Just as the so-enlightened voters of Utah have fallen for the tax cut scam, so it appears will the MAGA masses following the lead of Trump and his sycophantic followers in the U.S. House and Senate.

As I pointed out in an earlier blog, the Republican-dominated Utah state legislature has passed minuscule tax cuts (1/10 of one percent) each year for the past five years and appears likely to do so again this year. The poorest families would receive a tax cut of $24 a year, middle class families $174, while millionaires would get thousands in tax cuts. At the same time, the legislature increased tuition rates at all state colleges and universities roughly $300 per student per year and cut university and college budgets by tens of millions of dollars while student enrollment in Utah is still increasing.

Also, following the lead of Elon Musk, the legislature has, in the last few weeks, also mandated a further cut of $60 million in higher education for the 2025-26 school year and created a committee charged with further reducing college and university budgets.

While Utah’s rate of sexual assault is the ninth in the U.S. (only eight states have higher rates), legislators cut back funding dealing with that problem, and only made minimal increases for primary and secondary education, despite the fact that Utah has on average the largest class sizes in the nation.

On the federal level, Trump and Musk are pursuing the same sort of policies. They’re destroying middle class jobs, both among federal workers and in the civilian economy, to pay for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, and justifying those cuts by saying that private industry will create more jobs.

Really? Musk’s takeover of Twitter (or X) resulted in mass layoffs. Trump still delights in firing people, and Bezos’s policies don’t give workers time to eat and go to the bathroom.

There are a few old sayings that apply, such as “leopards don’t change their spots,” or “if it sounds too good to be true, it isn’t,” or “look before you leap,” but the Republicans don’t seem to recall any of them, preferring to glory in insignificant tax cuts for the masses, and major handouts to the rich.

Last Friday, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance browbeat Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the oval office and and attacked him for being ungrateful, as well as blamed him for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

What Trump, Vance, and the MAGA Republicans (who all fell into line behind Trump like the good little sycophants they are) seemingly forget is that the Russia/Ukraine conflict has never required the U.S. to put troops in the field, unlike all the other wars in which we’ve been involved. Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians have never asked for troops, only for weapons and equipment.

Trump (et al) also ignored the horrific acts continuously perpetrated by Russian troops, not to mention the prolonged drone attacks on civilian populations, and kept claiming that Zelenskyy wasn’t properly grateful. Shortly after that, CNN aired a montage of more than thirty separate occasions over the past three years in which Zelenskyy offered lengthy public thanks.

As usual, Trump made a raft of lies and misstatements, as is his wont, but when Zelenskyy attempted to set the record straight, that apparently offended Vance. No matter that both the British Prime Minister and the French President had to correct Trump as well when they met with him.

To date, Ukraine has lost 46,000 soldiers in combat, with 380,000 wounded, and suffered 40,000 civilian casualties, including 12,000 documented deaths, of which at least were 600 murdered children. In addition, Russia has illegally kidnapped nearly 20,000 children.

Russian military death claims total 85,000, and the Russian casualty figures are at least 500,000 and could be as high as 875,000. If I wanted to be purely mercenary about it, I could point out that we made a very good investment in supporting Ukraine, just because of the military and economic burden our aid imposed on Putin, all without costing an American life.

All Trump and the Republicans are concerned about are dollars, but the total of U.S. military aid sent (as opposed to that appropriated for possible use) to Ukraine amounts to some $120 billion, while European governments have supplied $140 billion – figures very much at variance with those incorrectly claimed by Trump.

But Zelenskyy clearly wasn’t subservient enough to Emperor Trump. But why should he be? He’s speaking on behalf of a nation that’s suffered roughly 60,000 deaths and half a million casualties from a Russian invasion, while Trump is demanding that Ukraine surrender to a despot so that the U.S. can save less money than it wastes annually (according to Trump), while claiming the U.S. is sending far more assistance that it actually has.

All this suggests that we’ve got an ignorant bully in the bully pulpit.

Governments owe certain services and infrastructure to their people, such as highways, impartial laws and courts, civic order, defense against invaders, and open and affordable communications systems.

Historically, the United States was one of the first nations to emphasize a national postal system. Among our founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin was firm in his determination that the United States should have a postal service. He even served as Postmaster General before there was a United States.

Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution mandates that Congress establish post offices and post roads. One of long-standing aspects of the Post Office and its successor, the Postal Service, has been the mission to provide mail access to all Americans, not just to people in cities or people who are physically or economically convenient to serve, but the vast majority of Americans.

While the Postal Service should be as cost-efficient as possible, cost-efficiency shouldn’t be its primary mission. Maintaining service to all Americans should be. That was why the post office and post roads were an essential part of the Constitution.

This background seems to have been forgotten. Amazon can use the Postal Service on Sundays to deliver packages for what I suspect is below the actual cost, using cost structures that I’ve critiqued previously for their unreality, and now Trump is talking about privatizing the Postal Service, enabling that “private” successor to gouge the public and provide less service.

We can run huge deficits for national defense and all manner of other “necessary” services, but comparatively small deficits for postal service are apparently taboo… which says a great deal about people and politicians, particularly about Republicans.

With all of the headlines about the actions of Trump and DOGE trying to cut out “wasteful” jobs with a chainsaw, so far, at least so far as I can tell, no one seems to have given much thought to the secondary and tertiary impacts of those cuts.

A relative of mine was let go last week. He wasn’t a federal employee, nor was he a lobbyist. He was a technical writer for a publishing services company, and he was laid off because one of the company’s larger clients was the Veterans Administration.

What Musk, DOGE, and Trump clearly fail to understand is that, in a great many instances, contrary to popular belief, it’s cheaper for government agencies to contract out services than to do them with government employees.

And even if it’s not, adding additional workloads on agency personnel to accomplish tasks previously contracted out is either going to slow down everything, actually increase costs, or reduce the amount of work done, if not some combination of all three, particularly if the agency is also cutting back on personnel.

Not only that, but the savings from cutting federal employees are limited. In 1960, federal employees were 4.3% of all US workers; today, they amount to only 1.4%. Zeroing out the entire federal payroll would save $271 billion a year, a mere 4% of the federal budget.

I’ve run a Congressional office, and several offices at EPA. I’ve also been a consultant working for some of the largest corporations in the United States, and the greatest waste I’ve seen has largely come from unwise Congressional mandates and laws.

First off, there’s the practice of “earmarking” where Representatives and Senators add or direct appropriations to pet projects in their state or district. A number of organizations and members of Congress have documented such earmarks, and those documented over the last ten years that I’ve been able to total amount to more than 10,000, costing more than $50 billion. And those were the ones I could easily find.

Far more serious are the instances of manipulation of defense funding for local economic development. I can remember the F-7 [The gutless Cutlass] mess from when I was a Navy pilot, because older pilots were still talking about the fact that Congressman Jim Wright (later Speaker of the House) dragged out production of the F-7 so that Chance-Vought would be able to deliver the far superior F-8, which massively increased the cost of the last F-7s, just in time for them to be retired.

More recently, in 2023 the Navy discovered that the so-called advanced littoral combat ships built in Wisconsin by Fincantieri Marinette Marine in partnership with Lockheed Martin, suffered a series of humiliating breakdowns, including repeated engine failures and technical shortcomings in an anti-submarine system intended to counter China’s growing naval capacity. The Navy decided to retire nine out of the ten ships built, because of the astronomical repair costs, telling Congress that would save $4.3 billion that could be used on other ships and systems. Various congressmen got involved, citing the 2,000 jobs that would be lost. In the end the Navy was only allowed to retire four ships and $3 billion more was allocated for repairs. – for ships originally budgeted to cost $220 million each and which eventually cost over $500 million each – before the $3 billion in repair costs.

Then there are the massive cost overruns associated with the F-35, and the Ford class of aircraft carriers, not to mention the cost of maintaining 750 military bases around the world, a number of which in the U.S. could likely be closed without adversely affecting military readiness – except they won’t be closed because various members of Congress will oppose closings in their states and districts.

But Trump and Musk want to funnel more funds to the armed services, while cutting the civilian logistical base, at a time when the military is having trouble retaining personnel.

None of this makes much sense.

The original idea behind insurance was to provide financial protection for infrequent, but catastrophic and unexpected events that a reasonable and prudent person could not expect to be able to pay, such as dying young, major damage to or destruction of a house or building, injury to others in an automobile accident, loss of an entire merchant ship and cargo… and similar events.

Insurance started out essentially as a form of mutual risk sharing for events that didn’t happen that often but which, when they did, could devastate an individual or a business. At that time, people were (theoretically) supposed to save for smaller adverse “rainy day” occurrences.

Yet now, rainy-day-savings seem to have vanished, replaced by what seems like insurance for everything. Not only do we have health insurance (which has become a necessity, given the high cost of medical care), but dental insurance, and nursing home insurance. The latest insurance bombarding the media is car repair insurance, but there’s now also appliance repair and replacement insurance, as well as pet insurance (possibly because veterinary medical costs have also skyrocketed). That doesn’t include roughly twenty other types of insurance, such as boat or ATV insurance and identity protection insurance and personal liability coverage.

The fact that so many types of coverage exist might just go hand in hand with the fact that the U.S. has a surfeit of attorneys, but the attorneys could easily counter with the fact that Americans tend to argue over everything.

Add to that the technological and legal complexity of our modern world and the increasing costs of everything, and the failure of working-class wages to keep up with the cost of living… and, unfortunately, because people have trouble in making ends meet in paying for the basics, insurance for everything becomes the default, because few Americans can save enough to pay for all possible adverse eventualities, particularly in a litigious society.

While Trump is “carrying out his promises” with a vengeance, what he’s doing is also carefully orchestrated political sleight of hand, spearheaded by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The majority of Americans (and particularly the far right and Trump supporters) has always been skeptical of foreign aid and federal intrusion into state and local schools (in the south especially). So how does Trump begin his second term?

By trying to abolish USAID and the Department of Education, of course, whose combined annual operating budgets are roughly $110 billion. Last year, from what I can determine, total federal outlays were $7 trillion, and the deficit was $711 billion. But eliminating USAID and the Department of Education won’t save $110 billion, because, for example, one of the Department of Education’s primary tasks is dealing with the $1.7 trillion student-loan portfolio and 40 million student-loan borrowers. So those administrative costs have to go somewhere else.

Most of the Department of Education’s budget funds federal student aid for higher education, subsidies for elementary and secondary schools with large shares of students from low-income families, and special education programs for children with special needs. States set broad rules that schools have to follow in return for those funds, but individual districts implement them, and they set the curriculum. The Department of Education is not controlling education. It is providing supplemental funds and requiring compliance with civil rights laws for using those funds. But eliminating the Department of Education would not “return” education to the states and would reduce the overall funding of primary and secondary education by an average of twenty percent, the greatest funding losses coming from schools in the poorest communities.

Other programs DOGE has marked for elimination are medical care for veterans, housing-assistance vouchers for low-income renters, college Pell Grants, the National Institutes of Health, the FBI, and NASA’s major initiatives.

In the meantime,last Friday, Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned after Justice Department leadership instructed her to drop the criminal corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, in order to obtain Adams’s “cooperation” with Trump immigration policies. In short, the Trump-controlled DOJ wants to offer Adams a literal get-out-of-jail card for doing what Trump wants on immigration in New York City. Legal bribery, in effect, that Sassoon refused to be any part of, despite being a Trump appointee and a member of the extremely conservative Federalist Society. Within days, at least six more senior career DOJ officials resigned in protest. The mass resignation appears to be the largest in DOJ since Watergate. The mass resignation appears to be the largest in DOJ since Watergate.

The latest DOGE target is the Federal Aviation Administration, where apparently all recently hired employees working to maintain the hardware and computer systems dealing with aviation safety have been informed that they will be fired. The FAA operates an antiquated system that needs desperately to be updated, but Congress has refused to fund such modernization. Instead, Trump and Musk, in a single stroke, are making it even harder for the Air Traffic Control system to operate safely.

DOGE is now also trying to gain access to the IRS data on all American taxpayers, while reducing personnel and making it even more difficult to track down tax evaders.

What we’re already seeing isn’t a real attempt to reduce inefficiency and waste, but the beginning of an all-out attack on every aspect of government Donald Trump and Elon Musk dislike, and especially on any aspect of government that might hold them accountable.

Over recent years and even decades, idealists have been holding up the idea of the meritocracy as the most ideal way to get to a “fairer” and more egalitarian U.S. society. They point out that everyone should be judged on their abilities and that will take care of the problem.

The problem with this idea is that we’re fairly close to that right now (that is, in the sense that in hiring for more and more jobs most people are judged on their credentials), and the current semi-meritocracy hasn’t created a fair and more egalitarian workplace, and that won’t happen so long as the system remains as it’s presently structured or as long as such concepts as “personal freedom,” self-determination, and market economy are part of the legal/social framework (and I’m definitely opposed to removing any of those).

One of the problems with the current “meritocracy” is that poorer or disadvantaged children of equal raw talent/native intelligence to those more advantaged (and thus better credentialed) don’t have anywhere near equal opportunity to refine their raw ability into usable and valuable skills that will allow them to benefit from higher education or advanced technical training.

In addition, the students able to benefit the most from college education are those individuals with the most resources, whose families can provide better nutrition, better economic and educational support (such as college and post-graduate degrees, as well as housing and living expenses) so that they enter the workforce with extensive credentials (since we are a society where success requires credentials for most people), with more developed contacts, and without debt. Unless society is going to strip away all income inequality (effectively destroying freedom), offspring of the well-off will always have an advantage in showing “merit.”.

The upper middle class can provide a certain amount of support for their offspring, but many of them will leave higher education with a certain amount of debt and sometimes a great deal more, without any certainty that they’ll be able to pay it off. And for the vast majority of offspring of less affluent or poor families, higher education means crippling debt, if they can even get into higher education.

Then, too, like it or not, studies show that standardized tests measure fairly accurately a student’s ability to handle college level work. The problem is that they don’t measure as well the ability to handle many post-education jobs, because too many college curricula don’t teach students to think or to persevere, and that’s yet another area where the children of the well-off have an advantage because more of them are taught the social codes of the elite and to think by their families.

So… unless one either destroys the elites and the upper middle class, which means total loss of freedom and rigid socialism, or provides more aid for the children of the working poor, we’ll remain an unequal semi-meritocracy

From what I can tell, Phase I of the second Trump presidency is where Trump issues executive orders on every campaign promise Trump made, whether or not those promises can legally be accomplished through executive orders. Some, such as eliminating cabinet-level departments, legally require action by Congress, although Trump will certainly attempt to accomplish as much as he can without Congressional authorization, and the Republicans in Congress would prefer that, for the most part, because it absolves them of responsibility.

Trump has now begun the process of impounding funds, i.e., refusing to spend money on programs he doesn’t like, even though Congress has authorized and appropriated the funds. Richard Nixon tried this in the early 1970s, which resulted in Congress passing the Impoundment and Control Act (ICA), and the U.S. Supreme Court telling the President that he couldn’t withhold funds already authorized and appropriated. Trump is apparently ignoring both the law and the Supreme Court ruling, and it’s likely that even the present Supreme Court will rule against him – but that process will take time, and in the interim, federal employees and programs will be hurt and disrupted. This could prove deadly this summer, if another hot, dry, and windy summer engulfs the western U.S., because more than 15,000 federal firefighters are seasonally employed.

Trump is also proposing firing rank-and-file federal employees in large numbers from long-established federal departments without Congressional approval, something equally against the law, although some “flexibility” is not beyond the realm of possibility, given the makeup of the current Supreme Court.

But if the legal restraints on Trump largely hold, what happens in Phase II? Will Trump continue the barrage of executive orders, attempting to overwhelm the legal system? Will he be able to pressure Congress as a whole to enact what he wants? Or will he attack and or pressure key Republicans and vulnerable Democrats?

If all that fails, will he then attempt to corrode/corrupt the legal system further in order to obtain what he wants? Or will he claim victory? [While that’s possible, in my opinion it’s more likely that he’ll attempt to destroy anything that thwarts his imperial desires.]

How effective will he be when wide-scale price increases begin to erode personal income and family budgets? Will people be smart enough to see that his token tax cuts for working and middle class earners don’t compensate for the increasing consumer prices? Or that getting rid of air traffic controllers, VA doctors and support staff, Forest Service firefighters, and other “excess” federal employees only makes life harder for Americans who aren’t billionaires?

Or will they cheer on Dictator/Emperor Trump?

The other morning in the course of my daily search, I came across this as part of an “AI Overview” on a Google search:

• The Saga of Recluce: A popular fantasy series that follows Rahl, a young apprentice who becomes a powerful mage

As those who’ve read the Recluce books know, Rahl is the protagonist of Natural Ordermage, and the Recluce Saga isn’t about just one protagonist. In fact, Rahl is the ninth protagonist (in publication order) of the saga.

The summary also states that I attended Williams College, which is slightly misleading because I graduated as well as attended.

Since that first occurrence, that same “AI Overview,” or one similar, has reoccurred on several occasions.

Obviously, such errors irritate me, but, more than that, they disturb me because an artificial intelligence (supposedly) is providing incorrect information at the same time that Google is touting its AI capabilities.

I didn’t even ask for a summary in my search. It was provided unasked for. So…not only is the information thrust upon me, but it’s wrong, and likely provided incorrectly to other searchers as well.

I’m also fairly certain that other erroneous information is being supplied by other AI overviews on differing subjects, simply because these AI overviews are based on internet-posted information, much of which isn’t fact checked in any way, but such “overviews” lend a credence to dubious or erroneous “facts.”

I wonder if DeepSeek would do any better.

Last week, President Trump effectively stated that the nation’s air safety was degraded by federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, even going on to say that FAA air traffic controllers needed to be “brilliant,” in a context implying that anyone benefiting from DEI policies was unqualified.

While federal DEI programs were designed to promote equal access, opportunity, employment, and inclusion of underrepresented people in the workplace, they did not override or supersede existing job or position requirements based on ability to do the job. Nor did they mandate replacing existing employees with underrepresented individuals. What they did attempt to override was a long-standing and unspoken cultural assumption that the best person for a position was a straight white male.

The problem with DEI was that it went too far, especially on the state level and elsewhere, with an assumption that diversity, equity, and inclusion can and should be mandated, and achieved instantly and without adverse legal effects, rather than requiring efforts to attain DEI objectives.

The state of California enacted a law requiring corporations to place members of unrepresented groups on their corporate boards. That requirement was struck down by a federal judge in California, but the state is pursuing an appeal. The Nasdaq Stock Market had required corporations listed on the exchange to report that they had, or explain why they did not have, racial, gender or LGBTQIA+ diversity among the directors on their boards. That requirement was struck down by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Both decisions were based on earlier Supreme Court rulings that racial and ethnic quotas are unconstitutional.

The examples of DEI overreach created a backlash, primarily from conservative white males, who saw and apparently continue to see DEI policies as a threat, with the result that Trump issued an executive order not only eliminating all federal DEI policies and actions, but also effectively removing most federal affirmative action programs and threatening to remove federal educational aid to colleges and universities that do not remove all DEI policies and programs. (Of course, Utah already did that last summer).

In the end, overreach by either side usually results in overreaction, certainly as it has in this instance. Unfortunately, it appears that this was just the beginning.

The Amazon “survey” that I conducted last week revealed the emphasis and market power of series or linked books, but I didn’t say much about one of the most negative aspects – the fact that books not linked to “series” don’t sell well (at least not in the fantasy genre). Out of the 500 fantasy novels I looked through, so far as I could determine, less than a score, possibly less than that, were stand-alone novels.

I’m well aware of that problem. My last two stand-alone novels were Solar Express (2015) and Quantum Shadows (2020), neither of which sold anywhere near what my “series” books do. Every once in a while, a “series” author does write a stand-alone novel that’s wildly successful (such as V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue), but that’s the rare exception and not the general rule.

Even modest-selling linked books are being pushed out of the marketplace. I was thinking about writing another novel in my Ghost world, but Tor had no interest in such a book, and I know several midlist authors who can no longer sell novels to commercial U.S. publishers because their work doesn’t sell enough against the impact and marketing of multi-volume mega series.

Series books written by a single author have been around from the beginning of science fiction as a genre, but became more prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, including E.C. Tubb’s Dumarest series, Doc Smith’s Lensman books, and Marian Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover books, but these were essentially science fiction (if with often dubious science). The first popular English fantasy series is likely that of L. Frank Baum, beginning with The Wizard of Oz in 1900 and continuing with other authors for roughly 30 years, but after that, there wasn’t that much interest in multiple fantasies in a continuing setting until after the U.S. publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in 1965, although the first widely popular non-Tolkien-spinoff fantasy series was The Wheel of Time, after which all manner of fantasy series proliferated (including the Saga of Recluce).

This proliferation has turned into an unkempt jungle, in which very few stand-alone fantasies rise out of the canopy of intertwined series. One of the ironies of the Recluce Saga is that, unlike The Wheel of Time, which was planned as a series from the beginning, The Magic of Recluce was written as a stand-alone novel, and after its initial publication, David Hartwell, my long-time editor until his death, asked for a sequel.

So, in a way, I’m also part of the problem, but I still continue to worry about the over-emphasis on mega-selling series and the way in which the internet and the marketing strategies of Amazon and Barnes & Noble effectively force traditional publishers to minimize stand-alone novels and make it ever more difficult for unknown authors to self-market.

Donald Trump appears to be out to undo one of the philosophical and legal bases of the United States – the idea that the United States is based on the rule of law and that our representative democratic republic is a government based on laws, and not on men. He’s also served notice – again – that he’s above the law.

This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, at least if they think about it. Trump declares that any law he dislikes is aimed at him personally, and he’s apparently willing to pardon anyone convicted of breaking a law he or his followers don’t like.

He’s already attempted to undo the birthright section of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and pardoned every single person convicted of anything to do with the January 6th insurrection, as well as pardoning anti-abortion activists who were convicted of using violence against abortion clinics and against those attempting to use such facilities.

He’s immediately fired eighteen federal inspectors general (whose job is to monitor federal agencies for misfeasance, malfeasance and/or corruption) without notice, even though the law requires him to notify Congress thirty days in advance of any planned removal.

Under Trump’s orders, acting Attorney General James McHenry has fired twelve Department of Justice attorneys not because they didn’t do their jobs, but because they cannot be “trusted” to “faithfully” implement Trump’s agenda. The actual language of the dismissal letters reads:

“You played a significant role in prosecuting President Trump. The proper functioning of government critically depends on the trust superior officials place in their subordinates… Given your significant role in prosecuting the President, I do not believe that the leadership of the Department can trust you to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully.”

Attorneys and officials at the Department of Justice are tasked with enforcing the laws of the land, not with implementing the agenda of the President.

Trump’s also removed Secret Service protection from two Republicans who served in his first administration where they carried out Trump’s orders and policies. Because they did, both have become targets for Islamic extremists, yet because both have been critical of him, Trump has removed their protection.

And for all the talk about illegal immigration, one of Trump’s first acts was to freeze and nullify the legal immigration process for people who’ve completely followed the legal procedures and were nearly through the process.

And all this has come to light in just one week. What else is in the works… and what other laws will Trump attempt to trash or flout?

As the old radio/TV slogan says, “Stay tuned!”

Finding” decent” books is getting harder and harder, “decent” meaning books from which I can derive both entertainment and enlightenment, without being depressed as hell.

It’s not that such books don’t exist, but finding them is getting somewhere between difficult and close to impossible, particularly if you live in a town/small city of 50,000 people some sixty miles from the nearest large bookstore. But even if I did live closer to that store, it wouldn’t help much because, that Barnes & Noble store carries an incredibly limited stock of speculative fiction, as do many these days.

Then, of course, there’s Amazon, where everything under the sun is theoretically listed. I checked out “fantasy books,” supposedly ranked by best-seller listing, and went through the first 150 books listed. Of those 150, a third were “sponsored,” i.e., placed there because someone paid for that placement. More than half were by “name” series authors, i.e., Sarah Maas, Brandon Sanderson, Jennifer Armentrout. Ten percent were variations on endless series, and that left roughly six to eight books, half of which I’d read. (Disclosure: I have read several Sarah Maas books, and a few Brandon Sanderson books, but those few were enough for me).

After roughly 350 books, the number of “sponsored” books stabilized at around six out of roughly twenty-five, and right about that point, Overcaptain showed up. I went through over 500 books before I quit. Out of all those 500, I bought exactly one book, by an author I recognized, having read one of her books several years back.

Now, because I was counting as I browsed, it took a bit longer, but spending an hour plus searching for a book I might like is why many readers rely on the recommendations of others. My problem is that my tastes differ from those of most reviewers, possibly because I’ve been reading so long that I really don’t like mindless or single-minded mayhem, nor graphic violence and explicit sex. I’m also not all that fond of “whipped cream” reading unless it’s really good whipped cream (like Legends & Lattes), and I don’t read it all that often because more often than that is cloying.

The other day I read what was a quite good and well-written military/dragon novel – until I got to the ultra-sex romantasy part, which I skimmed, and which was, to me, a considerable detraction(but apparently not to many readers, since the book was listed in the first four Amazon pages).

All of which may be obvious, but, at the least, I thought the Amazon numbers were intriguing.

Trump’s Inaugural Address definitely set the tone for the next year, and possibly for the next four. Why do I say “possibly?”

For one thing, Trump has promised some things that, at least under the Constitution, he cannot do. Birthright citizenship was established by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, but Trump’s legal advisors claim that the language of the amendment – “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” — allows federal government not to recognize automatic birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents without legal status. One way or another, any government action to deny birthright citizenship will come before the Supreme Court.

If the Supreme Court agrees with such a broad interpretation, then some estimates show that as many as five million people in the U.S. could be affected. Even more important, such a ruling would also suggest that the Supreme Court would effectively be a rubber stamp for Trump, and that the government has the ability to circumvent the Constitution.

If the Supreme Court denies that interpretation, then Trump will be somewhat limited in what he can accomplish, although he now has the means to block almost all legal immigration and has already apparently closed the southern border.

Changing the name of the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America” is problematical, although he could conceivably require that name change on all maps and publications printed by the U.S. government, but he certainly doesn’t have the legal authority to require map-makers elsewhere to comply, even U.S. mapmakers.

And those are just the beginning of the struggles that Trump faces, which means “interesting” (in the worst way possible) years ahead for all of us.

Often, in U.S. culture, Justice is portrayed as a blindfolded female goddess holding a set of scales with two pans to weigh the evidence. Now, of course, I could ask more than a few questions, such as how could she see the results if she’s blindfolded or how does she know the evidence is valid if she can’t see it, but those questions spoil the image and the metaphor.

Yet, in so many ways in the United States, the pursuit of justice can be blind, and it’s certainly biased against those without the resources to fully utilize the skills and tools of law.

The fact is that the majority of criminal charges in U.S. courts are settled through plea bargains, with various studies showing that only two to ten percent (depending on the study) of criminal cases are settled by actual full-scale trials, with evidence and legal examinations, etc. Why are there so few actual trials without a plea bargain? The answer, as in so many areas of U.S. culture, is simply money. Trials cost money and take time, and few criminal defendants have any significant financial assets, and most public defenders are overloaded, underpaid, and less experienced. In that sense, lack of money can blind justice.

But there’s also another blindness in criminal justice, and that blindness, or at least impairment, lies in which cases law enforcement pursues and how effectively they’re pursued. When Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO, was gunned down in New York, a nationwide hunt ensued, and the news has been filled with stories about his death. But 23 others were killed in New York City in December, and none of them received such coverage or such intensive law enforcement efforts – likely not even close. Most of them are statistics to everyone but immediate friends and family.

How many murders go unsolved? Currently, roughly half of all homicides in the U.S. go unsolved, but how many more might be solved if the level of resources focused on finding Brian Thompson’s killer were focused on all murders? Except they can’t be, because local authorities don’t have enough resources, and why justice is so often blind… in the worst way.

Recently, a number of readers have commented and/or complained about how long it takes between the time I finish a book and when it appears in print, often telling me or my publisher to release the books sooner. While the time delay might seem capricious or calculated for some nefarious reason, unfortunately, it’s not.

Publishers, at least my publisher, won’t schedule a book for release until it’s under contract, and I’m one of the few writers who won’t ask for a contract until I’ve usually finished the first draft of a book. Getting a contract through the paperwork of a publisher can take weeks, if not longer, depending on the time of year.

That’s one reason why it takes longer from the time I announce a book until it’s published, but I’m old fashioned in that I prefer to write a book without either time pressure or pressure from editors or marketing people to write a particular kind of book or to slant a book in one way or another. Also, while I announce when I’ve finished a book, I wouldn’t be surprised if some authors don’t announce a new book until it’s been scheduled.

The second reason is that spacing two similar books, i.e., two Recluce books, closer together than ten months reduces the sales of both books. Neither the publisher nor I favor that. As readers can note, this doesn’t apply to books in a different series, which is why Legalist is being released roughly three months after Sub-Majer’s Challenge .

The third reason is that Amazon and Barnes & Noble require at least a year’s advance notice of publication of a book, or they won’t commit to carrying as many copies. Although my books sell modestly well, no single book is or has been a “million-seller,” and that means Tor has to play by the rules of the big retailers in positioning when my books are released.

None of these reasons make eager readers happy, but they’re the facts of a marketplace in which I write, and while I did manage to get Tor to space the Recluce books closer together, that’s the limit of what I can do.

As I was walking the dogs this morning, we passed a tall flagpole in the front yard of a house on our normal route. Instead of the usual two flags – the U.S. flag above the Australian flag – only the U.S. flag was displayed, at half-mast, clearly in memory of former President Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter was, as his entire life demonstrated, a good man. He wasn’t the best politician the United States has had as President, but he was far from the worst. Like many men who are successful in business, he tended to try do too much himself and he strove to make things better, excellent if possible. This is a great temptation in government, since successful government is based on compromise, simply because too many people want more from their government than any government can deliver, and compromise too often undermines excellence.

In the end, in his administration, despite his success on many fronts, Carter wasn’t successful in persuading people of his real achievements as President, and the combination of inflation and the Iran crisis led to his loss in the 1980 election. Ironically, the credit for one of his greatest accomplishments – appointing and supporting Paul Volcker and the policies that finally broke the near-runaway inflation of the 1970s – went largely to Ronald Reagan, a pattern that persists to this day, because most Americans are too focused on today and too ignorant about how government and economics really work and how long it takes to change economic conditions.

Whether history will be kinder and more objective about the Carter administration remains to be seen, but there’s no doubt about the accomplishments of his post-presidential career, including the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for his life-long humanitarian efforts.

Somehow, I think I’ll remember seeing that sole United States flag at half-mast for a long time.

CEO turnovers are up — considerably, at possibly the highest rate in years.

One of the reasons cited by analysts is that while the profits of the “Magnificent Seven” (Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia, Meta Platforms, and Tesla) have ballooned in recent years, the returns of other corporations, while perfectly decent, aren’t keeping pace, and the corporate boards of other corporacions are demanding more from their CEOs.

So… everyone wants more profits, and CEO’s who don’t deliver get sacked or are forced out.

At the same time, there are only three ways to increase profits – be more innovative, cut costs, and raise prices. Being more innovative usually means using knowledge and technology to do more with fewer people or less material. Fewer people means more stress on those who remain, and even more stress on those who lose jobs. Less material means less durable products and higher costs to customers over time. Cutting costs means paying people less or paying fewer people and/or paying suppliers less.

In short, pushing for more and more profit screws pretty much everyone (and sometimes even CEOs) except large shareholders.

Or put another way, when is more profit too much? Or is it ever too much?

So often in my life, I’ve heard, or overheard, phrases along the lines of, “It’s not personal; we need to make a change…” Or it’s not personal because corporate headquarters, or the state legislature, or someone else cut the funding. It might not be “personal” because the business is failing.

But whatever the cause, to the person or people affected, it’s personal; it’s very personal.

And for large corporations, such as United Healthcare, it’s definitely never personal. It’s just about the need to maintain profit, and whether the so-called “impersonal” axe falls on employees being let go or policyholders not getting the benefits they paid for, the corporation seldom, if ever, considers the personal costs.

Yet, in a way, many of the “personal decisions” are in fact personal, just not in the way most people would consider personal. Corporate profit increases tend to boost the price of the stock, and, in the case of most CEOs, increasing profits and stock prices increase their compensation. According to the latest publicly reported information, Brian Thompson was paid slightly more than $10 million annually. But his salary was only one million dollars. The rest, 90%, came from stock, stock options, and bonuses.

So those decisions on how to raise profits had a decidedly personal effect on Mr. Thompson. He may not have considered the algorithms “personal,” but they not only increased the negative effects of healthcare denials and delays on policy holders in order to increase profits., but also significantly increased his personal compensation.

Not personal… really?

In the case of Brian Thompson’s murder, there’s been a decidedly strong reaction on both sides, and that clouds the underlying issues that led to his death.

According to all reports, Thompson was a devoted and dedicated husband and family man, and a respected and well-liked colleague by those in the health insurance field. The healthcare industry is clearly stunned by the public reaction and how many people viewed his death with little or no sympathy.

But the fact is that Thompson was also a cold-eyed, analytical, profit-maximizing executive who clearly had no difficulty making decisions and implementing programs and systems that devastated thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of families in order to maintain or increase corporate profit margins. During his tenure as President of United Healthcare, Thompson raised profits from $10 billion to $16 billion, a sixty percent increase in three years. During that period, UnitedHealthcare was rated the worst of all U.S. healthcare firms in denying claims, turning down 32% of all claims, twice the industry average of 16%. For this, he was paid over $10 million last year.

What I find disturbing is the “mainstream” news media’s emphasis on Thompson the family man and nice guy persona, who was unjustly murdered. I’m not condoning the murder or the murderer, who appears to personify anti-establishment zealotry, and represents, on the other side, the same lack of humanity that Thompson represented professionally in his time with United Healthcare.

Just because Thompson was a loving devoted family man in his personal life and a good professional colleague doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a cold-blooded bastard in designing, implementing, and using methodologies designed to deny healthcare to people who had already paid for what they believed was adequate coverage.

At least one media newscaster made a comment along the lines that Thompson was just doing his job, but what was his job? Was it to effectively fund the healthcare of millions of Americans so that they could receive proper medical treatment, or was it principally to increase the profits of United Healthcare? That 32% rejection rate and 60% profit increase strongly suggest that the health of United Healthcare’s Medicare Advantage and other patients came in a distant second place to increased profits.

And the healthcare insurance industry is stunned by the reaction to his murder?