Maybe I’m missing something, but I was under the impression that one of the “benefits” of satellite networks like Direct TV and Dish was to obtain programming free of all those annoying ads, but now ads are appearing in the middle of movies – even movies made decades ago. And while the profits of Hollywood studios are down, those of Netflix, Amazon, and a few others are way up.

Ad breaks used to be a few minutes, but on satellite and cable networks, now they’re often five minutes long. And sports TV/internet is now using split-screen technology so that you get a silent picture of the “action” on one side and a loud commercial on the other side. And yes, advertising revenues are way, way up.

And, oh, yes, my monthly internet access bill went up 40%, unannounced, last month.

So, with all the revenues from this vast array of news and entertainment going up and up, exactly why are the real content providers, i.e., the writers and actors (the majority of them, not the super high-paid stars) getting stiffed and striking? And why do the media giants complain that they can’t afford real people? To pay for the exorbitant pay of high executives, perhaps?

As a provider of entertainment content myself, I can see that the list price of one of my fantasy hardcovers has gone from $21 in 1991 to $32 in 2023, an increase of slightly more than 50%. That’s over 32 years, which amounts to an increase of 34 cents a year, or an annual price increase of under 2% (not exactly exorbitant). In the meantime, my property taxes have doubled, and to replace my 2009 SUV would cost twice much as I paid for it.

But I’m one of the more fortunate authors. I know a number who no longer can make a living from their writing or who couldn’t save enough and afford good enough health insurance and who’ve been financially and sometimes physically destroyed. I’ve seen editors sacked by publisher after publisher, with downsizing after downsizing.

And, unhappily, this isn’t just happening in the entertainment industry. The IT industry is famous for hiring young talent comparatively cheaply and then laying off more experienced (and higher paid) technical staff in their forties and fifties, and sometimes younger.

Academia used to rely on the expertise of tenured professors. Now those positions comprise less than a third of university teachers, and are declining every year, while the majority of undergraduates are taught by part-time adjuncts, who get no health or retirement benefits and have no idea whether they’ll have a job in the next semester.

At some point, all these comparatively underpaid workers will no longer be able to service the debt that they’ve built up while struggling for better pay and job security… and then what?

These days, there is a plethora of ways to classify or categorize almost anything, and fantasy fiction is certainly no different.

The Masterclass system lists eighteen different fantasy subgenres, yet almost no fantasy novel I’ve written fits neatly, or even not-neatly, into any one of those classifications, and that’s true of quite a few other writers I know.

“Discovery” lists fifty fantasy sub-genres, and only a handful or so have the same categorization as the Masterclass system, while Wikipedia offers a listing of thirty fantasy subgenres, with a disclaimer that the listing doesn’t encompass everything.

In Rhetorics of Fantasy, the scholar Farah Mendlesohn (a lovely scholarly lady, by the way) takes a different approach, by providing four ways of classifying fantasy: portal/quest fantasy; immersive fantasy; intrusive fantasy; and liminal fantasy, the last of which is fantasy where the reader really isn’t sure whether it’s fantasy or not (if I understood the explanation correctly).

Then there are those who simply break fantasy into two types: high and low.

In effect, almost everyone has their own definition/classifying system for fantasy, and I’m no different, although I haven’t seen any other classification like mine (not that someone hasn’t done it besides me, just that I haven’t seen it).

My “system” breaks fantasy into two types, one type where the characters live fantasy lives in a fantasy world/universe, and another where the characters live “real” lives in a fantasy setting. By “real” I mean that the characters have to have jobs and a way of supporting themselves, and that the economics, politics, society, and magic all work logically and consistently in that fantasy setting.

Of course, in the end, I suspect few readers really care about classifying what they read, or even what “classification” or type of fantasy the novel happens to be, but about how entertaining they find the novel, and possibly about what insights it provides.

According to the dictionary, moral behavior is “concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior” and “holding or manifesting high principles for proper conduct.”

And certainly the Founding Fathers were definitely concerned about moral behavior, even if their focus was initially on white male property holders and proper (and submissive) wives, but over time that focus expanded to include women, and after the Civil War, and especially after the Civil Rights Act, minorities as well.

But what is “right behavior” or “proper conduct?” Certainly, for the first hundred and fifty years of the United States, there was an emphasis on morality, excessive at times, but without doubt there was a difference between moral and immoral behavior, and there were unspoken standards for such behavior. Even when people didn’t meet those standards, the standards remained, generally applicable to society as whole.

Those standards weren’t just confined to criminality, but to all aspects of life. In additional to being law-abiding, being “moral” required public politeness to everyone, certain standards of attire appropriate to the locale and situation, charity toward those less fortunate, at least a nod to a higher power, respect for those in authority, and polite language in public. Underlying this was the tacit or unconscious realization that such “morality” was important to hold society together.

For various reasons, this more traditional understanding of civic morality has largely vanished, exemplified by the election of Donald Trump, who, by any definition, is totally immoral and who even proposed suspending the Constitution if it suited his purposes.

Equally disturbing is the change in attitudes of younger Americans. A long-standing survey of incoming college students shows a disturbing pattern. In 1967, about 85% said that their principal goal was to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. By 2000, only 42% said that, while the majority said being financially well off was their goal, and by 2015, 82% of students said wealth was their principal aim in life.

Interestingly enough, over recent years, Americans have also become less charitable. In 2000, over two-thirds of households have to charity, but by 2018, that percentage was just below fifty percent.

While the Constitution clearly established both freedom of religion and freedom from religion, right-wing “Christians” have become increasingly vocal and effective in passing laws based on their beliefs in an effort to force their beliefs on others, failing to recognize that a society that imposes one set of religious values on the entire population by law is not a moral society, but an immoral tyranny.

While “traditional” morality had quite a few flaws, it also held the precept, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” something that current society, especially the extremists, also seems to have discarded and replaced with “me first, no matter what.”

Recently, with all the publicity surrounding the charges against Donald Trump, there’s been a great deal of commentary on a “two-tiered” system of justice, where those with fame and money are treated far differently that those without either. That’s indisputable. It’s also always been the case – anywhere in the world.

What seems to get overlooked is just how long it takes for so many criminal cases even to get to trial. Recently, a CBS News investigation uncovered a massive backlog of court cases. Data from courts and district attorneys’ offices in more than a dozen major American cities showed that “pending” criminal cases jumped from 383,879 in 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, to 546,727 in 2021. In California, New York, Florida and Michigan, the number of “pending” cases in 2021 totaled nearly 1.3 million.

The indictments against former President Donald Trump join a major backlog of cases, since Trump’s case in the D.C. federal district court is just one of the more than 6,000 pending criminal cases there. Trump may be the best known, but he’s far from the first defendant charged in connection with crimes related to the 2020 election. More than 1,069 people have been charged with crimes related to Jan. 6, which the indictment says Trump’s actions helped fuel.

But this isn’t just a Washington, D.C., problem. In one Georgia case, a man charged in a shooting spent ten years in pre-trial detention, finally had his case heard, with the result that the jury couldn’t reach a verdict, leaving the defendant facing another trial. Even in Utah, the current case backlog in just the state courts is over 10,000 cases.

In many cases, defendants spend more time in pre-trial detention than they potentially could serve if convicted. Is it any wonder that some innocent (usually minority) defendants who are unable to make bail “plead out”, rather than spend months in detention before trial? It’s also why many who are convicted get “credit” for time already served.

But whether it’s Trump or someone we’ve never heard of, waiting months, or even years, to even get to trial is a disgrace… and suggests that our justice system is anything but just, since the poorest are the ones most penalized by such seemingly endless waiting – except in the case of Trump, where he hopes waiting will allow him to escape justice.

The ultra-conservatives and many in the right wing of Republican party tout all sorts of conspiracies, including 9/11 being a clandestine government operation, the “liberal” deep state (with various acts purportedly associated), the “stealing” of the 2020 election,” that the January 6th insurrection was an antifa operation, that liberals, including Hillary Clinton, ran a child porn operation, and that Joe Biden is the head of a family crime ring.

There are, however, significant problems with all these purported conspiracies, principally that not a shred of hard provable evidence exists to back up any of them, despite years and years of trying to find any hard evidence — and this is in a country that can’t keep anything secret for long and where cellphone photos are everywhere.,

Yet, despite the lack of hard evidence beyond unprovable rumors and repeated lies, the true believers in all these “conspiracies” persevere in their beliefs.

What’s so amazing about all of them is that they ignore the biggest conspiracy of all – that Donald Trump conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election. So far, Trump has been indicted and arrested on ninety-one criminal counts in four separate jurisdictions so far, on both state and federal charges. He’s currently out on bail, awaiting all those trials.

And there’s plenty of evidence, unlike in all the Republican conspiracy theories. We have Trump being recorded asking an election official to find him over 11,800 votes, and his attorneys documented as fabricating false slates of electors. There’s video and documentary of him retaining classified information, as well as paying hush money to a porn star not to reveal their sexual encounters.

And, oh yes, Trump’s even lost a civil case involving his sexual assault on a woman.

None of this is speculation. There are thousands of pages of documentation, as well as hundreds of video images.

Yet the right-wing conspiracy types not only insist that Trump didn’t nothing wrong, but they’ve gone so far as buying mug-shot mugs and donating even more millions of dollars to Trump.

All the evidence in the world won’t change their support of Trump, not surprisingly, since, where Trump’s concerned, those who actually have minds lost them long ago.