I’ve always been a big fan of facts. When I was in school, though, I often got in trouble because I didn’t apply the scientific method to so-called facts I ran across. Some of those “facts” I embraced were from extended family members and some from unreliable print sources – like the 1910 encyclopedia from my grandparents’ attic, where some facts weren’t so much wrong as outdated. As I grew older, I did learn a bit more about facts, and when it might be painful to insist on factual accuracy. For example, adults didn’t like it when interrupted with an observation that their facts were incorrect, even when a reference book showed they were nowhere close

In college I learned in depth about another way of presenting facts – statistics. Later on, as an industrial economist and as a political staffer, I learned more than a few ways of lying, or sometimes just exaggerating, with absolutely accurate statistics.

But, really, facts and accurate statistics, even accurately and objectively presented, won’t change people’s minds when they’re emotionally convinced of something.

As we all know, or should know, some deeply held beliefs aren’t rational. I have an acquaintance who is absolutely and deeply convinced that a ban on assault rifles… or even a ban on rifle magazines that hold more than 25 cartridges – will inexorably and immediately lead to the repeal of the second amendment. There are a few facts in the way of that development. First, to ban all firearms would require a Constitutional amendment, and such an amendment has to win a two-thirds vote of both Houses of Congress, and then must be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures, meaning by 38 states. Right now, Republicans control legislatures in 31 states, and with the polarization in the U.S., there’s no way Congress, even by a simple majority, would vote to outlaw all guns, let alone thirty eight states.

Doesn’t matter. This acquaintance is absolutely convinced that any “weakness” by firearms’ rights activists will lead to the loss of all their guns. And he’s not the only one, and it’s not the only issue where people’s mindsets and what they believe have no basis in the facts.

There’s no reputable evidence or study to support the vast majority of claims by antivaxxers. Doesn’t matter. They’re not about to change.

There’s no recent evidence of massive voter fraud. The Heritage Foundation, an ultraconservative think tank, did its best to dig up voter fraud in the U.S. and documented almost 1,300 cases of voter fraud in all elections in the U.S. for more than 20 years. That sounds like a lot, but virtually all the cases involved individuals, and were spread across multiple elections in fifty states. At a minimum, that involves ten federal elections in 50 states, and with both primary and general elections, that’s 2,000 separate elections. So the average fraud level was less than one person per election. That’s an insignificant number compared to the number of voters and elections. Yet right wing conservatives are convinced massive voter fraud exists… because that’s what their emotions tell them.

So who believes all that shit? People who want to, regardless of solid facts.

The 2018 film, The Green Book , depicts a 1962 tour by Don Shirley, an extraordinary black classical and jazz pianist, who melded jazz and classical music on that tour and in the majority of his public performances. What most viewers of the movie likely didn’t know was that in terms of ability, Shirley was one of the greatest classical piano virtuosos of the 1950s and 1960s. The composer Igor Stravinsky, a contemporary of Shirley’s, said of him, “His virtuosity is worthy of Gods.”

Shirley also wrote organ symphonies, piano concerti, a cello concerto, three string quartets, a one-act opera, works for organ, piano and violin, a symphonic tone poem based on the 1939 novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, and a set of “Variations” on the 1858 opera Orpheus in the Underworld.

Although he performed with a number of the great symphony orchestras, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, and the New York Philharmonic, the majority of his income came from his classical-jazz fusion performances and recordings, because, in the 1950s, only a handful of classical pianists could make a living, and many classical venues felt that a black classical pianist would not draw audiences.

Shirley was able to stay in music because he was versatile and gifted enough to shift his focus and performance largely to jazz. It was certainly his decision to do so, but the choice he faced was whether to starve as a black classical pianist and composer or to use his talents in another musical genre. In a real sense, if he wanted to remain a musician, he had to put classical performing and composing on a back burner.

Shirley certainly wasn’t the first musician or creative artist to run into difficulties not of their own making that forced a change in career emphasis. In music, the changes in popular tastes are obvious, and popular tastes dictate who, and how many, can make a living performing or composing in a particular way or style. 1950s style rock and roll is gone. For the most part, so is the folk music of the sixties, etc. Some musicians are versatile enough to shift; others aren’t. Those who aren’t tend to be marginalized or totally unable to make a living.

In writing, times also change. How fast they change depends, from what I’ve seen, on the literary genre. What is published and “popular” in poetry has changed drastically over the past fifty years, largely, I suspect, because poetry is not commercially successful and is effectively subsidized in various ways. Because the “market” has changed, I suspect that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for a “traditional” poet, no matter how accomplished and how talented, who emphasized formal rhyme and meter to be widely published or acclaimed.

On the other hand, F&SF is a commercial marketplace, meaning that it’s big enough to support a range of subgenres, based on the preferences of readers. Even so, I’ve seen that certain of my books sell far less well than others, and that’s one reason why I don’t write many of that type, much as I enjoy writing them, but, like Don Shirley and others, I still need to make a living… and it’s the kind of choice most creative artists have to make, one way or another.

How many people in the U.S. have died of the coronavirus? According to the official U.S. death toll as I write, this, the number is 76,600. Today the Christian Science Monitor reported that, according to the latest Axios-Ipsos poll, 63% of Democrats say that number is an undercount, while a plurality of Republicans (40%) believes the figure is inflated.

Yet a wide range of studies and reports conclude that undercounting coronavirus deaths is widespread.

A New York Times study concluded that in just nine states, in March and April alone, the death undercount was close to 9,000. A study by the Yale Medical School reported in the Washington Post came to a similar conclusion.

Reports from numerous sources indicate that both the number of covid cases and deaths in Texas have been significantly under-reported, particularly among prison inmates and people in nursing homes, and Governor Abbott has refused to address the discrepancies.

According to the CDC and other health organizations, virtually all pandemics have been initially undercounted, for various reasons, partly because not all health workers recognize the signs of a new disease and then because record-keeping suffers when the health system gets overwhelmed.

So why the wide discrepancy between Democrats and Republicans?

One reason for that discrepancy is obvious. All of us tend to believe what we see around us. I live in an overwhelming Republican state with only one moderately large city and a whole lot of space elsewhere. The entire state has less than 6,000 cases, and less than 70 deaths. Needless to say, most Republicans here think the problem is overstated. Republicans tend to predominate in rural areas, and those areas generally, like Utah, are spread out more. Republicans also tend to have a greater percentage of those well-off who live in less crowded and more sanitary areas – which means they don’t see the deaths and the suffering to the same degree.

And it doesn’t help when the Republican President downplays the severity of the situation.

Democrats, on the other hand, are more likely to see the deaths or be personally affected. The coronavirus thrives best in densely populated and connected areas, which is why New York City, New Jersey, and Connecticut, as well as Detroit and Chicago and other dense urban areas, are getting hammered by the virus. In those locales, health professionals and others have been storing bodies in refrigerated trucks and makeshift morgues. New York has discovered funeral homes overwhelmed with bodies. Under those conditions, undercounts are far more likely than overcounts. And those areas are also highly Democratic in their voting allegiance.

No… the coronavirus hasn’t taken a strong hold here, and it may not, given the more rural nature of Cedar City, which so far has only had 30 cases and one death, and the folks here have a tendency to discount just how bad it can be elsewhere. But we have a daughter who’s a doctor at a major medical center in Virginia, and grown children in New York City, Boston, and the Washington, D.C., area, and everything they’re telling me is a far different story than what’s happening in Cedar City.

While we’d like to believe what we see is what the rest of the country is like…sometimes, it just isn’t, and, if you don’t see this, you should consider giving more credence to those media reports you distrust than to your own pleasant surroundings.

Everyone likes “free stuff,” especially if they don’t consider the costs of those “free” goodies, but there’s a cost to the “free” stuff. Facebook is “free” to users, but, as one tech type put it, that’s because the users are really the product. This was brought home to me personally when I installed AdBlock on my computer, and suddenly I couldn’t get access to all sorts of excerpts from publications unless I whitelisted them or removed AdBlock. Mostly, I just don’t bother.

But there are other kinds of “free stuff” that aren’t free, and were never meant to be considered as such, that are targeted by the political extremists on both sides. Right wingers have a tendency to classify social programs such as SNAP ((once known as Food Stamps), Medicaid, and AFDC as free stuff for the poor. These programs are generally considered a social and practical necessity, even though some participants continually abuse the system. The reason why politicians keep funding the system is because of something no one really wants to admit publicly – that without funneling aid to families a lot of children would suffer, if not die, of starvation. So far, no government anywhere has figured out a practical and legal way to feed needy children without also feeding a certain proportion of not so needy adults – and sometimes adults who could work but who’ve discovered that welfare pays better than the jobs they could get paid to do.

What’s more often neglected in the criticism of “free stuff” are other services paid for by taxes where the users of those services get such services at well below costs. Some of those I’ve mentioned before, such as the massive subsidies received from the U.S. Postal Service by charitable or non-profit organizations who can send me a letter for roughly 11 cents, while it costs “regular” users 50 cents… or the massive subsidies for bulk rate mail – and don’t send me refutations unless you include the infrastructure costs as well [because those aren’t included in USPS cost justifications, and using marginal costs is a scam when more than eighty percent of your volume by weight is from discounted service].

For the past several years, banks have been able to borrow money from the Fed almost “free” because of federal fiscal and monetary policies, and that means anyone with a savings account has been screwed, which also resulted in investors trying to get better returns in the stock market, which has caused all sorts of other problems. But I don’t see the financial community complaining about the ills of “free money.”

Nor do I see corporations with healthy profits who pay no federal taxes complaining about that sort of “free money” or wealthy individuals who pocket “free money” in the form of lower taxes because of exemptions or loopholes that the majority of Americans can’t use because they don’t have the assets to do so.

So… when you complain about “free” stuff, make sure you include the free or discounted goodies you get.

Social Darwinism comes in many flavors, most of which emerged in the United Kingdom, North America, and Western Europe in the 1870s, and which attempted to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology and politics. Basically, Social Darwinists argue that the strong should see their wealth and power increase while the weak should see their wealth and power decrease.

The considerable flaws involved with applying natural selection to explain individuals’ success or failure in society have been documented in depth, but there’s one aspect of the issue that troubles me, and that’s the definition of “the fittest.” Is fitness determined by physical strength, by intelligence, by biological resilience… or by something else?

What if, in terms, of natural selection, fitness isn’t intelligence or strength? What if it’s something we’ve not considered before? And what if it applies to politics?

Over the past seventy years, the voters of the United States have historically been wary of overtly intelligent Presidential candidates, and those of high intelligence who have been elected have, for the most part, gone out of their way to downplay that intelligence. Then, there have been presidents who obviously had no need to downplay their intelligence.

When a President asks seriously about whether there are any benefits to ingesting strong disinfectants – any later fallacious claims that he was baiting the press notwithstanding – this certainly isn’t a display of intelligence. Nor is contradicting himself day after day, or denying he said something that millions have heard and that is recorded world-wide. Nor is asserting “facts” that have consistently proven to be untrue.

So what factor does Trump have that overshadows his considerable and obvious faults? What factor is so great that even when he’s botched the handling of the coronavirus crisis that forty percent of the U.S. population still supports him?

Could it just be that the characteristic that spells out fitness in natural selection, or political natural selection, is simply the ability to convince people of the most improbable and factually incorrect explanations of anything?

That would certainly explain Trump… although it doesn’t say much for forty percent of the American people.