When I first discovered and was almost immediately fascinated by history, especially ancient history, history book after history book postulated that the pyramids had to have been built by slave labor. More recent archeological discoveries have revealed that they were built by paid and comparatively well-fed skilled workers.

Likewise, in the 1950s and early 1960s, virtually all books about post-colonial western hemisphere grossly underestimated the pre-colonial population, especially that of North America, and presented the United States and Canada as sparsely populated by benighted and uncivilized “Indians.” Many history books of that period even reiterated the myth that a significant percentage of the European population believed that the earth was flat. Both sets of assertions have proved to be untrue.

During the Middle Ages and even after the Renaissance, much of Europe idolized and idealized the “great” civilization of the Roman Empire, but the majority of technology underlying the Roman Empire came from foreign, primarily Greek, sources. With the possible exception of concrete, the Romans didn’t excel at technological ideas, but at the wide-scale implementation of existing technology, often by slaves. In fact, at the time of Caesar, between twenty and thirty percent of the population of Italy consisted of slaves, something that is still seldom mentioned in references to the Roman Empire.

Despite the fact that the American South rebelled and tried to leave the Union in order to preserve slavery and effectively retain white supremacy, for almost a century after the Civil War, the social and political aristocracy of the south struggled to rewrite history, through literature, politics, and lots of statues and monuments, under the guise of states’ rights and to portray the soldiers and generals of the south as noble figures, rather than traitors and pawns of the old order.

Unfortunately, not all inaccurate writing or rewriting of history lies in the past. For whatever reason, these days no one seems comfortable pointing out that virtually all black slaves sold to southern American planters were originally enslaved by other blacks, and that the practice continues, if on a much, much smaller scale, even today in Africa. While that doesn’t excuse in the slightest the whites who bought blacks to enrich their coffers, not all the blame for the ills of slavery can or should be laid exclusively on whites.

Likewise, the current push by ultraconservatives to return to the idealized and conveniently “sterilized” time of free-enterprise ignores the wide-spread ills of early free-enterprise, from ten to twelve hour days six days a week, wide-spread child labor, unsafe working conditions, contaminated food, and more, all of which are overlooked.

Also, despite widescale revelations over the past two decades, most Americans still have no idea how much the American business community influenced American intervention and military pressure around the world and especially in Central and South America and how much of the immigration problem that meddling has led to.

Or, as Oscar Wilde said most cynically, “Our only duty to history is to rewrite it.”

I’ve often said that disasters of any sort are seldom caused by a single factor, but this observation is seldom heeded or even recognized. The disasters caused by the “snowmageddon” that struck the various California mountain areas weren’t just because of the unprecedented amount of snow, but by the fact that more and more people built houses, roads, and businesses in places where heavy snow would in fact cause such problems. Hurricanes create greater damage overall than ever before because more people want to live where hurricanes are more likely to strike, and that’s compounded by government and insurance policies that allow rebuilding in such hazardous locales.

The two most recent bank failures represent another aspect of the same problem. Because banks impact so many people, bank failures can create economic disasters unless government steps in. But when people know that government will step in, there’s far less pressure to manage well and more of an incentive to take greater risks, which creates the need for more bailouts or more regulation, if not both – that is, if we don’t want to crater the economy.

A compounding factor – also almost totally ignored by politicians and policy-makers – is that current corporate law effectively insulates bank and corporate managers from personal repercussions. Often they even collect bonuses and high salaries after various kinds of disasters, to which they contributed or even caused by practices designed to maximize profits and bonuses, rather than better or safer operations, and almost never can those who implemented bad policies and procedures be held personally responsible.

The string of railcar derailments on the Norfolk Southern Railway system follows the company’s efforts to stop stronger safety measures from being implemented, and the attempts at minimal compensation for victims of the hazardous chemical spill in Ohio.

And, of course, the current media climate glorifies the idea of getting “more.” No one ever seems to be praised for acting carefully or responsibly.

But the risks and costs of all that “getting more” are downplayed and ignored, and those who claim they want more responsibility placed on individuals and companies, rather than more regulation, don’t want to bear the costs and deaths of less regulation.

You can’t have it both ways.

I haven’t posted much recently about what I’ve read, not because I haven’t been reading, but because I won’t mention books I dislike by name, and I’ve come across too many of those lately.

These days I tend to read F&SF as much to keep up with authors with whom I’m not familiar as for entertainment and enlightenment. One of the problems with this is that I’ve been reading – or trying to read – too many books that have been well-reviewed and in which I’ve found I have no real interest for one or more of the following reasons.

The first reason is because in one type of book being recently written/published the setting is not only implausible, but wildly so, not to mention internally self-contradictory, as well as, in at least one case, apparently written to test the reader’s ability to deal with example after of meticulously written grossness, which earned it praise as highly original from several review sources. Personally, I don’t consider the equivalent of sludge and sewage particularly original, given that they’ve been part of any urban culture since there have been towns.

Another matter is the growing tendency to shift viewpoints wildly from character to character, for no discernable reason, often just to show how irrational, scheming, or evil even minor characters are. A good writer doesn’t need to shift POV to show that, or even to show that the minor character villain is more than a cardboard plot device, but perhaps editors are allowing this sort of writing because fewer and fewer readers seem able to pick up smaller clues and hints and need massive “signposts.”

Then there are the books that dwell in great depth on the miseries of personal incompetence, ineptness, and/or apparent powerlessness in authoritarian or bureaucratic societies that could care less, which can be done well, as in 1984 or Brave New World, or even, more recently, A Memory Called Empire, but seldom are most authors able to do that well.

Then, there’s the class of books where I find myself asking, “Why on earth should I care about these people?” Now, admittedly, I could care less about most of George R. R. Martin’s characters, who are all despicable to greater or lesser degrees, but George writes them well, possibly because of his long experience in Hollywood. Most writers presenting despicable characters don’t.

Finally, there’s another class of books that also befuddles me. I don’t mind good action novels, but not the ones where every detail of every fight, every explosion, every betrayal, every sensual scene is described, but where it’s almost impossible to discern where in the generic setting any of these actions take place.

And those are just a few of the reasons why this curmudgeon isn’t recommending more books.

Some thirty plus years ago, when most of my children were out of the house, my then-wife and I looked into selling the five plus bedroom house in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., because the stress of my high-paying, higher-stress consulting job had literally landed me in the hospital, and we were hoping that a smaller dwelling with less maintenance would allow me to become a full-time writer.

It wasn’t possible. Housing prices had risen so fast that smaller decent houses were selling for almost as much as our larger dwelling would fetch, and a lower income couldn’t finance them. In the end, that was a great part of the reason we moved to New Hampshire.

I’ve recently discovered the same problem is recuring for several relatives, although the mechanics are slightly different, this time because of the concurrence of a change in the tax treatment of selling residences and the even higher rises in housing in a number of urban areas.

What happens when an older single widow or widower [that doesn’t apply to us, thankfully] or divorced individual has a house too big to handle, in which there’s a substantial amount of increased equity because of spiking real estate prices, and wants to downsize? In a number of suburban areas, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to downsize without huge penalties.

And for single parent families, the situation can be even worse. One professional woman bought a house ten years ago for $500,000, with a mortgage of $350,000. She had a solid income from her own business, but COVID effectively destroyed 80% of her income from her business. She’d like to sell the house and buy something smaller for her and her child because her income won’t cover the current mortgage payment on the house. The house will likely fetch slightly over a million dollars. But if she sells the house, she’ll realize a capital gain of $500,000, half of which is taxable, with a capital gains tax of roughly $40,000, and sales costs of $75,000 leaving her with approximately $525,000, which sounds like a lot, except even a 1,200-1,400 square foot townhouse anywhere within 20 miles will cost $700,000, and her income isn’t high enough to qualify for a mortgage to make up the difference. So she can’t afford to buy a house half the size of the one she owns, which she can no longer afford, and she has to pay capital gains tax when the “gain” in value is effectively illusory.

This situation can be even worse in places like Los Angeles, where 1,100 square foot former “tract” homes in many areas, not even high status locations, sell for over a million dollars, which is why so many former Californians are moving to Cedar City and elsewhere in Utah, where they’re driving up housing prices here.

And all the time, the government is collecting taxes on illusory capital gains.

The legislature of the great state of Utah has just passed a $200 million income tax cut bill which reduces the state’s income tax rate from 4.85% to 4.65%. Two hundred million may sound significant, but the decrease in income taxes for a family making $80,000 a year will amount to $208, or roughly 57 cents a day. For families making less than that, the tax cut is estimated to cut taxes by as much as 22%, but for a family with a taxable income of $30,000, a 22% reduction is less than $200.

This is the second – or possibly third – year of “small” tax cuts, and those small percentages add up to significant dollars for the top five percent of Utah taxpayers but aren’t all that helpful for lower income taxpayers.

I’d rather see no tax cuts and the money used for public education funding, given that Utah teachers – all the way from kindergarten to the university level – aren’t that well paid and face, on average, some of the largest class sizes.

And just possibly, the state legislators might consider more funding for improving air quality along the Salt Lake City/Wasatch Front, since the pollution levels there are among the worst in the nation. That doesn’t take into account that wasteful water use is resulting in Salt Lake drying up, which also results in toxic dust from the exposed lakebed being blown into the air.

Both the air and water problems, as well as shortfalls in infrastructure, have been compounded by the fact that Utah has been the fastest-growing state in the U.S. from 2010 to 2023, with a total growth of 23.88%.

But, obviously, touting minuscule tax cuts that really only benefit the wealthiest taxpayers is really good politics. Whether it’s best in the long-term for the state and its people is another question.

What do Donald Trump, less reputable politicians, and dubious news sources all have in common?

Besides a certain sleaziness, they all have a tendency to present words and facts out of context in a way that distorts what actually occurred.

In all fields of expertise, presentation/observation/understanding of events and facts in context is vital. That’s why archeologists excavate so carefully, because the context in which objects are found can often reveal even more than the objects themselves.

It’s why courts use the phrase “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

As I’ve noted earlier, there’s a great deal of difference between the handling of classified documents by Donald Trump and by Joe Biden or Mike Pence, because the context in each instance is very different.

This lack of understanding also results in the misapplication and misunderstanding of certain phrases. The despicable Harvey Weinstein used a common and accurate phrase – “it’s a small world” as a threat to his victims which suggested that he knew enough people to blackball those women from getting future work in entertainment. There’s no doubt that Weinstein was using that phrase as a threat, but the plain fact is that the world of entertainment is a small world. So is the world of classical music. So is the political arena.

But when a classical music instructor told a pupil who’d displayed thoughtless and rude behavior to be careful in the future because classical music was a small world, the pupil complained that the instructor had issued a threat, when no threat was even implied. All the instructor meant was that a pattern of bad or thoughtless behavior would get around, and not to the student’s benefit, but the student likely didn’t understand the contextual difference.

But because of the Weinstein cases, and the publicity involving that phrase, what was an honest and accurate observation of a number of professional fields has become a toxic phrase, all because the media, especially, failed to understand the difference in context.

And, with Twitter, social media, and even mainstream media shortening everything, there’s a growing loss of context… and a corresponding lack of understanding that benefits no one.

I’ve noted earlier that weather forecasts for Cedar City tend to be hit or miss, possibly because Cedar City is roughly fifteen miles north of Black Ridge, and Black Ridge is the southern end of the plateau on which Cedar City is situated. South of Black Ridge, the ground drops close to three thousand feet in less than thirty miles.

I understand the difficulties this poses for forecasters, especially since Cedar City is not exactly a major metropolitan area, but as I write this, it’s been snowing consistently for the past six hours, and we’ve gotten about seven inches of snow, and it’s still falling.

All the forecasts say it’s partly cloudy and that we’ll have scattered snow showers.

I’ve lived in New England at the foot of the White Mountains, in Colorado at the foot of the Rocky Mountains and here in Cedar City, essentially between three mountain ranges, and in none of those places would seven inches of snow be considered intermittent snow flurries or showers.

Last night, Cedar City was supposed to have flurries. We got about three inches of snow.

I understand that the location of Cedar City makes forecasting difficult, but still stating that it’s partly cloudy with possible snow flurries as the snow continues to fall strikes me as either a continuing reliance on unreliable algorithms or incompetence, if not both. It’s one thing to miss a forecast; it’s another to report the current weather wrong – continually.

Or perhaps it’s just that none of those so-called meteorologists even bothered to check with any of the 50,000 -60,000 people who are experiencing those “scattered snow showers,” because algorithms are so much more accurate than real people, not to mention, cheaper.

Sometime back, I wrote about some of the “innovations” proposed and since implemented by the local university, in order to create a three-year bachelor’s degree, a degree pushed by the state legislature. One of those “innovations” was to cut the length of the semester by twenty-percent, without any increase in the length of classes or the number of classes. Despite all the rhetoric, what that has meant is that students aren’t learning as much.

I’d thought about detailing more of the so-called improvements in education and pointing out how they actually degrade learning and how most students today know less, have lower critical thinking skills than their predecessors, and have more difficulty learning and recalling material.

But there’s little point in that exercise. Most of the American people have turned their backs on what used to be the objective of education, especially higher education, and that was the ability to read and write critically, to think analytically, to understand what numbers actually mean, and to obtain the skills to be able to learn and to attain new skills on a lifelong basis.

Instead, public education, at least through the collegiate baccalaureate level, has largely become a charade of exercises in mastering objective tests and obtaining paper credentials in the hopes of leveraging an inadequate education and an overstated degree into a job that will provide an adequate income.

It’s also become an incredibly expensive exercise, as millions of young Americans with massive student debt can testify, especially given that we’re graduating twice as many students from college every year as there are jobs requiring a college degree, and yet the mindless push for more students to go to college continues.

At the same time, we’re seeing a growing contempt for science, for verified facts, and for reasoned analysis of everything, while unthinking tribalism is running wild. All that suggests to me that, despite record high numbers of high school graduates and the proliferation of college degrees, the possession of credentials, and the mastery of the cellphone, Google, and objective tests, doesn’t help much with critical thinking, logical writing, or understanding and solving the problems facing the world.

Once upon a time, say sixty years ago, media news was largely about facts and an average reader or listener could usually figure out what was accurate and what was not. No, the news wasn’t perfect, and government hid information back then as well, but most media outlets devoted much more time and effort to digging up hard news, especially the facts. Today, all too many “news” outlets trumpet opinions second-hand and focus on sensationalist “exposes,” often about lesser matters.

It doesn’t really matter whether Hillary Clinton used a private server for some official emails. So did Colin Powell, and there’s no real evidence that either’s use compromised U.S. security. Hunter Biden tried to cash in on his father’s position. So did Billy Carter. Again, there’s no evidence that either President Carter or President Biden did anything wrong. Millions of Americans have greedy relatives. Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinski was deplorable and in terrible taste, but the fate of the free world didn’t exactly hang on a stained dress. So what else is new?

When thousands of people try to storm the U.S. Capitol and overturn an election that state officials from both parties declare was the fairest ever – that is a big deal. And so is a President inciting the mob or repeatedly committing tax fraud.

How did we get to a point where the facts and hard news take a back seat (or are often ignored) to unfounded lies and to those who trumpet them?

Largely because too many in the media have come to focus on what gets people excited and stirred up and how people feel. That drives ratings and profits, even for so-called “staid” and established media outlets such as The New York Times.

The other problem is that far too many media news outlets have focused on “fairness,” falsely equating objectivity to giving both sides equal time/airspace/column inches or the like. Today, the news continues to equate the fact that President Biden inadvertently had a few classified documents in his house and office with the hundreds of classified documents willfully taken and kept by former President Trump. The news media also gave up on noting Trump’s documented tens of thousands of lies and misstatements but scrutinizes Biden’s every statement for even minor inconsistencies.

In such cases, the news media are literally undermining their own objectivity, not that they seem to care that much, but objectivity isn’t measured or determined by equal time or by political beliefs; it’s established by verified facts – and by the lack of facts.

Opinions not backed by facts shouldn’t get equal time. Their shortcomings need to be exposed – factually – and the news needs to concentrate on what actually happened and how, instead of continually churning up the falsehoods and the liars who spout them.

Will this change? Only for the worse, I suspect, because Mammon is now the American God.

“Magic Thinking” is the idea that belief can change the physical world. Now, I’d be the first to admit that someone’s beliefs can motivate them to accomplish great things, but in the end it is the accomplishments that can change the world, not the beliefs. Belief is the first step, and at least in my experience, the easiest.

Yet today, all over the United States, we’ve had a resurgence of “magic thinking” totally divorced from reality.

How can a culture that promotes Viagra, movies and television with intense sexual content, that supplies its young people with private transportation and funds, and that now has the largest gap between the age of physical maturity and financial and social maturity honestly believe that abstinence is going to be practiced for ten years or more by a significant fraction of the young population? It isn’t; and the facts show it, but legislators across the country continue to push abstinence as the solution and to reject any form of realistic sex education. But then again, perhaps Twitter or TikTok might increase abstinence, but not the rhetoric of rightwing fundamentalist legislators.

Thirty to thirty-five percent of the American population continues to believe that the 2020 Presidential election was “stolen,” despite study after study, audit after audit, and election officials from both major parties declaring that it was a free and fair election and that the results are accurate.

Scientific study after study has also shown there’s no significant difference in overall mental ability of human beings linked to skin color, but significant percentages of populations in the U.S., Japan, China, and elsewhere believe such a difference exists, when all the evidence links the vast majority of differences to nutrition and income.

There’s a simple fact that all too many “magic thinkers” don’t understand: The strength of one’s beliefs does not make something so. All the denying in the world isn’t going to change physical facts. Unfortunately, magic thinking can lead to riots and storming the Capitol, or to unwanted and neglected children born out of wedlock, or to massacres of people who are different.

The other day I read a reader review of Isolate, the first book of “The Grand Illusion,” my newest series, which features a junior military security officer essentially ordered to work as an aide for a senior politician, in a constitutional empire with a mandated three party system. In this world electricity doesn’t work as a power source, and a tiny percentage of the population have empathic talents, either as empaths who can read and project emotions or as isolates whose emotions cannot be read or influenced by empaths. The book begins with the main character and his partner fending off an empath attack on the politician as they leave the capitol building.

What I found both amusing and slightly appalling was that the reader gave Isolate a five star review (which I certainly appreciate) with the sole comment of: “A little too political at times but a good read if you like his books.”

I’m still shaking my head about it, because the book is avowedly political. Everything revolves around the politics and how those politics influence everything from the politicians to the large corporations and the poorest field workers. I can see a reader who doesn’t like politics disliking the book, but saying that a science-fantasy political novel is a little too political leaves me baffled, especially with such a good rating.

I suppose it’s possible, and perhaps it’s happened, but I wonder if anyone would say that a thriller is a little too thrilling at times, or that a detective novel has a little too much detecting, or a romance novel has a bit too much romance.

For the National Football League, the game might as well be called “Get the Quarterback!” Or perhaps the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire’s gladiatorial games.

By the end of November fourteen teams (out of thirty-two) had started two or more quarterbacks this season. Over the entire season, the San Francisco Forty-Niners went through four quarterbacks, losing two for the entire season, and they lost the conference play-off because one quarterback was concussed and the other had his throwing elbow injured enough in the game that he couldn’t throw a pass. The Los Angeles Rams lost all the quarterbacks on their roster one week and had to sign Baker Mayfield two days before the next game.

From what I could determine, at least twenty-four quarterbacks were injured in the current NFL season seriously enough to miss at least one game – not counting the Superbowl, which hasn’t been played.

Eight quarterbacks were concussed severely enough to miss at least one game completely. Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa is still in the NFL’s concussion protocol more than a month after he last entered it. He was already out for two games earlier this year because of a previous concussion, and some doctors suggest that it might be best if he retired, rather than risk another concussion.

And despite the playing longevity of a few select, talented, and lucky NFL players, the average career playing span is a little over three years, not all that different from a Roman gladiator, the significant difference being that most less successful gladiators died, while NFL football players ‘only’ have their lifespan reduced by thirty percent on average, and that doesn’t take into account the high rate of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and the considerable risk of dementia in their later years, which some studies have shown may well be over 70%.

But that’s football… and lots of money for franchise owners. The Walton-Penner group paid $4.65 billion when they bought the Denver Broncos last year, and Denver’s hardly likely to be the most profitable NFL franchise.

All of a sudden classified documents are showing up in more homes than those of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, and I’m more than certain more could be found. While Trump willfully knew about the hundreds of documents he kept and insisted that they were his, it appears that both Biden and Pence were unaware that classified documents were included among their personal papers.

Given the volume of papers crossing their desks, it’s hardly surprising that comparatively small numbers of classified documents slipped through scrutiny. But the hullabaloo over Biden and Pence ignores a far larger problem.

Part of the problem is that the classification system is broken. More than forty years back when I was a Navy pilot and then a Congressional staffer, everyone in defense-related fields new that far too much information was overclassified, and that much of that information that couldn’t ever have been kept out of public view. Aviation Week was known in the military-industrial community as “Aviation Leak.”

Since then the problem has grown, partly because it’s far easier to classify information than to ask if it really needs to be classified, partly because classification is also a way to mute public and media criticism , and partly because the media has become more and more tabloid, ever more willing to disclose and publicize not only material that should never have been classified, but also to publicize information that legitimately should not be presently in the public domain.

Too much information that was classified legitimately years and years ago remains classified, not because its disclosure now would be detrimental to national security, but because its disclosure would be detrimental to the national image or to the reputation of institutions and individuals. But you can’t learn from past mistakes if you never know what they were and if you accept the images founded on incomplete information.

And the media, unfortunately, can’t be trusted to determine what should or shouldn’t be made public, especially not when the media’s primary goal has become profits, and when disclosing secrets raises ratings and, consequently, profits.

Nor can the military be totally trusted, but details and specifications for new weapons systems don’t belong in the public domain. Neither do intelligence findings about foreign military readiness… nor do the names of covert intelligence operatives.

What’s necessary is a balancing of interests and national needs, but balance doesn’t serve the short-term interests of politicians, the media, or the military-industrial complex…which is why we have an overclassification problem.

A while back, I made the observation that technology is, of itself, neither good nor evil, but that its basic function, whether intended or not, is as a multiplier. In warfare, technology multiplies the force wielded by an individual or a group of individuals; it multiplies the distances from which one can strike and the impact of that strike. In transportation, it multiplies how far and how fast one can travel. In communications, technology allows the transfer of more information almost instantly [at least on our planet] to more people.

But there’s one aspect of technology that’s seldom mentioned, and that’s the impact not only on the person or people affected by the technology, but also on the individual using the technology, where often technology multiplies the ability to do harm and the ability to avoid being caught or punished for that harm..

Donald Trump effectively mobilized somewhere between thirty thousand and a hundred thousand protesters (depending on where people were counted and by whom) on January 6th, from all across the nation, and more than a thousand actually stormed the Capitol, of whom more than 700 so far have been arrested and charged, with most being convicted or pleading guilty.

The problem with technology, in the case of Trump and others, is that while technology multiplies their abilities, it fails to multiply their accountability. In fact, in the case of Trump, his uses of technology has made it difficult to enforce any accountability.

Con men and swindlers can commit thefts from places where they can’t be discovered, let alone prosecuted. Cyber-bullying among teenagers has become endemic, and definitely contributes to increases in teen suicide. Trolls can badger and harass people with little fear of either retaliation or repercussion.

Functioning societies fall into two categories – autocracies and those based on popular trust, generally but not exclusively democracies. But technology is increasingly being used in ways that isolate people and create greater mistrust of any one who is different. Because isolation and mistrust undermine governments, one of the questions facing democracies is how to stop the increasing misuse of technology, because, skeptic that I am, I sincerely doubt that the people who are using technology to harm others are going to stop of their own free will. Trump and Putin certainly aren’t, nor are all the others.

The current “popular” reason why so little gets done in Congress is the wide polarization between the Democrats and Republicans, and that’s certainly a major factor, but I’d submit that there are other reasons that are just as important, if not more so.

The first is that the benefits of doing anything for the public good always take time to happen and often longer for people to recognize and appreciate them, while the negative impacts usually recognized and trumpeted widely and instantly by those affected. That’s why it took decades for legislation eliminating leaded gasoline and lead-based paint to be enacted. Lead in gasoline was a cheaper way of allowing gasoline refiners to market lower octane gasoline that worked in cars. Without using lead, refiners needed more highly refined and/or other more expensive additives. The same was true of lead paint. The benefits of “deleading” were spread across society, but benefitted the poor the most, while the costs were concentrated across a comparative handful of companies and industries, all of which had greater wealth and political power.

Dealing with environmental issues has run into the same difficulties.

Another problem is that some problems have no “good” solutions, because any financially and physically workable system will hurt many innocents. Yet the longer such problems persist without being addressed, the worse the problem becomes.

Immigration is one of those proems facing the United States. First, there’s no financial, military, and physically feasible way to halt all illegal immigration without becoming a police state along the lines of East Germany or North Korea. Walls don’t work, and deporting millions of border-crossers on a continuing basis becomes a huge financial and resource burden. Much of the problem lies in the fact that for many would-be immigrants, ANYTHING is better than remaining where they are, but to change those conditions in Central America and elsewhere would require essentially invading and rebuilding the socio-political structures in those lands, which would require resources and an effort that neither the regimes of those countries nor the American taxpayers would support. A “middle-ground” of allowing certain immigrants who would benefit the United States and absolutely rejecting the others would mean rejecting innocent people who merely want a chance at a better life. At the same time, failing to address the problem with clear-cut policies and laws will insure that the problem will worsen.

And the bottom line is that most politicians wish to avoid pain at a time when workable solutions will cause immediate pain for those with resources and votes.

One of the traits common to politics today, but especially to the Party of No, otherwise misnamed as the Republican Party, is a continuing failure to understand and acknowledge context and factual accuracy, and to equate minor transgressions with major criminal offenses.

Donald Trump knowingly and willfully transported thousands of official documents from the White House, of which more than three hundred were classified, many highly classified. He insisted, contrary to established law, that they were his. He claimed, falsely, that he could and had declassified them. After months and months of attempting to reclaim them, with Trump’s attorneys falsely claiming that all documents had been returned, the Justice Department executed a search warrant and discovered even more documents.

To date, a few handfuls of classified documents, if that, dating from Biden’s time as Vice President have been found in an office he used after leaving the Vice Presidency and in his home. These were turned over to the archives and later to the Justice Department. Biden didn’t claim they belonged to him and has cooperated fully.

Trump did not and still hasn’t, yet the Republicans and many of the media are equating the situations as roughly equal.

They’re anything but equal.

Once upon a time, I was staff director for a Congressman, and even with a staff of twelve or so, the amount of paperwork was staggering. Now, admittedly, we handled no classified documents in the office, although I did have a security clearance. The Executive Office employs roughly 1,800 employees, with slightly less than five hundred directly under the White House chief of staff, and the paper flow to the President and the Vice President is staggering.

Even under the best of circumstances, with that much paperwork, it’s practically impossible to absolutely assure that a document here and there doesn’t get filed in the wrong place or sticks to another file and ends up misplaced, particularly during a transition period or when leaving office. That’s a far different kettle of fish, as the saying goes, from the deliberate and willful theft of thousands of documents.

In addition, the Republicans are asking for “visitor logs” of people who visited Biden’s private residence, despite the fact that such logs don’t exist for private residences and have never been required – and that such a request was never even suggested for Donald Trump. But then, Trump ended the policy of visitor logs to the White House, which Biden restored. So the Republicans are demanding of Biden what they didn’t of Trump, compounding their intellectual and political dishonesty, not to mention emphasizing their hypocrisy.

There’s a huge difference between the situations, but what can you expect from a political party that denies election results and is indebted to Trump?

As for the media… as usual, they’re in it for the headlines, and accuracy is either an afterthought or irrelevant, especially for conservative media.

The instant cardiac arrest of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin was so jolting that it even stopped an NFL game that might affect the outcome of the Superbowl.

Personally, I’m surprised that the NFL hasn’t had more severe and near-fatal injuries.

Because passers and receivers have become more accurate, it’s become obvious to defensive backs that the most effective way to break up a pass is to hit the receiver full-force the instant he catches the ball. This timing is so close that I’ve seen more than a few cases where the receiver has been effectively tackled even before his fingers could touch the ball and where the officials didn’t call a penalty. And on more and more pass routes, the interaction between the receiver and the defensive back resembles a wrestling match run at full speed.

And that’s from someone who doesn’t watch all that much football any more. In fact, I haven’t seen a complete game in more than thirty years.

This sort of split-second brutality has become more and more of a feature of the game, especially for quarterbacks and receivers. A number of NFL teams are on their second-string, if not third-string, quarterbacks this year. In the years long ago when I did watch professional football a bit more intently, I don’t recall the plethora of injured quarterbacks I read about now.

While Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday was regarded as satire and overkill when it came out in 1999, what happened to Damar Hamlin is exactly what Stone was pointing out about professional football – that it’s a barbaric, scuzzy, gladiatorial battle of blood, sweat and tears that grinds down the players to powder and rewards them with fleeting fame… and possibly enough money to sustain some of them in a physically diminished life after football.

One of the aspects of the religio-social culture of the prevailing faith where I live is an emphasis on perfection, particularly as it applies to women and their appearance and to their families. There’s a definite pressure on women to be the perfect wife and have the perfect family with the perfect number of children (5).

This obviously takes a toll on women, seeing as women, especially married women, in Utah have a higher percentage of use of anti-depressants than in any other state, and a third of all women in Utah suffer depression, more than twice the rate for men.

I’ve been walking for my exercise for the nearly thirty years I’ve lived in Cedar City, and I always see women, particularly younger women, usually jogging, often pushing strollers, at all hours. I see a few men, but I’d estimate that there are ten women for every man I see, and almost all the men I see appear to be around my age. The women also appear to have more gym memberships.

This need to present a façade of perfection permeates everything. Even death. Utah also has one of the highest rates of teen suicide, but that never gets much press. When a teenager dies in Utah, and no cause of death is listed, there’s a high probability that it was suicide.

Last week, in the neighboring community of Enoch, the owner of a local insurance agency killed his wife, his mother-in-law, his five children, and then committed suicide, and all the news stories mentioned how wonderful a family they had been, and what a tragedy it was. Except, everything clearly wasn’t that wonderful. Under questioning, the Enoch police chief mentioned that there had been three calls over the past several years about “domestic disturbances,” but that there had been no charges. It also turned out that the wife had filed for divorce and that her husband had been served divorce papers just a few days before the shooting. Most of these details either didn’t appear in the local press or were buried.

This is scarcely new. Several years ago, two teenage males were killed in a stabbing incident here in Cedar City. The only news released was that the deaths occurred, and that the matter was “resolved.” More than a few cases of embezzlement have been hushed up as well as other incidents, and those are only the ones I know about.

But everything is perfect here in Deseret.

As all my family, and many of my readers know, I have a penchant for vests, both dressy and every day. So it was no surprise when I received black wool winter vest from a family member – delayed more than a week by the recent storm that savaged the mid-section of the United States. At first glance, it appeared to be a slightly dressier version of an older vest.

Then I noticed the glossy, multi-colored and professionally printed card attached to the vest, topped with the words, CONCEALED CARRY. Directly below that was the image of a revolver on top of a U.S. flag, beneath which were the words, in smaller caps, SECOND AMMENDMENT [spelled exactly that way], followed by a paragraph declaring that the maker/seller of the vest supported the right of citizens to bear arms and to carry licensed and concealed firearms.

A second and more careful inspection of the vest revealed pockets and straps inside designed to hold two revolvers – one on each side. Above the left-hand inside straps was a machine embroidered six-bullet-point list for safe use of the straps.

It’s rather unlikely I’ll be using the vest for its apparently intended purpose, particularly since I don’t have a concealed carry permit, but, since it is a handsome vest, I’ll certainly wear it.

But what puzzles me the most is how a fairly well-known retailer/manufacturer could go to all of the trouble of designing, manufacturing, and selling such a vest – and then fail to spell “amendment” correctly.

Or aren’t most of those who would buy the vest able to tell that “AMMENDMENT” was misspelled, or does it matter in the slightest to them? In this regard, I have noticed that many of those who cite the Second Amendment most vociferously have the least understanding of what it means, legally and constitutionally, so why would a mere misspelling matter in the slightest? Just as a certain segment of the House Republicans apparently have no real understanding of their responsibility to govern and how to exercise that responsibility.

While over 70% of Americans now believe that climate change is real, only about 50% of Republicans do, not that the discrepancy between Democrats and Republicans surprises me, given that Democrats are, in general, much more prone to accept “new” findings (even those that turn out not to be true or accurate), while Republicans tend to be older and more conservative, and conservatives are much slower to change their views on anything, even when the facts are overwhelming.

But, in one way, that still surprises me, because age does offer a perspective that youth lacks. When I lived in New Hampshire some thirty years ago, just above Newfound Lake, the lake froze so solid that every winter the lake was dotted with little ice-fishing huts, and even stake trucks were routinely driven on the ice. Now, one of my daughters reports that over several recent years, the lake didn’t ice over at all. The spotty local records indicate that there’s no record of the lake not freezing over before 2000.

I’ve lived in Cedar City for almost thirty years, and in the first ten years, we almost invariably had periods of sub-zero weather [Fahrenheit]. The infrequent snowstorms were usually severe (ten to twenty-five inches), and the local museum has a plethora of pictures illustrating just that. Until about five or six years ago, we never got rain in winter. In just the last few years, we’ve been getting winter rain, when before all the precipitation was snow. Now the infrequent storms are even less frequent, and the moisture content usually far less, and for the last week, we’ve had rain, finally turning to snow as I write this.

Whole sections of pine forests in the mountains are covered with beetle-killed pines. Why? Because, it turns out, that what kills the beetles most effectively is weeks of sub-zero winter weather, and we haven’t had anything like that in the three decades I’ve lived here.

Now, the recollections of an older man should be taken with caution, unless the statistics back them up, which in this case they do. But now that the statistics are out there, why do so many conservative older people fail to see the trends?