Sometimes, it’s called the myth of the Frontier, or “Superman,” or “Rambo,” or even Trump, but in the end, this all too popular myth infuses American culture. The basic idea is that “the others” are evil, and that only the chosen one can put things right, because the laws are ineffectual or even part of the evil.

Yet, for all the growing popularity of the myth of “the One,” for the most part, the myth is not only a fallacy, but its popularity undermines the very roots of society.

Take a good look at history. In recent years, archaeologists have discovered that once upon a time, there were a good number of human species and forebears, and given the rate that more ancestral species are being dug up (literally), it’s like that we’ll find even more. All of that raises the question as to why homo sapiens is the only one to survive.

Although archaeologists don’t like speculating on why this is so, as a F&SF writer I don’t have that problem, and, to me, at least, the answer is simple. For all our infighting, based on the evidence so far unearthed, homo sapiens is and was the most social of all primate species, and apparently the only species able to live in larger groups.

That cooperation is what allowed the development of technology. No matter how bright an individual is, the requirements for survival require pooling efforts, initiative, and intelligence to get above a hunter-gatherer existence, and the higher the level of technology and standard of living one desires, the more cooperation that is required.

Unfortunately, the myth of individual inspiration or sole genius (an offshoot corollary of the myth of “the One”) also pervades society, particularly American society, often ignoring actual facts. Despite all the citations, James Watt didn’t invent the steam engine from whole cloth. He improved on the design of Thomas Newcomen, who in turn had improved on the initial design of Thomas Savery. Isaac Newton acknowledged that his discoveries were based on the discoveries of those before him.

This has been the pattern of all technological development and materials science. History has also shown, rather conclusively, that government by dictator is unstable and unworkable over any period of time, and that broad-based governments that acknowledge individual rights and responsibilities under law tend to be more stable.

Yet today in the United States, too many people are still flocking to the myth of “the One,” looking for the one person [usually male] who can save them and the country. They overlook the fact that, like it or not, messy as it’s been, Joe Biden has, through cooperation and persuasion, accomplished more in two years than Trump did in his entire term.

Conservatives often cite Ronald Reagan as “the man,” but most of them who cite him weren’t there. I was, and I actually served in the Reagan Administration, which was remarkably decentralized and cooperative [admittedly with several major gaffes and disasters] and was anything but one-man-rule.

The real solution to current problems lies in rejecting the myth of “the One” and all it’s corollaries and permutations (such as the idea that only one political party represents “truth” and the way), and returning to constructive cooperation. “One man” ideas will only divide us more.

The last days of the 117th Congress are dribbling away, and the remaining question is whether the Democrats will fumble the ball, so to speak, and subject the nation to a total mess in January, when Republicans theoretically take over the House of Representatives, with dubious leadership, if it can even be called that, given something like 170 of the 222 Republican members of the House are essentially election-deniers and the far-right wingnuts currently have enough votes to deny Kevin McCarthy the Speaker’s gavel. In short, there are even more Republican nay-sayers than ever before, and that doesn’t bode well for anything constructive.

Democrats ought to understand that NOTHING constructive will get done in the next six months, if not longer, given that the Republican nutjobs are focused on investigations and impeachments that will solve nothing, because, first, Hunter Biden hasn’t ever been a member of the Biden administration and his father never had any financial ties to his son’s business dealings, and second, any impeachment of either Joe Biden or any other administration official will go nowhere in the Senate, if it even gets that far.

For all that, and the Democratic rhetoric that they have a “framework” to work out an overall appropriations bill for the fiscal year ending in September, I have to say that I worry that the progressives and the more conservative Democrats will get hung up over pet projects and peeves and lose sight of what can be done while insisting on what cannot be done, especially in four days.

Yes, Biden and the Democrats have actually accomplished a lot, but much of that will be undone without an overall appropriations bill to fund some of those programs. Democrats also need to realize that they’ll be the ones held accountable if the money’s not there, and Kevin McCarthy would like nothing better than to gut programs and blame it on the Democrats.

So… will the Democrats come up with something sensible that can be passed, or will they attempt a massive and futile Hail Mary spending bill… and undercut all they’ve accomplished?

At our house, we decorate for various seasons, and for holidays. The degree of decoration depends on various factors, such as the holiday and or season.

Post-new-year winter decorations consist of two door wreaths and two urns with faux winter foliage. Easter sometimes gets egg wreaths or spring foliage wreaths and urns with spring foliage. Summer is slightly more festive, except for the Fourth of July when we put red, white, and blue bunting across the deck railing that extends the length of the rear deck, and patriotic décor on the dining room table.

But when autumn comes the decorations get more serious, with not only door wreaths and harvest urns, but also lots of faux pumpkins on the front porch, a harvest display around the fireplace, and an elaborate dining room display that starts harvest/Halloween and then becomes Harvest/Thanksgiving.

The grand finale is Christmas, with front porch displays, lighted lawn decorations, and roof-line lights, and lights and garlands on the deck, not to mention a mantel display of lights and miniature carolers and white deer, with stockings beneath, an elaborate Christmas tree, as well as rotating décor and decorations from my wife the professor’s some sixty plus boxes of Christmas “stuff” gathered over more than forty years.

EXCEPT… this year, we have no family coming, and we’ve both just recovered from Covid [despite two shots and three boosters each], and we decided to downsize for Christmas, with just the Christmas tree, smaller mantel display, a few more outside wreaths, and miniature lighted evergreens along the front walk… and just one lighted brand-new lawn ornament – a cheerful dog wearing a Santa hat and pouncing on a red-and-green wrapped Christmas present.

I set up the dog a little over two weeks ago, pounding the stakes anchoring the base into the frozen ground. He looked very cheerful. Three days later, we got unforecast winds of sixty miles per hour that ripped half the base of the dog ornament out of the ground and snapped one not very securely welded support, with the result that the dog was sideways on the lawn. Before I could resuscitate the collapsed canine, we got four inches of snow.

When the weather cleared some, I got out heavy wire and reassembled the pooch, and gathered roughly fifty pounds of small boulders to anchor the base and supplement the replaced stakes. He lasted about a week before we got more winds, merely gusts of fifty miles per hour, but those were sufficient to decapitate the poor beleaguered canine and snap another under-engineered metal support, and again topple the dog, before dropping another five inches of snow and temperatures twenty degrees below freezing over the partly disassembled canine.

So I got heavier wire and reassembled and reinforced him, added a few small boulders to those supporting his base, only to discover that the forecast has changed and we’re likely facing more wind, even lower temperatures, and likely more snow.

So much for a lower effort, downsized Christmas with only one lawn ornament.

A particular work of fiction opens with an attempted assassination of a prominent politician, which is thwarted by his security team. Over the course of the book, more assassination attempts occur, and a number of high-level elected politicians are killed. Some fifteen security buildings are bombed and destroyed, and two government ministries are gutted by terrorists. The engineer supervising the building of a government research facility vanishes after he discovers a plot to sabotage the construction. Despite all this mayhem, and more besides, a handful of reader reviews found the book “boring.”

Some of you may even recognize the book, but those “boring” reviews got me to thinking. What does it take to keep reader interest? How many people today have become so addicted to violence on so many levels that if there’s not something overtly violent in every chapter – or at least every other chapter – they lose interest?

Then there’s the complaint that politics are boring. Yet, in not only the fictional world, but in the real world, politics are only boring to those who don’t understand them. Failure to obtain a workable political solution to slavery led to the bloodiest war in U.S. history, and the incomplete nature of the Constitutional amendments and post-Reconstruction state laws led to more than a century of subsequent violence. The political decisions by Great Britain and France to exact maximum “reparations” from Germany after WWI likely led to worsening the Great Depression in Germany and to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.

In 1832, President Andrew Jackson not only refused to enforce the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that federal law prevented Georgia from disenfranchising the Cherokee Nation, but also sent troops to evict the Cherokees, a course of action that resulted in the death of roughly 4,000 Cherokees on the Trail of Tears and set a horrible example for dealing with other tribes. “Jacksonian democracy,” while high-sounding, enshrined universal white male suffrage, masculine privilege, and blatant racism and effectively supported the growth of southern slavery, all of which stemmed, at least in part, from a political decision to flout the law as defined by the Supreme Court.

So… as I see it, those who find politics boring are the ones who fail to learn the lessons of history (and politics) and so often doom the rest of us to live through the same mistakes all over again.

Donald Trump has not only reiterated – and reiterated – the big lie about the 2020 election being stolen, but has now declared that there was such massive fraud that any laws, including the Constitution, that keep him from being elected should be terminated. While a bare handful of elected Republicans have said that terminating the Constitution was uncalled for, so far no Republican in a leadership position has publicly disagreed with Trump or rebuked him on his rejection of the Constitution.

Just how has the United States gotten to a point where patent falsehoods are held as truths by roughly a third of the country, and nearly half the country votes for officials who endorse those falsehoods?

Living where I do, immersed in “deep red” southwestern Utah, I can understand why a third of the population believes those falsehoods. The culture here is unabashedly patriarchal, with the greatest economic disparity between the earnings of men and women of any state in the union. When we moved here, a senior professor told my wife that if she didn’t follow the male party line dealing with female professors, she’d never get tenure, and it really didn’t matter because she had a husband to take care of her. My wife fought back and got him removed from the committee [but not from the university], and she built an opera program from nothing and got tenure but was paid less than male professors in the department for years. Over those years, the more overt aspects of patriarchal domination have softened, and the university now has its first female president, possibly because her two previous male predecessors (forced on the school by the male dominated state legislature) were so totally incompetent that even the male-dominated faculty and administration backed her, quite possibly out of fear that another patriarchal clone would destroy the university.

There is no effective Democratic party, and the only competition Republican candidates face is in the Republican primary so that they generally run unopposed in the general election, except occasionally by minority party candidates. Guns are sacred, and environmentalists are generally either despised or considered misguided souls. The Bureau of Land Management belongs to the devil because it wants to destroy ranchers by restricting the number of cattle they can graze on federal lands.

In this culture, it’s effectively social and often economic suicide to suggest loudly anything to the contrary of the local mindset, and that’s one reason why almost no faculty with liberal or moderate views remain long at the university.

The result is that there’s really no way to effectively point out misconceptions and falsehoods, and everyone believes that everyone everywhere, except for a minority of liberals on the coasts, thinks the way they do – and I’m just a fantasy and SF author who’s never lived in the real world, despite the fact that I’ve lived and worked in ten different states and served as a naval officer and Navy pilot during the Vietnam War. But then, anything not in Utah isn’t the real world… and I’ve seen that same attitude in other “red” states.

This self-isolation isn’t limited to the far right, unhappily, because it also occurs on the left, but it’s more dangerous on the right because the far-right is losing economic position, is generally less well-educated, is getting angrier and angrier, and has far more guns and large trucks.

The other day I got a couple of spam-type political emails, claiming that “The Left Hates Thanksgiving.” And before long, it will doubtless be “The Left Hates Christmas,” because that also occurs every year.

Both of which are follow-ons to a whole slew of far-right initiatives to portray both centrists and liberals as the evilest people in the United States. The right also engages in far greater personal attacks with virtually no regard for the truth. All the vicious right-wing rhetoric about liberals eating babies and running child porn operations from beneath pizza parlors [that don’t even have basements] is fairly indicative of the disregard that the far right has for the truth.

For years, the right has claimed that the left wants to take away the right’s guns, but the left only wants to get rid of military style mass-killing weapons, and they couldn’t outlaw all guns if they wanted to, not without a Constitutional amendment, which isn’t politically possible now and never will be.

The left certainly has no love of the far right, but for the most part, the left tends to attack individuals for their policies and for trying to take away personal freedoms. There’s a huge difference between minorities who’ve been oppressed for centuries wanting fairer treatment under law and right-wing nutjobs who attack the Capitol because they don’t want to accept an election that didn’t turn out the way they wanted.

All across the country, election officials have been threatened, and politicians who have pointed out the illegality of the January 6th insurrection have had their lives and those of their families threatened, hundreds of times.

I’ve been in and around politics for almost fifty years, and I can only recall four instances where possible “leftists” targeted Republican officeholders with armed attacks and/or violent threats. While there are likely a few others as well, the numbers of officeholders threatened by the far-right is in the hundreds, if not the thousands, and includes Republicans whose actions the far-right doesn’t like, all of which strongly suggests that the Republican Party is not only the Party of No, but also the Party of Hate.

And what’s even worse, none of the GOP leaders even seem to care that some of their officeholders and far too many of their supporters are lying hate-mongers.

I have to admit it. I do tend to get my news from CNN. But I’m getting less and less enchanted with CNN, not because of the “slant” of the news, because all news sources have a slant, but because, with the new head of CNN, not only are there layoffs, but there are more and more commercials. That’s likely because CNN’s parent company – Warner Bros-Discovery – wants to squeeze more revenue out of CNN at a time when fewer people are watching CNN. That’s despite the fact that Warner Bros-Discovery’s gross profits for the fiscal year ending in September were $11.4 billion, an increase of 58% over the previous year.

Now, I don’t see that cramming more ads into a profitable news network that’s already losing viewers is going to do anything to increase viewers. If you’re looking for news and only finding more commercials, that’s not going to maintain viewership.

But this trend is everywhere, the latest being Netflix and Amazon Prime cutting commercials into movies that used to be commercial-free. Supposedly, one of the attractions of Netflix and Prime was the lack of commercials.

I’m not a sports fanatic, but on brief breaks from writing on Saturdays and Sundays [yes, I write on Sundays and every other day], I’ll channel-surf the football games or in basketball season, the college games, but I’m doing that less and less as well.

Why?

Because even though my satellite system may have three or four games on at the same time, there are more and more times when all four games have a series of commercials on at the same time, and there are more of them that last longer. How the various networks manage to synchronize this inability to avoid commercials I have no idea, unless it happens that they’re paying the athletic bodies for more commercial slots. And if I’m seeking a brief look at a game in progress, I’d like to see a game in progress, not a series of commercials, especially since the satellite service is already charging me for access (not that I have much choice, living 200 miles and a mountain range from the nearest metro area).

But then, the biggest corporations are locked into a mindset of grubbing for higher and higher profits, even when it’s counterproductive… and possibly likely to precipitate greater government regulation, about which they’ll bitch even when their actions have invited it.

If early statements and promises are any indication, the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives will continue being the Party of No, with meaningless investigations of any Democratic member of the Biden Administration that they feel they can target, as well as quite a few legislative initiatives [which will likely go nowhere] to undo any laws and policies that the Republicans don’t like. So far, I’m not aware of a single constructive suggestion from the Republicans, and I don’t consider tax cuts for corporations and the wealth as positive, not given the state of both deficit and debt.

It’s not as though Kevin McCarthy has much choice, given the size of the “Freedom Caucus” and the number of election deniers within the House Republicans and the fact that Trump, the biggest liar and election denier of all, has announced he’s running for President again.

The Freedom Caucus appears likely to make it somewhere between difficult and impossible for McCarthy to come up with and pass a unified and constructive Republican agenda, even though there are areas, such as immigration reform, that could gain enough Democratic votes to pass. But because there’s so much anger among Republicans, it’s likely that “revenge” actions against the Democrats and President Biden will take up much of the next year, and the year after that will be consumed by pre-election positioning.

All that suggests a singularly unproductive Congressional session, and I could be wrong (I certainly have been before), but the anger and negativity of most elected Republicans will make getting anything done beyond the bare minimums (if even that) extraordinarily difficult.

A slight majority (or a near majority, depending on how you view it) of the American people decided last Tuesday, on the whole, that they did not want to be governed by people who lied and who tried to restrict their freedoms. It was, at best, a reluctant decision, but a great many Americans decided that the more liberal party was less of a threat than a party dominated by election-deniers and would-be autocrats.

Even as I write this, not all elections in the House or Senate have been decided, but assuming that the Republicans do end up controlling the House, it’s likely to be by a very slim majority, and I would not wish to be Kevin McCarthy, because, as I learned many long years ago as a Republican staffer in the House and later as a Republican appointee at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Reagan Administration, the people who can hurt you the worst aren’t the Democrats, but other Republicans.

With something like 150 election deniers among House Republicans, McCarthy will have a very hard time getting much of anything done except dead-end investigations, contentious hearings, and attempted impeachments, and those won’t suffice to keep the Trumpists and ultra-conservatives happy, not for long. That doesn’t even consider the additional divisiveness of another Trump campaign for the presidency.

Sooner or later, McCarthy may well have to threaten to shut down government to try to obtain what the far right wants, if indeed he becomes and remains Speaker. This likely won’t set well with most Americans, at least if Biden portrays the situation accurately to the people.

All in all, the next four years look bumpier than the previous four, unless the Republicans melt down into bitter feuding fiefdoms or some Republicans defect to the Democrats out of sheer self-defense, and none of that seems likely to me. But then, again, like many political pundits, I didn’t see the election turning out as it did, and given the political instability, nothing is certain at this point, except for ever more bitter rhetoric and recriminations from the far right… and, possibly, after the shock wears off, more unwanted stridency from the far left.

Too many Americans (and all theocrats and dictators) have a fondness for “simple” solutions: Ban All Abortion. Stop all immigration. Kill the Unbelievers. Defund the Police. Stop the Steal. Insist that the only love be between a man and a woman. Balance the budget, no matter what. A college education is the answer.

The list of simplistic absolutes is long, both now and throughout human history, and all of those absolutes, including the many that I haven’t named, have one thing in common. They can’t work, at least not without massively increasing human misery and suffering.

Why do free or even semi-free nations have justice systems and courts? It’s just not to determine guilt and punish the guilty. It’s also to determine whether the absolutes apply and to what degree. Our legal system attempts to take into account shades of gray. It’s far from perfect, but those who created it understood that absolutes are too often tyranny.

The problem politically is that too many people don’t like complexity, and, as well, that too much complexity is unworkable. Just try to install solar power in some parts of California.

So law has to strike a balance between simple beliefs and unworkable complexity.

Unfortunately, the majority of the Republican Party seems to back tyrannical faith-based absolutes and far too many liberal Democrats opt for “woke” complexity.

What the Democrats don’t understand is that they’ve lost support by pushing complex extremes, while the Republicans don’t understand that their beliefs will result in the majority losing their freedom.

And, of course, the extremes on each each side thinks they have the only acceptable answers, which is why the election is turning out the way it is.

Or at the very least, profits come above democracy and its values for almost half of the Fortune 500 companies, who contributed more than $14 million to the 147 congressional Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election results. The five largest defense companies — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics — contributed a total of nearly $2 million to Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election results, and that doesn’t include contributions to so-called Super PACs that can fund independent campaigns for or against issues or individual candidates.

After brief “pauses” in contributions, by early 2022, the political arms of these corporations were back in business supporting those Republicans, because they need those government contracts, which is something I don’t quite understand, given that, in many cases, there’s almost no one else who could develop and build those expensive defense procurements.

Corporate donors and billionaires have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Political Action Committees theoretically not affiliated with any political party or candidate, but that’s a legal fiction. The PACs spending millions of dollars and running night-and-day attack ads here in Utah against the independent candidate for Senate [Evan McMullin] while endorsing the far-right incumbent [Mike Lee] might as well be called GOP auxiliaries.

Add to that the fact that such PACs can spend millions on advertising pushing blatant misstatements and outright lies. In McMullin’s case, he’s actually a moderate Republican and member of the LDS faith who’s anti-abortion – but the PACs portray him as ultra-liberal and pro-abortion because he said he voted for Biden over Trump.

In just the mid-term elections, oil and gas industry Super PACs have poured over $300 million into ads supporting Republican candidates to the House and Senate. Eight Republican billionaires, all with ties to corporate, finance, or tech industries, have poured nearly $400 million into supporting Republican candidates.

At the current pace of spending, campaign spending for the mid-term elections will exceed $9 billion, the vast majority of that money coming from Super PACs.

Why all that spending? Because profits come before people or the national interests…and they’ll continue to do so as long as corporations and billionaires can spend unlimited amounts on their so-called unaffiliated campaigns.

Less than a week before the mid-term election, the Republicans have yet to come up with a single concrete principle or legislative agenda for how they’ll solve anything. Their only message is, effectively: The Democrats caused everything that bothers you, and we’ll do better, because, after all, the last election was stolen, but we don’t have the faintest idea how we’ll do anything, except be against everything the other guys support.

The message isn’t surprising. It’s the same message that the GOP has had for years. The only real achievement the party has made in the past decade was to enact a massive tax cut that primarily benefitted the wealthy.

Yet it appears likely that the Republicans will take over the House, possibly the Senate, and will accomplish almost nothing on the federal level, while Republicans on the state level will do their best to undermine government credibility at all levels.

Why will the Republicans likely win? Because too many Americans are angry, and they need someone to blame, despite the fact that conditions here in the U.S. are far from as bad as they believe, and most of what’s going wrong isn’t because of what the federal government is or isn’t doing now, or for that matter what it’s done for the last two years, as I’ve pointed out earlier.

But today, facts don’t matter, only feelings, and those feelings, especially anger, Trump [negative pun intended] facts, common sense, and even enlightened self-interest.

And screaming “no” and echoing lies isn’t going to make anything better, not that the screamers will listen to anything, because then they’d have to take some responsibility, and far too many Americans don’t have the faintest idea what electoral or even personal responsibility entails. Besides, following simplistic lies and screaming “No!” is so much easier.

While polls are not very accurate at predicting how young people will vote, early voting statistics suggest that, once again, the turn-out for younger voters will be low, despite the number of issues being championed by Republicans that will penalize younger Americans.

According to various surveys, too many young people aren’t voting because “the politicians are too old and don’t speak to us.” Or because the young don’t see anything or anyone that appeals to them. Or because they think politics isn’t that important.

This is stupidity based on the internet ala carte menu mindset of a generation that has been able, at least in terms of products and entertainment, to get almost anything they want. And if they can’t get what they want, they won’t buy a product, or visit that site or venue.

What they seem incapable of grasping is that in politics your choices are limited in reality to two choices. All too often in American politics, the choice isn’t between which candidate is better, but which one is least bad.

If you’re young and don’t like either, and don’t vote, the choice is made by those who care enough to vote, and in most cases, those voters are “old people” many of whom who don’t have the interests of the young at heart.

If you’re young and have student loans, and don’t vote, you’re likely to lose the chance for some loan forgiveness, because Republicans in six states have filed a lawsuit to stop loan forgiveness, and the majority of Republicans, who are either old or against higher education, especially for minorities, oppose loan forgiveness.

One of the greatest risks to life for young women are complications involving reproduction, yet states controlled by Republicans have already increased those health risks by the way they’ve crafted anti-abortion laws so that women, especially young women, who aren’t well off, even working women, face greater risks of dying.

Far too many young people don’t seem to understand that politics isn’t like the internet, where you can come back later for a better product, or not buy at all, and not suffer. In politics, not choosing to vote is, in effect, a form of electoral Russian roulette. It might not affect you, but then again, the effects could be severe.

But the Democrats aren’t addressing this problem; the Republicans don’t see youth issues as a problem for them; and far too many young people don’t understand or think it doesn’t apply to them; and I’m pointing this out on a platform that very few young people seem to frequent, because, after all, the young think everything should be available where they are.

When we bought our house twenty-nine years ago, it came with an assortment of pinyon pines and junipers, some pfitzers, and a well-established sycamore that partly shaded the master bedroom, even though it’s not that close to the house. It looked to be a sturdy stately tree, and the only one of any height, since even mature pinyon pines seldom exceed fifteen feet and junipers aren’t much taller.

My first mistake was to confuse the solid trunk with sturdiness. My wife the professor was more skeptical, asking, “Why did anyone ever plant a southern tree here?”

I didn’t understand at first. Then came the first windstorm. Now, for readers not familiar with the climate where I live, there are reasons why the only indigenous trees in the area, besides sagebrush, are pinyons and junipers. One of those reasons is that we live in high desert. The second is that we have high winds – on and off all the time. Fifty mile an hour gusts are always a possibility. Thirty- thirty-five mph winds are common. Higher wind speeds are not uncommon, and without storms. One clear-air storm ripped most of the shingles off a house just up the street. Another ripped the vinyl siding off a house a block away. Every year or so we get seventy mph wind gusts. They blow semi-trucks off the interstate.

Then, even though we live in a desert, every second or third year we get heavy snows in either early fall or late spring. One Mother’s Day we got fifteen inches of heavy wet snow, just after we’d started a major remodeling/addition project, but that’s another story. Earlier this week we got a mere eight to ten inches of heavy snow – far too much for the wide leaves and the soft wood of our southern sycamore tree – which is why I woke up to several hundred pounds of broken limbs surrounding the “stately” sycamore, which, as a southern tree, doesn’t deign to shed its leaves until at least mid-December, despite the fact that the nights have been freezing for at least a month and a half by then.

It’s also why, when the sycamore finally relinquishes its leaves, it looks gap-branched and most irregular despite the efforts of local tree-trimmers, who aren’t ever available until I’ve cleaned up the immediate carnage and sawed and added limbs to the firewood pile. The sycamore, crippled as it is, remains the tallest tree by far around our part of the hill, and I don’t know whether to bless or curse the idiots who planted it.

Two recent and separate studies reported in 2020 that large families tend to be far more conservative and far more religious than smaller families, as well as less highly educated, and that such conservatism is definitely reflected in their voting behavior.

While these studies don’t surprise me in the slightest, they certainly tie into the current U.S. political scene. They also explain, at least in part, why the United States is likely to remain politically polarized for some time to come, since, by definition, large, conservative, religious, and less highly educated families are having more children, and liberal, more highly educated, and smaller families are having not just fewer children, but considerably fewer children, roughly two or less, and some younger couples in this group are choosing to have no children at all.

Part of the reason why these trends may well continue is the skyrocketing cost of higher education. Parents who think about educating their children may well decide to have fewer children, and children from larger families may find less support for higher education as well as finding it increasingly difficult to afford higher education. Then there’s the fact that rural areas tend to be more conservative, more religious, and also usually have lower costs of living.

At the same time, these statistics reflect groups as a whole, not individual families, since there are certainly highly educated, large, religious and liberally inclined families as well as small highly educated families that are quite conservative.

There’s a phrase that I hear too often, especially when used with children and young people – You can do anything you put your mind to – or some similar expression.

I know parents and teachers want to encourage young people, but using that phrase is not only misleading, but it’s also cruel.

Not that parents and teachers shouldn’t encourage young people, but that encouragement should be based in reality.

That’s not being cruel. The universe is filled with limitations. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, no matter how much energy and effort you apply. If you jump off a cliff without a paragliding outfit you’re going to fall… and hard.

The same is true of people. There are some who can do almost anything in their chosen field, such as Michael Phelps in swimming, or Tom Brady, but even they end up facing limits imposed by age and their physiology. And what’s often overlooked in cases such as theirs is just how much they can’t do, how much they’ve given up in the rest of their lives to achieve a comparatively short span of greatness in one field.

And yes, there are people who achieve goals no one thought those people could achieve, but they’re celebrated precisely because they’re so rare.

I’m not saying that anyone should tell a young person that they cannot do something, but they should tell them what it takes. My wife the professor teaches voice and opera, and every year she gets fresh-faced students who were considered “stars” in their high schools. Only a few of those students will get a life-supporting paying job in classical music. One in several hundred might go on to get “star” roles in the field. Why? Because there are probably ten thousand or more music graduates every year for perhaps at most a thousand jobs, most of them instrumental.

And while she can tell whether a student has the raw talent, so many other factors (or limits) enter the equation. How determined is the student? How hard and long will they work? How good is their technique? Can they learn roles quickly and accurately? Is their voice what grad schools or directors are looking for? And with the growing emphasis on media… do they look the “right” way for the part? These days, the absolutely most brilliant and greatest singing white soprano will not be cast in the professional lead in Madame Butterfly. Other roles, perhaps, but not that one.

And then, there’s simply the luck factor. I’d likely still be a mid-list SF writer, if in the late 1980s I hadn’t decided to write a fantasy novel because certain fantasy authors at a F&SF convention had hinted that I couldn’t do it. I turned in that novel to Tor just after Tom Doherty decided to publish the first Wheel of Time book. Even my own editor didn’t know I was writing The Magic of Recluce. But Tor liked it and gave me the same cover artist (Darrell Sweet) at a time when big fantasy books were taking off. I couldn’t have planned the timing. I was just working like hell trying to sell enough to become a full-time author. And sometimes luck goes the other way, as with The Green Progression, which I thought was the worst-selling hardcover Tor ever published, but turned out to be only the second-worst, which was why there wasn’t a sequel, even though it got some good reviews.

The bottom line is simple. You can’t be anything you dream, and if you want to succeed in the field where you have ability, and keep succeeding, you’ll have to work harder than you thought possible on the abilities you do have for longer than you think possible… and even then, you’ll likely need a bit of luck.

And, of course, there’s the one in a million case, where a lucky bastard makes it big without doing anything and certainly not working as hard as you did, but do you really want to gamble on being able to do it that way?

When Putin ordered partial military mobilization on September 21st, he also issued a directive stating that all organizations, including international companies, must conduct military registration of their staff, assist with delivering the summons from the military to their employees, ensure the delivery of equipment to assembly points or military units, and provide buildings, communications, land plots, transport and other material means to support the war.

Effectively, that means that international companies operating in Russia are now obliged to assist the Kremlin’s war mobilization by helping conscript soldiers and equip the army. Currently, U.S. companies employ between 250,000 and 700,000 people in Russia, those numbers differing by who has compiled them.

Interestingly enough, I’ve seen nothing about this declaration in U.S. major media or by any candidates running in the upcoming mid-term election. That doesn’t mean someone didn’t publish it, but the fact that U.S. companies operating in Russia are practically and legally required to support the war effort against Ukraine doesn’t seem to be a priority.

Among other things, complying with the law could make those companies and their employees at least theoretically liable for committing war crimes, not that anyone is ever going to prosecute political leaders over the Ukraine-Russian conflict.

While a significant number of U.S. companies have curtailed operations in Russia, comparatively few have fully pulled out, which means that most of them could be required to support the Russian war effort.

Why hasn’t either political party addressed the issue? Could it be that too many U.S. companies are heavily invested in Russia and that, if they pulled out, the economic losses could be sizeable and that the Russians would simply seize the assets permanently, as they already have in a number of cases?

So why have U.S. companies invested so much there? Because the profits outweigh the immorality of supporting a tottering economy of a human-rights abusing dictatorship?

That couldn’t be, could it?

Except that, as Yogi Berra once said, “It’s déjà vu all over again,” because that’s exactly what major U.S. corporations did in Germany in the years leading up to World War II, and even well into the war.

So… give it some careful thought when you see all the corporate ads declaring how patriotic and caring for the American way they are. But then again, hasn’t the American way become getting the most bucks any way you can?

Almost everyone notices and deplores the polarization and extremism in politics today in the United States, but there’s more to that trend than merely in the political arena.

As I’ve noted before, there’s extremism in the environmental field, ranging from those who want to burn coal and use more fossil fuels because they believe more power and more industrial and consumer production will improve life and that’s more important than environmental “purity. On the other side are the environmental purists who want no power from fossil fuels or nuclear fission, and only from renewable sources. Both are crazy, because uncontrolled fossil fuel use will create massive environmental impacts and could eventually render the planet uninhabitable for humans, while purely renewable and passive solar can’t solve the energy needs of society, and large-scale solar panel and battery-stored power use will create considerable environmental damage, possibly even on the scale of strip-mined coal.

On the social front, the conflicts are everywhere, from Black Lives Matter and those even more extreme on the far left to the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, and other white supremacists on the far right. Then there are the cultural wars over pronouns, identity politics, and history. There’s the struggle over various aspects of education, most of which result in dumbing down the ability of students to read, write, calculate, and, most importantly, to think.

Then there’s the war over how far freedom of speech goes – or should go – where the extremists in both parties, but predominantly on the right, want the freedom to shout out their “truths,” even when those “truths” are fact-proven, bald-faced lies, but the extremists violently, even physically, oppose those who try to rein them in.

And in all these conflicts, the extremists on both sides have no interests in practical, middle-of-the-road solutions, because they see their “truths” as absolutes that cannot be compromised.

Yet the greatest freedom for the greatest number requires compromise. So does the continuation of a high-tech civilization. Not that the “purists” seem to care about either freedom [at least anyone else’s freedom] or civilization.

I keep getting emails from the far right that scream “the Socialists are coming” or “left wing terrorists threaten Trump supporters” or “Hollywood is trying to buy Congress” or “Stop Political Persecution by DOJ” or “Keep the FBI out of Your House.”

All of them are scare tactics that can’t or won’t come true.

But if I sent out a political email that said, “Vote Against the Religious Jihadists Who Destroyed U.S. Women’s Freedoms!” I’d be considered an unhinged exaggerator at best and a hatemonger at worst.

And yet, that email I can’t send would be more accurate than all the rightwing scare tactics that currently fill the internet and infosphere.

Seven of the nine justices on the Supreme Court are Catholics (or 6 ½ if you consider that Gorsuch was raised Catholic and now professes to be Anglican), and six of the seven effectively voted to take away a woman’s control of her own body.

That wasn’t a scare tactic. It already happened… and it seems like eighty percent of Americans have forgotten that our Supreme Court is dominated by members of a minority ultra-conservative belief that wants to return American women to being broodmares.

Inflation will come and go, and even if it doesn’t immediately subside, it doesn’t take your freedoms; it just raises the cost of living. As for the “socialists coming,” the members of the so-called left wing in the United States would qualify as centrists in most first world democratic societies. I certainly don’t call investigating the theft of government documents and classified materials “political persecution,” and no one else should either. And I don’t see that the FBI will be breaking into everyone’s house, possibly the local police in certain communities, but not the FBI, if for no other reason than there aren’t enough FBI agents to come anywhere close to the number required.

Yet a vast number of Americans will vote based on unrealistic fears, rather than against the political party who appointed American religious fanatics to the Supreme Court, fanatics who make no secret about their desire to reduce personal freedoms even more, based on a faith practiced by a minority of the American people.

Over just a twenty-four hour period earlier this week, I received emails declaring that I had “won” an iPhone14 Pro, a Pfizer Treatment, a $5000 Shell gas card, a Ninja food processer, a Zempire tent, a Craftsman generator, a Yeti cooler, a Ryobi lawn mower, a “Hobby Lobby” reward, a Titleist TSi3 Driver, a Traeger Grill Timberline XL, and a $500 Delta Airlines Gift Card.

If I responded to any of these “winning” notices, I can guarantee that I won’t have won something for nothing, and that, most likely, they’re all scams to get hold of personal information and my money or tie me into a long-term contract of some sort. I also can’t believe that they’re “misguided” marketing ploys, since there are only two companies on that list from which that I’ve ever purchased goods or services.

That doesn’t include the 50-100 political solicitations (daily) for campaign contributions, from both political parties and from one independent candidate, each of which declares that the Republic will fall without my donations and that the need is urgent, because the other side has or is marshalling more funds.

Even though my spam filter rejects/collects somewhere over 300 messages a day, it doesn’t catch another 100-150.

All of this says a great deal about the United States, and most of what it says is anything but favorable.

What strikes me most is not only the volume of these pleas and offers, but that the more “commercial” spam appeals must be effective at separating a considerable number of people from their money, because even internet bots take some effort, time, and equipment to spew out such a volume of fraudulent offers.

All this “free” stuff also plays to the insatiable appetite of American for something they don’t have to pay for, which is exactly why we have inflation at a recent high and far too many people blaming the politicians instead of themselves.