West of Cedar City, on land grazed by herds of sheep in the not-too-distant past, apartment and condominium buildings are springing up seemingly everywhere. That’s unfortunately not too surprising, given that last year Iron County tied for the fastest county population growth in the state of Utah. And those numbers understate the actual number of people, because the enrollment at Southern Utah University has doubled in the past 11 years to almost 16,000 students, and most of them (roughly 70%) don’t come from Iron County/Cedar City.

One aspect of all this home building I find most interesting is that, from what I can tell, over 80% of those apartments/condominiums are constructed of pseudo-stucco, i.e., a thin layer of mortar over one half inch OSB (Oriented Strand Board) clad in Tyvek (waterproof plastic). In my opinion, this isn’t exactly terribly permanent, but this growing impermanence in housing mirrors impermanence elsewhere.

This is especially true in the book business. I have a collection of mass market paperbacks, many of which are over forty years old. Some of them are a bit fragile, admittedly, but they’re readable.

On the other hand, since my publisher went digital, I’ve created back-up files for each book in place of hard copies. The only problem is that many of the back-up files are essentially “lost,” since the earliest were on thin floppies, the next were on 3 ½ inch hard floppies, the next on CDs. I never kept the older computers for obvious reasons. All of which means that, effectively, those fragile paperbacks are outlasting the electronic formats.

As others have pointed out, at least some of the data and records from the Mercury and Apollo space programs has been “lost” because the systems with which to read that data have been replaced by newer systems using totally different codes.

Somehow it seems rather amusingly odd that someone can read the words and songs of the Sumerian poetess/priestess Enheduanna written some 4300 years ago on a clay tablet, but more and more data and history are being recorded on electronic media that will vanish far sooner, either from power failures or planned obsolescence. One of the greatest cultural losses is likely to be in the area of classical music where the failure of the copyright system means that thousands of works are slowly moldering away because few have the time and/or resources to preserve them, and even those preserved “electronically” won’t last that long.

As for the semi-temporary apartments springing up everywhere, in the global scheme of things, they’re no great loss – except to whoever owns them when they collapse or are demolished in the comparative near future.

Sometimes, propaganda is blatantly false; sometimes it’s a mixture of truth and misinformation; and sometimes, what’s perceived as blatantly false is largely factually accurate.

Ted Koppel of CBS News revealed on Sunday, May 24th that Iranians are flooding the internet, and the world, with skillfully rendered, AI-generated, anti-American, and especially anti-Trump media, often featuring AI-rendered Trump Lego figures.

Koppel talked, if via a translator, with one of the individuals behind at least some of the anti-Trump renderings, asking that individual about the assertion that Israel had blackmailed Trump into making the attack on Iran by threatening to reveal Trump’s more direct connections to Jeffrey Epstein. The Iranian, predictably, claimed that the report was, in fact, accurate.

Whether or not that assertion is accurate, the fact that it’s been made public and that the Iranian anti-Trump propaganda has been disseminated so far to near a billion people worldwide are disturbing. Even more disturbing in this context is the fact that roughly half of the Epstein documents remain undisseminated and that much of the material that was disseminated is so heavily redacted as to be unreadable.

Given the stakes of the Iran conflict, the fact that Trump and his administration acted without any long-term plan or strategy and given how unwilling Trump’s Department of Justice is to comply with the court order to disseminate all the Epstein files, merely dismissing the Iranian assertion as false is hardly sufficient to remove the cloud of doubt created by that assertion, particularly given Trump’s long record of misstatement and prevarication and the slavish devotion of the political appointees running DOJ.

Trump’s continuing statements about a pending solution to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are hardly reassuring, particularly given the pace of Iranian rearmament. While the growing threat of Iranian-backed terrorists in the Middle East and Iranian progress in developing a global nuclear threat provide some rationale for the initial February attack on Iran, none of those deal with the question of why the U.S. joined Israel almost immediately for a second attack, especially since it’s clear that Trump has been unable to provide any comprehensive reason for the second attack, beyond claiming that Iran should never be allowed a nuclear weapon.

So…whose claims are true, and to what degree, and which, if any, are blatantly false?

The Trump administration announced last Monday the creation of a $1.8 billion fund to compensate those who claim they were targeted by the Biden Justice Department and by Democrats. This act would forge a pipeline to funnel taxpayer money to President Trump’s allies.

The fund was created just after Trump withdrew his lawsuit demanding at least $10 billion against the Internal Revenue Service as an effort to skirt oversight by the judge on the case, who had expressed concern that the lawsuit against the IRS represented self-dealing between the president and a department run by his former defense lawyer, Todd Blanche.

Trump’s and Blanche’s moves stripped Judge Kathleen M. Williams, who had been overseeing the IRS case in the Southern District of Florida, of her appointed role in approving a formal settlement agreement. By dismissing the case in its entirety, Trump could reach an agreement with his own appointees without risking the rebuke of an impartial and independent arbiter.

Trump, his two sons and his family business, who sued the IRS together, would receive an apology but not be paid out of the new fund, officials said.

Trump and DOJ’s leadership have repeatedly accused Democrats of weaponizing federal law enforcement against their enemies, but they have failed to provide evidence of illegality, or political animus, in the two federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump or in investigations into his allies. Judge Williams had been considering dismissing Mr. Trump’s IRS suit on her own because Trump effectively controls both his personal lawyers bringing the complaint and the government lawyers who are supposed to respond to it.

In short, Trump is using Blanche to get a settlement for a lawsuit that never should have been brought and, if brought, would likely have lost, and settlement will direct $1.8 billion of taxpayer funds to whomever Trump and Blanche choose (if through a five-person board whose members Blanche effectively controls).

And to top it all off, the DOJ action blocks any IRS attempts to audit, investigate, or prosecute any tax matters involving Trump, the Trump family, or any Trump company… ever.

In terms of corruption of the legal system itself, this tops anything I’ve seen.

Over the years, even over the past century, there’s been an ongoing discussion/argument about technology, and whether it’s beneficial for society as a whole. It’s certainly beneficial for those who can reap its benefits, but the degree to which individuals can reap those benefits is largely determined by their education and physical resources.

What’s so often overlooked about technology is that its greatest function is as a multiplier. For me as a writer, computers were a godsend because I wrote barely legibly and got writer’s cramp after a few hundred words. Typewriters were better, but I was a lousy typist and went through bottles of Wite-Out. Computers definitely multiplied my writing accuracy and output, but I had the advantage of a good education and the resources to afford a computer.

The fact is that technology multiplies the skills and productivity more for those already enabled to a great degree.

Another factor is that technology is amoral. It can more greatly enable those who do work to improve society, and it can improve the ability of individuals who wish to destroy, either people or societies.

The third factor is that technology enables its users to create change more quickly, often more quickly than many, if not most, people can effectively adapt to. That becomes a destabilizing factor in any society because only a minority of people in most cultures can deal effectively with rapid change. Yet each improvement in technology increases the rate of change in a culture.

One area where technology has already changed the social structure of the United States is the replacement of brute physical strength in a range of jobs across the United States with computerized/mechanized systems, where precision and detail are increasingly important, and where women tend to handle such detail more effectively. That technological change has begun to reduce jobs demanding physical strength as well as to reduce the pay of such positions, which causes social and income erosion for men who used to fill those positions at higher pay.

Wider and more intensive communications convey more effectively and intensively the lifestyles of the rich and famous, if you will, and this increases social unrest among those less economically advantaged, which further increases already growing social unrest.

So far, the United States, as I see it, is failing to fully comprehend the magnitude and speed of changes created by ever-advancing technology and their possibly devastating effects (in a science-fiction sense, that just might be why we don’t see signs of highly intelligent life out in the universe).

As anyone following politics should know, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, and Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, brought charges in the Eastern District of North Carolina against James Comey, the former head of the FBI, claiming that Comey threatened the life of President Trump by posting a video consisting of seashells spelling out “86 47.”

Blanche claims to have other evidence, but given the fact that “86” is actually a restaurant term used to strike an item from the menu because the kitchen’s run out of that item, Blanche is stretching more than a little bit.

This is the second attempt by Trump to prosecute James Comey, and Blanche apparently is doing so because the Donald ordered him to do so, and after what happened to Pam Bondi once she failed to successfully bring charges against Trump’s so-called enemies, Blanche isn’t wasting any time.

Even some Republicans, including Senator Thom Tillis, are skeptical.

As for Comey’s being charged with threatening the President for merely expressing an opinion that Trump ought to be removed from office,whatever happened to First Amendment rights?

Unhappily, what else can you expect from a President who demands that comedians who make fun of him and his wife be fired? Or who discharges without a legally valid cause a highly commended career federal attorney merely because Trump hates her father?

What’s even more disturbing is that Trump can threaten anyone and everyone he doesn’t like, including to destroy an entire culture if those leading it won’t immediately capitulate, but takes umbrage in the slightest satire or mockery. He’s also delayed or withheld disaster aid to states that didn’t vote for him in the last election.

If any Democrat President had done half of what Trump has, they’d have long since run afoul of Congress, but superannuated adolescent Republican Representatives and Senators who once gloried in Trump’s braggadocio are now clueless chumps or sniveling cowards, unwilling to hold their bullying leader to the requirements of the Constitution.