Over my lifetime, weather forecasts have, in general, reached the point where they are accurate enough that they actually can be useful – except all too often in Cedar City, Utah, which is where we live.

On Monday morning, the weather forecasts from the major networks said that the snowstorm that had hit northern Utah was moving out to the east and that no storms were forecast in southwest Utah for the next several days. Roughly, an hour passed before it began snowing. Four hours later, it was still snowing, and there were at least three inches of snow on the ground. The snow flurries that followed lasted until dark.

This was hardly an isolated occurrence.

Now, I don’t blame the forecasters. Cedar City is a college town of roughly 40,000 people and is scarcely a population center or a media market on which forecasters might focus more expertise. There’s also the fact that its geographical location makes accurate forecasting a bitch. The town is located twenty miles north of Black Ridge, and the south side of Black Ridge drops almost 3,000 feet in roughly four miles, and another 1,000 feet over the next twenty. The east side of town literally climbs partway up red hills and cliffs that are the lower part of mountains that rise another 4,000 feet.

Cedar City is also known for its winds – strong and frequent. There’s a local saying about the town – that the Mormon settlers only stopped here until the wind died down, only to discover it never did. I’ve personally seen, and weathered, winds here that ripped the shingles off houses, and in one case peeled the vinyl siding right off the west side of a dwelling. We’re not talking tornadoes or hurricanes, just wind, Cedar City style.

And the weather can be freakishly weird – like the fifteen inches of snow we got on Mother’s Day weekend six years ago – incidentally also unforecast. We’ve often gotten a foot of snow in early September, and then sweltered through 80 degree weather for a month afterward.

And that’s why, while forecasts are useful most of the time, here in Cedar City, you still have to be wary about the weather.

Or unprincipled, lying, and hypocritical? Or all five? In case you haven’t guessed, I’m referring to all the Republicans lining up behind Trump’s claims of victory and election fraud on the part of Democrats, although Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security announced that the election was the most secure ever, and state after state has affirmed the same.

One of the latest of the sixty-odd frivolous lawsuits was filed by the Texas State Attorney General (who, by the way, has been charged with securities fraud and just might be hoping for a Trump pardon in return for filing the lawsuit). The Texas lawsuit claimed that election law changes in four states — Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania — which allowed more alternative ways to vote, violated existing law by essentially making it easier for citizens to cast their ballots. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the lawsuit, and that dismissal vote included three justices appointed by Trump.

Not only did Republican attorneys general from 17 states sign on to the lawsuit, but so did 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives, which raises another question. How can a ballot be fraudulent at the top and not at the bottom? If Biden’s election was fraudulent because of the process, how can their election not also be fraudulent?

The Trumpist Republican Attorney General here in Utah signed onto the Texas lawsuit without consulting either the Republican Governor or Lieutenant Governor, both of whom immediately denounced his action. His action was also hypocritical because Utah has had universal mail-in voting for the last two elections, and there’s never been a problem with fraud.

While Trump is stirring up those voters, the fact is that they’re easy to stir up, and that’s why so many Republican politicians don’t want to stand up against Trump’s claims. Most of those Republicans who have stated that the process was fair and without fraud have been subjected to threats, often death threats. So have quite a few electors.

Depending on the poll and the wording, between sixty and seventy percent of Republican voters think the election was “illegitimate.” What this means is that Republicans don’t like democracy or democratic processes when they don’t win. This isn’t a supposition; it’s fact. For last decade, if not longer, Republicans have been working methodically on the state level to restrict voting access to people who are less likely to vote Republican, including reducing the number of polling places in minority districts and “purging” voter registration records in minority districts, even removing the names of people who voted in the previous election and who didn’t die or move.

The United States was founded on the idea of equal opportunity, limited at first just to white males, but over the more than two centuries since its founding, we’ve legally determined that the votes of everyone born here or naturalized as a citizen are equal. Now, because Trump lost the election, Trump has decided that the votes in just certain states or certain parts of those states shouldn’t be counted because he says there was fraud – fraud that no Republican, or anyone else, has been able to prove… or even come up with a shred of verifiable evidence.

That hasn’t stopped Trump or the majority of Republican federal office holders from trying to use the courts to change the election results, something that has never happened before in our history. Why do these Republicans support an attempt at a de facto coup?

Pure and simple, they’re putting their political survival above the national interest, and they seem certain that their supporters won’t call them on it. Unhappily, all the polls and most of the Republican reaction seems to indicate that an attempted coup is all right with the majority of Republicans.

What’s also so sad and amusing about it is that if they all said to Trump, “You lost,” Trump wouldn’t have any power at all because he’d exhaust both his funds and public patience if he tried to attack them all.

So… all of those Republican politicians and officeholders who refuse to tell Trump the truth are either indeed cowardly, stupid, self-centered, unprincipled, or hypocritical, if not all of those… and the voters who support them are at the least stupid or totally ignorant… and if they aren’t stupid or ignorant, then they’re self-centered, unprincipled, and hypocritical.

Unless, of course, that they honestly believe that a right-wing dictatorship is preferable to an elected moderate President.

As most of my readers know, as a writer I don’t quite fit into any stereotype. My books get published through the traditional system [otherwise considered as equivalent to the “evil empire” or the dark side by some “indie” authors], but what I write doesn’t quite fit into any neat pigeonhole, at least not if one reads it carefully. I don’t have an agent and never had. But I spent almost twenty years in jobs requiring suits, and sometimes three-piece suits at that.

Before that, after college, I started out as a conventional naval officer – technically, a line officer – but quickly decided that it wasn’t for me. So I qualified to be considered for either SEAL training [I figured more than ten years of competitive swimming couldn’t hurt] or flight duty. When I saw all the running that the SEALs did, however, and considered the fact that I have short legs and small feet and that they were always running through sand, I opted for flight training, in the middle of the Vietnam War, giving up relatively safe duty for something that was anything but safe. I ended up as a helicopter search and rescue pilot, flying off of carriers, and occasionally landing on tight places on cliff-tops.

Although I’d read science fiction from my early teens on, I didn’t even consider writing it until I was nearly thirty, after I’d spent fifteen years writing poetry that only got published in small literary magazines… when it got published at all. And it took twenty years after my first story was published before I could afford to become a full-time writer.

All of that is likely why I’m somewhat surprised by an attitude I’ve seen in a certain segment of F&SF writers, who quite vocally, or rather in print, are so disparaging of “traditional” publishing. Traditional publishing really shouldn’t be called that – it’s large-scale commercial publishing. So-called “traditional” publishers are interested in selling large numbers of copies of what they print. Given their systems and cost structures, they can’t afford to sell less than roughly 5,000 hardcovers of a novel [these figures may be out of date, but the basic point remains]. They may occasionally do so, for books that editors think are “special,” but that doesn’t happen often.

A generation ago, an author who couldn’t sell that many books had nowhere to go. Happily today, with the advent of small presses, print-on-demand, and even Amazon [ another evil empire], authors who sell below the unofficial cutoffs of traditional publishing can still publish and sell their work, always assuming that they have a body of readers. To make a decent living that way generally requires a great deal of work… and the ability to turn out several novels a year. Some authors, but not that many, I suspect, who publish this way do quite well. Every year a few are even “recruited” by traditional publishers. From what I’ve observed, some gladly accept, just as I’ve seen some traditionally published authors walk away because they found traditional publishing too confining.

Yet I see comment after comment talking about the evils of traditional publishing, and even forecasts of its coming collapse. I don’t see that happening. I do see an industry in the middle of massive change. The numbers of mass market paperbacks printed and sold, once the preferred reading material of F&SF readers, have shrunk to a fraction of former sales, largely replaced first by e-books, and more recently by audiobooks. Hardcover sales, on the other hand, so far seem to be holding up.

Some readers, of course, now bemoan the costs of e-books released by traditional publishers, which, after the first year of release, are priced roughly the same as mass market paperbacks. That bemoaning, I suspect, is because self-publishing “indie” authors offer their books at a lower price. That pricing gains them readers, but the author pays for it in another way. He or she also has to deal personally with the details for covers, publicity, editing, proofing, etc., or hire others to do so… or risk presenting a technically inferior package. In effect, those writers are trading off writing time for production time.

But unlike the evil empire of Star Wars, traditional publishing isn’t out to destroy “indie” or self-publishing authors. Those publishers, like everyone else, are trying to make money. For the author, it’s much more a question of which costs an author chooses or is forced to bear, the “tyranny” of the “evil empire” or the greed of the readers in the self-publishing market, but they do have an option besides traditional publishing, unlike writers of an earlier time.

As some readers of F&SF may have read, the Disney corporation is stiffing author Alan Dean Foster. According to Foster, Disney has not paid royalties since 2014 on Star Wars books that Foster wrote. Disney has not responded to his inquiries and claims, and, in fact, Disney’s attorneys won’t even discuss the matter with Foster unless he signs a non-disclosure agreement. Alan and his wife are in poor health, and it would certainly be helpful to have the royalty payments he’s owed.

All Disney has said is that they only bought the “properties,” but not any contractual liabilities associated with those properties. If this position is applied across the economy, any corporation could sell itself and all its holdings to another corporation and shed its liabilities, stiffing its creditors.

Now… from what I can determine, while corporation employees can at least bring payment problems to the Labor Department, the only recourse Foster or any author or independent contractor has for non-payment is a civil lawsuit. The problem with this “recourse” is that virtually all independent contractors lack the financial resources to afford the extensive legal costs required to sue a mega-corporation and, if they had the resources, it normally wouldn’t make sense financially to pursue such litigation.

The late Harlan Ellison pursued copyright violations with a vengeance, spending over $40,000, according to one report, just in going after internet pirates. He also sued publishers and CBS, among others, but most of those lawsuits were before media became mega-corporations. He once was hired by Disney as a writer, and was almost immediately fired by Roy Disney. Most writers and independent contractors have neither the time nor the funds to do the same… and they shouldn’t have to.

Equally to the point is that the legal precedents go far beyond Alan Dean Foster’s situation or the applicability to other authors. I certainly can’t find any federal criminal statute that applies to failure to pay independent contractors, and with the expansion of the “gig economy,” unless something is done legislatively, it’s quite possible that other mega-corporations will follow Disney’s example. In effect, corporations could fail to pay independent contractors, as Trump has done on more than a few occasions, or underpay them even more, almost with impunity. While I suspect this is already occurring in cases besides that of Alan Dean Foster, unless the law is changed, those occurrences are bound to increase… and it’s just another example of why government action is necessary to rein in the mega-corporations, because individuals can’t muster the power or the resources to obtain fair treatment.

With the election of Joe Biden as the next President, the right-wing scare-mongers have revved up their rants about how the “ultra-liberal” Democrats are going to impose “socialist” measures of all sorts on the United States.

Even if, unlikely as it is, the Democrats win both Georgia Senate seats, they’ll only have a one vote edge in the Senate and that includes two independents, one of whom is Angus King, who left the Democratic Party almost thirty years ago because it had become too liberal. Add to that Joe Manchin, who has consistently opposed almost all “liberal” Democratic positions.

Any legislation that has a chance of passing the next Congress is going to have to have bipartisan support in the Senate or be a small and incremental improvement on existing programs and laws. In addition, as President, Joe Biden will be limited in creating new initiatives through Executive Orders.

Trump was successful largely because the vast majority of his successes lay in destroying or limiting existing programs. While Biden could restore some environmental regulations, he will be very limited in creating new programs without Congressional approval, and he’s not going to get approval of anything even remotely close to what the right-wing scare-mongers are claiming and projecting.

Some of what he may be able to get is a statutory ban on using pre-existing medical conditions to deny health care insurance or to require higher premiums for such insurance. It’s conceivable he might be able to get an increase in the federal minimum wage, but is it all that radical to push for a minimum wage that’s higher that the present one – which is set at 60% of the poverty level? He might also be able to reinstate some air pollution regulations rolled back by Trump, which would be helpful in allowing people to breathe without greater damage to their lungs.

But there won’t be any “Green New Deal” or “Medicare for Everyone,” no matter what the scare-mongers claim. Even getting improvements in the Affordable Care Act, beyond a ban on pre-existing conditions, will be difficult.

The votes just aren’t there, just as the votes weren’t there for Trump to be reelected, but that apparently doesn’t matter to the far right, which is, again, busy creating an alternate political reality, rather than trying to fix the one we have…and the one in which all of us, including Trump, will have to live.