well as surveys revealing that more U.S. households have pets than children. In addition, the market for pet-oriented products and services has grown by 450% over the past 25 years.

But nowhere could I find any studies on why more households have pets. I did find a poll by Morning Consult that reported that pet owners felt their pets helped reduce stress and anxiety, provided unconditional love and support, offered companionship, and provided a calming presence.

Some 75 years ago, President Harry Truman made the observation that, “If you want a friend in Washington, D.C., get a dog.” Having spent almost 20 years in that politico-economic climate, I’d agree.

Every morning, our two dachshunds are glad to see me, and the same is true any time I leave them and then return, even if it’s only fifteen minutes. That kind of spontaneous joy almost never occurs in academia, law, business, or politics and happens but infrequently in the dogless household.

As Americans become more personally and socially isolated [and texting doesn’t reduce isolation] as well as politically polarized, the non-judgmental warmth and welcome of a dog becomes more and more attractive in a world that’s becoming colder, more impersonal, and more demanding. Even our cat is far warmer than most people I had to deal with in politics or that my wife has to deal with in academia.

But that’s just my observation, not a peer-reviewed, statistically grounded psychological treatise, although I’m sure our dachshunds would agree. The cat would likely refuse to take sides, but he’d still settle in beside me while I’m reading.

In some ways, especially after the last few months, I can understand the growing anger in the United States, especially at incompetence.

I don’t like mowing the lawn, and after years of doing it, I hired a lawn service. For years, everything was fine, but the past year has been a bit of a trial, both for me and for the owner of the firm, who’s had to fire people because of their carelessness and their sloppy performance, and in my case, for repeatedly ripping out sprinkler heads, which caused additional damage, and failing to mow parts of the lawn – despite the fact that they’re well paid.

For years, I’ve subscribed to a local/regional newspaper. It used to arrive in my driveway between 6:30 and 7:00 A.M. Now, and for the past few months, it arrives between 7:00 A.M. and 11:00 A.M. or so, and almost one day a week it doesn’t arrive at all but comes along with the next day’s paper a day after it was due – and the subscription price has tripled in the last two years.

Then, there’s the local tree surgeon/trimmer, who turns down work, if he doesn’t like people, or doesn’t feel like it, and the alternative is an outfit that costs more and whose work is problematic to say the least.

I’ve already mentioned the incompetence of the Tovala food service outfit, but I’ve also run into it in the professional area. As some readers may know, the protagonists of The Grand Illusion are not whitebread, but have skin tones in the range of dark honey, and the books take place in a very urban environment – yet one of the covers I got for an audio version showed two very white Caucasians in the middle of a forest (where they’ve never been in all three books) with the equivalent of laser knives (when Steffan and Avraal rely on old-fashioned throwing knives in a society that has no electricity). This was hardly an example of competence, especially when it took three tries to get the cover remotely close to the “reality” of the book.

For professional reasons, I won’t go into the more egregious examples in the publishing field, but I will mention, without more details, the senior editor of an extremely best-selling author who failed to edit the manuscripts and books of other assigned authors for over a year before he was let go. I will note that, in the publishing industry, the terminology is almost always that so-and-so left to pursue other interests. Fortunately, my editor is far more responsible and diligent.

It’s also not just me. My wife ordered a fog machine for one of her spring opera productions – and received an elaborate dog bed. She checked the order and the invoice to make sure it wasn’t her error. They both specified a fog machine and had the right number. The Music Department is now looking for a new secretary/administrative assistant. The previous one left because, among other reasons, she wanted to do a face-to-face job remotely and had the habit of being unavailable, even online.

Our son has had to fire sales associates because they’re unreliable and don’t want to do the grunt-work (like restocking the shelves and storage areas) of the high-end men’s stores he’s in charge of and where they worked.

I’ve never seen anything like the amount of these examples, all within the last few months, nor in these numbers, in more than fifty years, and yet, as we all know, prices have also increased. So who says that incompetence doesn’t pay?

The simple answer is: Because too many people are greedy, careless, self-centered, and stupid.

Virtually every government function is there to protect people from themselves, because while James Madison said, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” men and women are far from being angels.

We have a large bureaucracy devoted to regulating and policing the food industry because too many food producers were producing contaminated, spoiled or tainted food, or food with unhealthy or poisonous additives, or using preservatives that essentially poisoned consumers, largely because it was cheaper, and that increased their profits.

We have safety standards for vehicles for similar reasons. We have air pollution regulations because industrial fumes and exhaust once made the air so toxic it killed people, and water pollution regulations because rivers were once sewers that could also catch fire. We have drug regulations so that pharmacists don’t poison people. We have building standards and inspectors so that houses and buildings don’t collapse, as thousands of structures did in Turkey in the recent earthquake, apparently partly because corrupt inspectors were bought off to allow buildings to be constructed that didn’t meet the building standards.

The list of regulatory agencies seems endless, but that’s because every advance in technology also advances the possibilities for the greedy and the unscrupulous to prey on those without the knowledge or means to protect themselves. And because there are so many unprincipled individuals, those regulatory agencies also have to devote resources to assure that they’re not being corrupted as well.

Extensive government isn’t as necessary in lower-tech, low population density societies, where a failure of a building or a bridge harms only a few people. But in our society today, failure of a single bridge can kill hundreds, and damage an entire region economically.

Another reason for regulation is to make sure that cost-cutting doesn’t jeopardize safety.

An aircraft design with flaws, such as the 737-Max, can kill hundreds. Boeing presented the 737-Max to the FAA as a slightly updated version of the 737, rather than one with considerable modifications, in order to reduce the regulatory costs and possible delays.

A design flaw in a mass-produced automobile, such as Ford Pinto, which led to hundreds of deaths, could have been minimized or eliminated by the installation of a plastic buffer pad that cost all of one dollar. The buffer, which Ford tested, was rejected for cost reasons, saving Ford about $4 million over the production years before the gas tank problem was fixed.

So… if you want smaller government, you have two options – accept a far more risky and likely shorter life or find a way to make your fellow humans more responsible and less greedy, careless, and self-centered.

Personally, I’m not fond of the first option, and I find the second a practical impossibility, which leaves me with reluctant acceptance of large government.

The 2023 WGA strike is the labor dispute between the Writers Guild of America — representing 11,500 screenwriters — and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. It began at 12:01 a.m. PDT on May 2, 2023. Primarily, the strike is over pay and working conditions. The industry wants to cut down on costs by having smaller writers’ rooms (mini-rooms) or doing without them altogether and relying more on “gig” writers. This isn’t setting well with writers, given that writers only receive about 2% of the total revenues generated out of their work.

While it doesn’t affect me directly and personally, I certainly understand the struggle, because it’s symptomatic of more than just broadcast and cinema media, representing as it does the struggle between “creators” and “packagers.” This dichotomy doesn’t just exist in entertainment; it’s just more obvious there.

There have also been recent incidents in the “book” side of the F&SF industry, where it came out that Disney was refusing to pay royalties to authors whose books had been made into movies. I don’t have that particular problem, since none of my books have ever been turned into movies or television series, but some authors have, and the Disney incident is indicative of just how little corporate CEOs value the ideas and craft behind what they market.

At the same time, I suspect very few F&SF fiction writers make the kind of money that run-of-the mill screenwriters make, but then, we usually don’t have to operate under the deadlines that they do.

Authors published traditionally share certain concerns with the WGA writers, such as how the publishers (i.e., packagers) present their work. Indie authors who publish their own books have greater control over their presentation – but also take on a great deal more work.

I have mixed feelings about the WGA strike, except that I definitely share the strikers’ concerns that the industry “packagers” are minimizing the strikers’ contribution to the final productions, not that it’s anything new.

Many long years ago, when my children were much younger than my grandchildren currently are, they watched the original version of Sesame Street. Among other jingles I recall was one presenting four items to a song entitled “One of These Things” (Is Not Like the Others). The idea was for the youngsters watching to pick out the item that was different.

When the latest predictable Republican flail came up, this time about Hunter Biden, I wondered if any of those Republicans had watched Sesame Street. Probably not, because it was likely too liberal for their parents. But they should have because the vast majority of Republicans in Congress seem unable to make any sort of meaningful distinctions about anything.

They don’t see the difference between dangerous immigrants and those willing to work hard and obey the laws of the land. They don’t see the difference between involuntarily or unwittingly retaining a few classified documents and returning them as soon as they found out and deliberately taking and hiding hundreds, if not thousands of classified documents, and then justifying it by legal falsehoods. They don’t see the difference between paying taxes late in one or two years and bilking the government with falsified records for decades. They don’t see the difference between limited shading the truth and making over thirty-thousand false or misleading statements over an entire term.

They not only don’t see the difference, but they’re trying to prosecute Democrats for minor failings while blatantly ignoring massive disregard of the laws and longstanding U.S. traditions (like the peaceful transfer of power).

But if they reject the concept of knowing the difference as expressed on Sesame Street, because it’s too “liberal,” what about the concept as expressed in their favorite book – the Bible? The one that says:

“Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

Nope… they even don’t follow their own holy book… except when it serves to oppress others in some fashion.

Most people seem to like the combination of the internet and electronic communication, but what happens if that’s all you’ve got, and something goes wrong? And you can’t get a real person to even address the problem, no matter what you try?

Think that’s an unfounded worry? A skeptic’s dystopia that can’t happen?

Let me tell you about our struggle with a meal delivery service called Tovala, that delivers meals for quick preparation with a computerized oven/broiler. Weekly, you select what you want from the menu and the meals are delivered the following week.

Some six months ago, we signed up for a food delivery system from Tovala. While there were a few meals we didn’t care for, the system worked reasonably well, and it definitely cut down on meal preparation time.

But the warning signs were there early. In March, my wife asked the electronic system to skip a week. That was an option on the ordering schedule. The system took the instructions, but we still got and were billed for the delivery of another week’s worth of food.

When the university semester ended, and we had more time, we paused meal deliveries for the summer, an option available on the online ordering system. But the following Wednesday, we got another order. We persisted, sending an email to Tovala, asking to stop meal delivery service. But the next Wednesday, we got another delivery, for which we were billed, even though the Tovala system indicated that our orders had been suspended indefinitely.

I tried to call the company, but could only find one telephone number, which had a recording telling me to use the on-line service or email Tovala. We lodged a complaint by email and got a response saying that deliveries had been suspended. We emailed the customer service section of the credit card company asking that charges from Tovala not be honored, but there was no response to that.

We thought the problem had been resolved when, the next week, there was no delivery from Tovala. Except the following week, there was another delivery, for which we were billed. So, we finally got a real person on the line, but only from the credit card company – who informed us that there was no record of our request to stop payment to Tovala, but who promised to look into the matter.

That didn’t work, either, and the next week we got yet another shipment.

After another hour of internet searching, my wife finally found a number that connected to a real person. That real person insisted that the order hadn’t been cancelled. My wife persisted. The real person actually searched and discovered that, for some reason, my wife had two accounts, and that they’d cancelled the inactive one. My wife definitely never signed up for two accounts, and we never received two orders. In any event, the real person promised that both would be cancelled.

Finally, this week, we didn’t receive a shipment of food we didn’t want and hadn’t ordered. I’m still a bit worried that, despite it all, we might get a shipment next week.

But my question is: How many people are going to be overcharged, hurt, or worse by electronic/AI systems with no way to get to someone who can actually address the problems? We’ve spent hours dealing with this problem so that a company can save a little money, and it’s cost us not only time, but dollars for meals we weren’t around to eat, not to mention the waste of food.

So far as I can see, these systems are too often one way — cost saving for the company and endless hassles for the customer.

Yes, I know. There’s no such word as simplisticity, but there should be, because it’s a perfect word to describe false and simplistic comparisons between events or facts.

The GOP and the right have an amazing tendency to rely on simplisticity. Equating Trump’s deliberate and massive heist of classified documents to a handful of classified documents inadvertently kept by Pence and Biden or to conversational email references to classified subjects by Hillary Clinton is definitely simplisticity.

So is equating the January 6th armed uprising to peaceful protests.

Or equating Trump’s thirty thousand plus documented misstatements and lies to literally any other U.S. national political figure. Well… except for George Santos. Yet I’ve heard Republican after Republican dismiss Trump’s lies with the statement, “All politicians lie.” They may, but nowhere to the extent that Trump has and continues to lie.

Another area where simplisticity reigns is in arguments over taxes and tax policy. Those on the right cite statistics generally based on “taxable income” and percentage of taxes paid, or occasionally on proportion of taxable income generated by the wealthy and the percent of that income that’s taxed federally. The problem with that simplistic approach is that the majority of income held by the wealthiest Americans isn’t taxed or taxable under current tax codes. Likewise, because poorer families pay a greater percentage of their income in state, local, and Social Security taxes, comparing the percentage of income taxed based on federal income taxes misrepresents their tax burden.

Simplisticity isn’t new. I can recall from my childhood people saying that blacks were stupid or ignorant because they bought expensive cars and lived in run-down neighborhoods. At the time, I was young and didn’t realize that in some cities and areas, that was because of various restrictions, such as redlining, that made it impossible for them to own or rent houses in more upscale neighborhoods.

So, when you have a simple and popular view about something, it might be a good idea to ask whether it’s actually accurate… or just comforting simplisticity.

Year 92 From the Forest (January 2024)

Year 101 Overcaptain (November 2024)

Year 103 Sub-Majer’s Challenge ( September (?) 2025)

Year 104 The Last of the First (2026 (?)

Year 410 Magi’i of Cyador

Year 418 Scion of Cyador

Year 801 Fall of Angels

Year 803 The Chaos Balance

Year 815 Arms-Commander

Year 825 Cyador’s Heirs

Year 833 Heritage of Cyador

Year 1075 The Mongrel Mage

Year 1076 Outcasts of Order

Year 1077 The Mage-Fire War

Year 1093 Fairhaven Rising

Year 1300 The Towers of the Sunset

Year 1590 The White Order

Year 1600 The Magic Engineer

Year 1605 Colors of Chaos

Year 1900 Natural Ordermage

Year 1903 Mage-Guard of Hamor

Year 2050 The Order War

Year 2110 Wellspring of Chaos

Year 2112 Ordermaster

Year 2250 The Magic of Recluce

Year 2255 The Death of Chaos

The years date from the founding of Cyad.

The Republicans are absolutely right that the United States can’t keep up deficit spending running over seven percent per year, not without creating long-term inflation and a national debt whose interest could soon reach forty percent of annual federal government spending. But they’re wrong in how they want to deal with the problem. At a time when we have multi-millionaires and multi-billion-dollar corporations who pay little or no taxes and whose businesses are essentially partly subsidized by federal government income and healthcare supports, the Republicans want to cut funds for the poorest of Americans while cutting taxes on the richest and passing tax credits for them as well.

The Democrats, on the other hand, want to keep increasing spending on existing social programs without being able to come up with a politically viable way to support those programs without increasing the deficit.

The so-called compromise bought us some time, but not much else. The plain fact remains that, under the current political stalemate, only corporations and the well-off really benefit. They keep their lower taxes and tax credits, and one way or another, everyone else pays.

One of my neighbors recently retired, not because he wanted to, but because, after forty years or more of working with heavy machinery his knees and shoulders gave out. Even with two replacement knees he couldn’t do the job he once did, and he couldn’t wait to get the maximum social security benefits. While he was more prudent than many, the fact remains that too many workers can’t physically work long enough to get even reduced social security benefits. Yet these are people who get hurt most by Republican policies, and one of the great ironies is that a disproportionate number are Republicans who don’t even seem to see that.

But until those who are hurt the most and don’t realize it finally understand, nothing will change.

I live in Utah, and I’d never exactly thought of the state as an expensive place to live, but changes creep up on you. When we moved to Cedar City, not quite thirty years ago, the cost of living was statistically about 94% of the national average. Today, depending on which index you use, we’re between 99% and 103% of the national average, and I suspect that those numbers are low. My property taxes, while not insignificant and low by the standards of some states, have doubled over the last eight years. The price of natural gas has tripled since last year.

But where Utah has really taken a hit is in the increase in housing prices. Depending on which figures or indices you look at, Utah is on average between the fourth and tenth most expensive state for housing, and housing prices have roughly doubled over the past fifteen years. Housing prices in Cedar City have more than doubled.

Four factors, I suspect, lie behind the rapid and substantial price increases. First, Utah has the highest birth rate in the nation, and has had for decades. Second, immigrants are pouring into the state, especially into Cedar City, which has one of the fastest growth rates in the nation, and the majority of those immigrants, at least here in town, are from California. Third, the local university has expanded from 3,500 students to over 15,000. And fourth, despite new housing developments everywhere, the amount of new housing hasn’t matched the demand.

There’s another factor, as well – that too many of the developers and builders are concentrating on higher-end housing, and that’s reflected in the fact that Cedar City now has a small but growing number of homeless people, while high-priced houses up for re-sale take a long time to sell, because the majority of newcomers insist on building new houses, most likely with the gains from selling houses in California and elsewhere.

But then, what’s happening here is also occurring in far too many other areas as well.

Over the last week in this part of Utah, there have been at least five serious accidents reported (and there may have been more that didn’t appear in the local media) caused by someone running a red light, with an impact on not only two vehicles, but others as well. This past week, there was “only” one fatality, but there easily could have been more.

In the same period, I’ve also seen, while driving, three other instances where someone either ran a red light or entered the intersection as the light turned red… and what I’ve seen has to understate the frequency, because I doubt I average even a half hour a day driving. Fortunately, in those three cases, no accident ensued.

I’ve mentioned this in passing before, but such collisions are definitely becoming more frequent, and not just in Utah, I suspect.

Anger may well be one of the causes behind some of these accidents or near accidents, given that we’re also seeing more and more incidents of road rage.

And arrogance is definitely a factor, the idea that the driver is more important than anyone else, which was certainly the case in one accident here in Cedar City, where the driver was driving on an expired and revoked license.

But the largest factor, I’m convinced, is that too many people are trying to do too many things too quickly and aren’t paying enough attention to the road. Multitasking is often an excellent way to screw up all those activities/chores/etc., that you’re trying to do at the same time, and it’s especially dangerous when driving… and even more dangerous when the driver is late and trying to catch up.

All of which beg the question – why are so many people so angry, so arrogant, so hurried, and so distracted while driving at excessive speeds a vehicle that can instantly become a killing machine? And so blind or indifferent to how deadly their vehicle can be?

It’s almost as if they’re saying, “A red light, that doesn’t really mean anything.”

What is the real defining split between conservatives and liberals? According to a recent article in Scientific American, research from the University of Pennsylvania indicates the fundamental difference is that “Conservatives tend to believe that strict divisions are an inherent part of life. Liberals do not.”

So… in practice this means that conservatives tend to be hierarchal absolutists, seeing all the elements of life as either black or white, and dividing elements of life into ranked categories with absolute bounds, while liberals are more likely to see things in shades of gray and to minimize categorical differences.

That’s why conservatives see gender as binary, despite the fact that every year babies are born with indeterminate sexual organs. And there’s been a fight over this as well, with the liberal side saying that one in a thousand children are born intersex, while the conservatives cite figures a hundred times smaller. But the plain fact is that there is a spectrum between genders, regardless of the numbers, and this spectrum has been found in 65,000 different species of animals as well.

The problem created by the conservatives is that they want to impose absolute rigidity, which is a form of despotism, because people are different, and in the United States there are definite sub-cultures, even within the smallest of least populated states, so that excessively rigid rules and laws are too restrictive and actually generate conflict.

On the other side, liberals too often fail to recognize that a working society simply can’t physically have and maintain the scope of laws and regulations to suit everyone perfectly, and there do have to be some limits.

When I was a young man, too many years ago, mass shootings were almost unknown, and never occurred at schools. Crude and lewd language was largely kept to back alleys or behind closed doors. Politicians – with a very few exceptions – shaded the truth rather than obliterated it.

Statistics show that crime spiked in the 1970-90 period and most crime rates, including murder, are at the same level as in 1950, although total numbers are up because the U.S. population has almost doubled since then.

The biggest differences I see involve the loss of societal and social limits on personal behavior. From what I can tell, most towns or cities over 50,000 people have problems with homeless people invading public spaces and even private commercial spaces, to the point that, in a growing number of cities, business owners have to clean up human filth and debris every morning before opening. With the outcries about past inhumane treatment of the mentally ill, governments have effectively abdicated most responsibility for either adequate treatment or lodging of those individuals, while dumping the problems these individuals create on the rest of society, as well as imposing additional costs on local governments.

We’re also seeing more drivers ignoring speed limits and running red lights, a significant increase in retail shoplifting, as well as increasingly violent disruptions at public meetings, and a growing lack of civility at all levels of society, even in Congress where shouting and heckling the President – something once considered unthinkable – has become common. College students organize protests and harass and heckle speakers for having differing beliefs. Racist demonstrations have become common.

One of my grandchildren attends a public middle school. In her class is a young male who repeatedly disrupts the class, who has attacked classmates violently, and upon one occasion, assaulted another smaller and weaker withdrawn student who’s never said or done anything offensive, and it took three teachers to remove him. Despite suspensions, the behavior has continued for the entire year. The administration appears helpless, and the parents won’t do anything, except insist that their son remain in school – no matter what the cost is to the other students and to their learning. This is hardly an isolated instance, but it’s the result of a society that refuses to say, “Some behavior is unacceptable, no matter what your background or problems are.”

All of these are the result of a societal failure to enforce socially, rather than legally, a norm of acceptable behavior.

While societies need rules, without also an accepted code of social behavior, laws are insufficient to maintain order – unless you want an iron-fisted autocracy.

And if there’s a continued growth in the lack of self-restraint, the U.S. will end up either in anarchy or under a right-wing autocracy, because neither the left nor the right appears willing to call out bad behavior and incivility on the part of its own partisans, and the right is perfectly willing to legislate controls over those who disagree with their perception of the ideal society. And neither seems able or willing to reach a consensus on acceptable social and public behavior.

Donald Trump should be officially recognized as the Greatest Liar of All Time – the GLOAT to end all GLOATs.

After all, almost every sentence contains a lie or misrepresentation of some sort.

Back in 2017, Carole McGranahan in the American Ethnologist journal stated, “Donald Trump is different”…and the most “accomplished and effective liar” thus far to have ever participated in American politics.

But Trump went on from there. Fact-checkers from The Washington Post, the Toronto Star, and CNN compiled data on “false or misleading claims”, and “false claims”, respectively. The Post reported 30,573 false or misleading claims in four years, an average of more than 21 per day.

But Trump hasn’t slowed down. In his recent New Hampshire Town Hall, he reiterated all the old lies and added a few more. Although he was convicted of sexual battery and defamation in the recent E. Jean Carroll case, Trump claimed “I don’t know her. I never met her.” There’s one large problem with that. Four years ago, The New York Times published a picture of Carroll and Trump and their spouses conversing.

Trump claimed he built hundreds of miles of border walls and finished the job. He did neither. His administration repaired existing walls, but only added 47 miles of new walls.

He also declared that he “offered” 10,000 National Guard troops to stop the January 6th violence. Every single figure who had authority to request or authorize such troops, as well as extensive documentation, refuted that claim.

Another lie was the statement that the U.S. has provided $171 billion in aid to Ukraine and that we’ve sent so much that the U.S. is out of ammunition. The current aid total is $37 billion, and the U.S. certainly not out of ammunition.

And then, when Caitlin Collins had the courage to point out his untruths, Trump had the nerve to say, “You’re a nasty person.” Nasty for pointing out that he lied?

But then, what else can you expect from the GLOAT?

The United States is facing a debt ceiling crisis, and if the U.S. does begin to default on its fiscal obligations, the economic results will be far from pretty.

The Republicans have passed legislation in the House of Representatives that supposedly addresses the problem. In fact, it doesn’t, at least not in any way that won’t create even greater chaos than a default will, because the spending cuts required by that bill would amount to an average cut of 22% in virtually all non-defense government programs.

No responsible Administration can willingly accept such cuts, which would fall on the poorest of Americans and would also affect infrastructure and environmental programs, agriculture, air travel, and health and safety programs in a number of areas.

So why did the Republicans make such a proposal?

Some would say that it’s to force those “free-spending Democrats” back to financial sanity, or at least to negotiate for less federal spending.

I’m not so sure about that. The Republicans were perfectly happy to raise the debt ceiling in a Trump administration when the national debt was significantly increased by the Trump tax cuts, most of which went to the wealthy.

Could it… might it… just possibly be to break the economy temporarily because that’s the only way a Republican candidate could win the presidency?

If the Biden Administration agrees to any significant cuts in non-defense programs, in order to avoid a default, there will be significant negative economic impacts. If it doesn’t agree to heavy cuts, and the Republicans hold fast, there will be a default and negative economic impacts.

Either way, the economy tanks, and Biden gets blamed.

Pure brutal genius, and the poor dumb American public will dump the entire blame on Biden, and that poor dumb American public will get what it deserves. Unfortunately, so will those of us who saw the possibility coming.