I’ve noted earlier that weather forecasts for Cedar City tend to be hit or miss, possibly because Cedar City is roughly fifteen miles north of Black Ridge, and Black Ridge is the southern end of the plateau on which Cedar City is situated. South of Black Ridge, the ground drops close to three thousand feet in less than thirty miles.

I understand the difficulties this poses for forecasters, especially since Cedar City is not exactly a major metropolitan area, but as I write this, it’s been snowing consistently for the past six hours, and we’ve gotten about seven inches of snow, and it’s still falling.

All the forecasts say it’s partly cloudy and that we’ll have scattered snow showers.

I’ve lived in New England at the foot of the White Mountains, in Colorado at the foot of the Rocky Mountains and here in Cedar City, essentially between three mountain ranges, and in none of those places would seven inches of snow be considered intermittent snow flurries or showers.

Last night, Cedar City was supposed to have flurries. We got about three inches of snow.

I understand that the location of Cedar City makes forecasting difficult, but still stating that it’s partly cloudy with possible snow flurries as the snow continues to fall strikes me as either a continuing reliance on unreliable algorithms or incompetence, if not both. It’s one thing to miss a forecast; it’s another to report the current weather wrong – continually.

Or perhaps it’s just that none of those so-called meteorologists even bothered to check with any of the 50,000 -60,000 people who are experiencing those “scattered snow showers,” because algorithms are so much more accurate than real people, not to mention, cheaper.

Sometime back, I wrote about some of the “innovations” proposed and since implemented by the local university, in order to create a three-year bachelor’s degree, a degree pushed by the state legislature. One of those “innovations” was to cut the length of the semester by twenty-percent, without any increase in the length of classes or the number of classes. Despite all the rhetoric, what that has meant is that students aren’t learning as much.

I’d thought about detailing more of the so-called improvements in education and pointing out how they actually degrade learning and how most students today know less, have lower critical thinking skills than their predecessors, and have more difficulty learning and recalling material.

But there’s little point in that exercise. Most of the American people have turned their backs on what used to be the objective of education, especially higher education, and that was the ability to read and write critically, to think analytically, to understand what numbers actually mean, and to obtain the skills to be able to learn and to attain new skills on a lifelong basis.

Instead, public education, at least through the collegiate baccalaureate level, has largely become a charade of exercises in mastering objective tests and obtaining paper credentials in the hopes of leveraging an inadequate education and an overstated degree into a job that will provide an adequate income.

It’s also become an incredibly expensive exercise, as millions of young Americans with massive student debt can testify, especially given that we’re graduating twice as many students from college every year as there are jobs requiring a college degree, and yet the mindless push for more students to go to college continues.

At the same time, we’re seeing a growing contempt for science, for verified facts, and for reasoned analysis of everything, while unthinking tribalism is running wild. All that suggests to me that, despite record high numbers of high school graduates and the proliferation of college degrees, the possession of credentials, and the mastery of the cellphone, Google, and objective tests, doesn’t help much with critical thinking, logical writing, or understanding and solving the problems facing the world.

Once upon a time, say sixty years ago, media news was largely about facts and an average reader or listener could usually figure out what was accurate and what was not. No, the news wasn’t perfect, and government hid information back then as well, but most media outlets devoted much more time and effort to digging up hard news, especially the facts. Today, all too many “news” outlets trumpet opinions second-hand and focus on sensationalist “exposes,” often about lesser matters.

It doesn’t really matter whether Hillary Clinton used a private server for some official emails. So did Colin Powell, and there’s no real evidence that either’s use compromised U.S. security. Hunter Biden tried to cash in on his father’s position. So did Billy Carter. Again, there’s no evidence that either President Carter or President Biden did anything wrong. Millions of Americans have greedy relatives. Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinski was deplorable and in terrible taste, but the fate of the free world didn’t exactly hang on a stained dress. So what else is new?

When thousands of people try to storm the U.S. Capitol and overturn an election that state officials from both parties declare was the fairest ever – that is a big deal. And so is a President inciting the mob or repeatedly committing tax fraud.

How did we get to a point where the facts and hard news take a back seat (or are often ignored) to unfounded lies and to those who trumpet them?

Largely because too many in the media have come to focus on what gets people excited and stirred up and how people feel. That drives ratings and profits, even for so-called “staid” and established media outlets such as The New York Times.

The other problem is that far too many media news outlets have focused on “fairness,” falsely equating objectivity to giving both sides equal time/airspace/column inches or the like. Today, the news continues to equate the fact that President Biden inadvertently had a few classified documents in his house and office with the hundreds of classified documents willfully taken and kept by former President Trump. The news media also gave up on noting Trump’s documented tens of thousands of lies and misstatements but scrutinizes Biden’s every statement for even minor inconsistencies.

In such cases, the news media are literally undermining their own objectivity, not that they seem to care that much, but objectivity isn’t measured or determined by equal time or by political beliefs; it’s established by verified facts – and by the lack of facts.

Opinions not backed by facts shouldn’t get equal time. Their shortcomings need to be exposed – factually – and the news needs to concentrate on what actually happened and how, instead of continually churning up the falsehoods and the liars who spout them.

Will this change? Only for the worse, I suspect, because Mammon is now the American God.

“Magic Thinking” is the idea that belief can change the physical world. Now, I’d be the first to admit that someone’s beliefs can motivate them to accomplish great things, but in the end it is the accomplishments that can change the world, not the beliefs. Belief is the first step, and at least in my experience, the easiest.

Yet today, all over the United States, we’ve had a resurgence of “magic thinking” totally divorced from reality.

How can a culture that promotes Viagra, movies and television with intense sexual content, that supplies its young people with private transportation and funds, and that now has the largest gap between the age of physical maturity and financial and social maturity honestly believe that abstinence is going to be practiced for ten years or more by a significant fraction of the young population? It isn’t; and the facts show it, but legislators across the country continue to push abstinence as the solution and to reject any form of realistic sex education. But then again, perhaps Twitter or TikTok might increase abstinence, but not the rhetoric of rightwing fundamentalist legislators.

Thirty to thirty-five percent of the American population continues to believe that the 2020 Presidential election was “stolen,” despite study after study, audit after audit, and election officials from both major parties declaring that it was a free and fair election and that the results are accurate.

Scientific study after study has also shown there’s no significant difference in overall mental ability of human beings linked to skin color, but significant percentages of populations in the U.S., Japan, China, and elsewhere believe such a difference exists, when all the evidence links the vast majority of differences to nutrition and income.

There’s a simple fact that all too many “magic thinkers” don’t understand: The strength of one’s beliefs does not make something so. All the denying in the world isn’t going to change physical facts. Unfortunately, magic thinking can lead to riots and storming the Capitol, or to unwanted and neglected children born out of wedlock, or to massacres of people who are different.

The other day I read a reader review of Isolate, the first book of “The Grand Illusion,” my newest series, which features a junior military security officer essentially ordered to work as an aide for a senior politician, in a constitutional empire with a mandated three party system. In this world electricity doesn’t work as a power source, and a tiny percentage of the population have empathic talents, either as empaths who can read and project emotions or as isolates whose emotions cannot be read or influenced by empaths. The book begins with the main character and his partner fending off an empath attack on the politician as they leave the capitol building.

What I found both amusing and slightly appalling was that the reader gave Isolate a five star review (which I certainly appreciate) with the sole comment of: “A little too political at times but a good read if you like his books.”

I’m still shaking my head about it, because the book is avowedly political. Everything revolves around the politics and how those politics influence everything from the politicians to the large corporations and the poorest field workers. I can see a reader who doesn’t like politics disliking the book, but saying that a science-fantasy political novel is a little too political leaves me baffled, especially with such a good rating.

I suppose it’s possible, and perhaps it’s happened, but I wonder if anyone would say that a thriller is a little too thrilling at times, or that a detective novel has a little too much detecting, or a romance novel has a bit too much romance.

For the National Football League, the game might as well be called “Get the Quarterback!” Or perhaps the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire’s gladiatorial games.

By the end of November fourteen teams (out of thirty-two) had started two or more quarterbacks this season. Over the entire season, the San Francisco Forty-Niners went through four quarterbacks, losing two for the entire season, and they lost the conference play-off because one quarterback was concussed and the other had his throwing elbow injured enough in the game that he couldn’t throw a pass. The Los Angeles Rams lost all the quarterbacks on their roster one week and had to sign Baker Mayfield two days before the next game.

From what I could determine, at least twenty-four quarterbacks were injured in the current NFL season seriously enough to miss at least one game – not counting the Superbowl, which hasn’t been played.

Eight quarterbacks were concussed severely enough to miss at least one game completely. Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa is still in the NFL’s concussion protocol more than a month after he last entered it. He was already out for two games earlier this year because of a previous concussion, and some doctors suggest that it might be best if he retired, rather than risk another concussion.

And despite the playing longevity of a few select, talented, and lucky NFL players, the average career playing span is a little over three years, not all that different from a Roman gladiator, the significant difference being that most less successful gladiators died, while NFL football players ‘only’ have their lifespan reduced by thirty percent on average, and that doesn’t take into account the high rate of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and the considerable risk of dementia in their later years, which some studies have shown may well be over 70%.

But that’s football… and lots of money for franchise owners. The Walton-Penner group paid $4.65 billion when they bought the Denver Broncos last year, and Denver’s hardly likely to be the most profitable NFL franchise.

All of a sudden classified documents are showing up in more homes than those of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, and I’m more than certain more could be found. While Trump willfully knew about the hundreds of documents he kept and insisted that they were his, it appears that both Biden and Pence were unaware that classified documents were included among their personal papers.

Given the volume of papers crossing their desks, it’s hardly surprising that comparatively small numbers of classified documents slipped through scrutiny. But the hullabaloo over Biden and Pence ignores a far larger problem.

Part of the problem is that the classification system is broken. More than forty years back when I was a Navy pilot and then a Congressional staffer, everyone in defense-related fields new that far too much information was overclassified, and that much of that information that couldn’t ever have been kept out of public view. Aviation Week was known in the military-industrial community as “Aviation Leak.”

Since then the problem has grown, partly because it’s far easier to classify information than to ask if it really needs to be classified, partly because classification is also a way to mute public and media criticism , and partly because the media has become more and more tabloid, ever more willing to disclose and publicize not only material that should never have been classified, but also to publicize information that legitimately should not be presently in the public domain.

Too much information that was classified legitimately years and years ago remains classified, not because its disclosure now would be detrimental to national security, but because its disclosure would be detrimental to the national image or to the reputation of institutions and individuals. But you can’t learn from past mistakes if you never know what they were and if you accept the images founded on incomplete information.

And the media, unfortunately, can’t be trusted to determine what should or shouldn’t be made public, especially not when the media’s primary goal has become profits, and when disclosing secrets raises ratings and, consequently, profits.

Nor can the military be totally trusted, but details and specifications for new weapons systems don’t belong in the public domain. Neither do intelligence findings about foreign military readiness… nor do the names of covert intelligence operatives.

What’s necessary is a balancing of interests and national needs, but balance doesn’t serve the short-term interests of politicians, the media, or the military-industrial complex…which is why we have an overclassification problem.

A while back, I made the observation that technology is, of itself, neither good nor evil, but that its basic function, whether intended or not, is as a multiplier. In warfare, technology multiplies the force wielded by an individual or a group of individuals; it multiplies the distances from which one can strike and the impact of that strike. In transportation, it multiplies how far and how fast one can travel. In communications, technology allows the transfer of more information almost instantly [at least on our planet] to more people.

But there’s one aspect of technology that’s seldom mentioned, and that’s the impact not only on the person or people affected by the technology, but also on the individual using the technology, where often technology multiplies the ability to do harm and the ability to avoid being caught or punished for that harm..

Donald Trump effectively mobilized somewhere between thirty thousand and a hundred thousand protesters (depending on where people were counted and by whom) on January 6th, from all across the nation, and more than a thousand actually stormed the Capitol, of whom more than 700 so far have been arrested and charged, with most being convicted or pleading guilty.

The problem with technology, in the case of Trump and others, is that while technology multiplies their abilities, it fails to multiply their accountability. In fact, in the case of Trump, his uses of technology has made it difficult to enforce any accountability.

Con men and swindlers can commit thefts from places where they can’t be discovered, let alone prosecuted. Cyber-bullying among teenagers has become endemic, and definitely contributes to increases in teen suicide. Trolls can badger and harass people with little fear of either retaliation or repercussion.

Functioning societies fall into two categories – autocracies and those based on popular trust, generally but not exclusively democracies. But technology is increasingly being used in ways that isolate people and create greater mistrust of any one who is different. Because isolation and mistrust undermine governments, one of the questions facing democracies is how to stop the increasing misuse of technology, because, skeptic that I am, I sincerely doubt that the people who are using technology to harm others are going to stop of their own free will. Trump and Putin certainly aren’t, nor are all the others.

The current “popular” reason why so little gets done in Congress is the wide polarization between the Democrats and Republicans, and that’s certainly a major factor, but I’d submit that there are other reasons that are just as important, if not more so.

The first is that the benefits of doing anything for the public good always take time to happen and often longer for people to recognize and appreciate them, while the negative impacts usually recognized and trumpeted widely and instantly by those affected. That’s why it took decades for legislation eliminating leaded gasoline and lead-based paint to be enacted. Lead in gasoline was a cheaper way of allowing gasoline refiners to market lower octane gasoline that worked in cars. Without using lead, refiners needed more highly refined and/or other more expensive additives. The same was true of lead paint. The benefits of “deleading” were spread across society, but benefitted the poor the most, while the costs were concentrated across a comparative handful of companies and industries, all of which had greater wealth and political power.

Dealing with environmental issues has run into the same difficulties.

Another problem is that some problems have no “good” solutions, because any financially and physically workable system will hurt many innocents. Yet the longer such problems persist without being addressed, the worse the problem becomes.

Immigration is one of those proems facing the United States. First, there’s no financial, military, and physically feasible way to halt all illegal immigration without becoming a police state along the lines of East Germany or North Korea. Walls don’t work, and deporting millions of border-crossers on a continuing basis becomes a huge financial and resource burden. Much of the problem lies in the fact that for many would-be immigrants, ANYTHING is better than remaining where they are, but to change those conditions in Central America and elsewhere would require essentially invading and rebuilding the socio-political structures in those lands, which would require resources and an effort that neither the regimes of those countries nor the American taxpayers would support. A “middle-ground” of allowing certain immigrants who would benefit the United States and absolutely rejecting the others would mean rejecting innocent people who merely want a chance at a better life. At the same time, failing to address the problem with clear-cut policies and laws will insure that the problem will worsen.

And the bottom line is that most politicians wish to avoid pain at a time when workable solutions will cause immediate pain for those with resources and votes.

One of the traits common to politics today, but especially to the Party of No, otherwise misnamed as the Republican Party, is a continuing failure to understand and acknowledge context and factual accuracy, and to equate minor transgressions with major criminal offenses.

Donald Trump knowingly and willfully transported thousands of official documents from the White House, of which more than three hundred were classified, many highly classified. He insisted, contrary to established law, that they were his. He claimed, falsely, that he could and had declassified them. After months and months of attempting to reclaim them, with Trump’s attorneys falsely claiming that all documents had been returned, the Justice Department executed a search warrant and discovered even more documents.

To date, a few handfuls of classified documents, if that, dating from Biden’s time as Vice President have been found in an office he used after leaving the Vice Presidency and in his home. These were turned over to the archives and later to the Justice Department. Biden didn’t claim they belonged to him and has cooperated fully.

Trump did not and still hasn’t, yet the Republicans and many of the media are equating the situations as roughly equal.

They’re anything but equal.

Once upon a time, I was staff director for a Congressman, and even with a staff of twelve or so, the amount of paperwork was staggering. Now, admittedly, we handled no classified documents in the office, although I did have a security clearance. The Executive Office employs roughly 1,800 employees, with slightly less than five hundred directly under the White House chief of staff, and the paper flow to the President and the Vice President is staggering.

Even under the best of circumstances, with that much paperwork, it’s practically impossible to absolutely assure that a document here and there doesn’t get filed in the wrong place or sticks to another file and ends up misplaced, particularly during a transition period or when leaving office. That’s a far different kettle of fish, as the saying goes, from the deliberate and willful theft of thousands of documents.

In addition, the Republicans are asking for “visitor logs” of people who visited Biden’s private residence, despite the fact that such logs don’t exist for private residences and have never been required – and that such a request was never even suggested for Donald Trump. But then, Trump ended the policy of visitor logs to the White House, which Biden restored. So the Republicans are demanding of Biden what they didn’t of Trump, compounding their intellectual and political dishonesty, not to mention emphasizing their hypocrisy.

There’s a huge difference between the situations, but what can you expect from a political party that denies election results and is indebted to Trump?

As for the media… as usual, they’re in it for the headlines, and accuracy is either an afterthought or irrelevant, especially for conservative media.

The instant cardiac arrest of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin was so jolting that it even stopped an NFL game that might affect the outcome of the Superbowl.

Personally, I’m surprised that the NFL hasn’t had more severe and near-fatal injuries.

Because passers and receivers have become more accurate, it’s become obvious to defensive backs that the most effective way to break up a pass is to hit the receiver full-force the instant he catches the ball. This timing is so close that I’ve seen more than a few cases where the receiver has been effectively tackled even before his fingers could touch the ball and where the officials didn’t call a penalty. And on more and more pass routes, the interaction between the receiver and the defensive back resembles a wrestling match run at full speed.

And that’s from someone who doesn’t watch all that much football any more. In fact, I haven’t seen a complete game in more than thirty years.

This sort of split-second brutality has become more and more of a feature of the game, especially for quarterbacks and receivers. A number of NFL teams are on their second-string, if not third-string, quarterbacks this year. In the years long ago when I did watch professional football a bit more intently, I don’t recall the plethora of injured quarterbacks I read about now.

While Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday was regarded as satire and overkill when it came out in 1999, what happened to Damar Hamlin is exactly what Stone was pointing out about professional football – that it’s a barbaric, scuzzy, gladiatorial battle of blood, sweat and tears that grinds down the players to powder and rewards them with fleeting fame… and possibly enough money to sustain some of them in a physically diminished life after football.

One of the aspects of the religio-social culture of the prevailing faith where I live is an emphasis on perfection, particularly as it applies to women and their appearance and to their families. There’s a definite pressure on women to be the perfect wife and have the perfect family with the perfect number of children (5).

This obviously takes a toll on women, seeing as women, especially married women, in Utah have a higher percentage of use of anti-depressants than in any other state, and a third of all women in Utah suffer depression, more than twice the rate for men.

I’ve been walking for my exercise for the nearly thirty years I’ve lived in Cedar City, and I always see women, particularly younger women, usually jogging, often pushing strollers, at all hours. I see a few men, but I’d estimate that there are ten women for every man I see, and almost all the men I see appear to be around my age. The women also appear to have more gym memberships.

This need to present a façade of perfection permeates everything. Even death. Utah also has one of the highest rates of teen suicide, but that never gets much press. When a teenager dies in Utah, and no cause of death is listed, there’s a high probability that it was suicide.

Last week, in the neighboring community of Enoch, the owner of a local insurance agency killed his wife, his mother-in-law, his five children, and then committed suicide, and all the news stories mentioned how wonderful a family they had been, and what a tragedy it was. Except, everything clearly wasn’t that wonderful. Under questioning, the Enoch police chief mentioned that there had been three calls over the past several years about “domestic disturbances,” but that there had been no charges. It also turned out that the wife had filed for divorce and that her husband had been served divorce papers just a few days before the shooting. Most of these details either didn’t appear in the local press or were buried.

This is scarcely new. Several years ago, two teenage males were killed in a stabbing incident here in Cedar City. The only news released was that the deaths occurred, and that the matter was “resolved.” More than a few cases of embezzlement have been hushed up as well as other incidents, and those are only the ones I know about.

But everything is perfect here in Deseret.

As all my family, and many of my readers know, I have a penchant for vests, both dressy and every day. So it was no surprise when I received black wool winter vest from a family member – delayed more than a week by the recent storm that savaged the mid-section of the United States. At first glance, it appeared to be a slightly dressier version of an older vest.

Then I noticed the glossy, multi-colored and professionally printed card attached to the vest, topped with the words, CONCEALED CARRY. Directly below that was the image of a revolver on top of a U.S. flag, beneath which were the words, in smaller caps, SECOND AMMENDMENT [spelled exactly that way], followed by a paragraph declaring that the maker/seller of the vest supported the right of citizens to bear arms and to carry licensed and concealed firearms.

A second and more careful inspection of the vest revealed pockets and straps inside designed to hold two revolvers – one on each side. Above the left-hand inside straps was a machine embroidered six-bullet-point list for safe use of the straps.

It’s rather unlikely I’ll be using the vest for its apparently intended purpose, particularly since I don’t have a concealed carry permit, but, since it is a handsome vest, I’ll certainly wear it.

But what puzzles me the most is how a fairly well-known retailer/manufacturer could go to all of the trouble of designing, manufacturing, and selling such a vest – and then fail to spell “amendment” correctly.

Or aren’t most of those who would buy the vest able to tell that “AMMENDMENT” was misspelled, or does it matter in the slightest to them? In this regard, I have noticed that many of those who cite the Second Amendment most vociferously have the least understanding of what it means, legally and constitutionally, so why would a mere misspelling matter in the slightest? Just as a certain segment of the House Republicans apparently have no real understanding of their responsibility to govern and how to exercise that responsibility.

While over 70% of Americans now believe that climate change is real, only about 50% of Republicans do, not that the discrepancy between Democrats and Republicans surprises me, given that Democrats are, in general, much more prone to accept “new” findings (even those that turn out not to be true or accurate), while Republicans tend to be older and more conservative, and conservatives are much slower to change their views on anything, even when the facts are overwhelming.

But, in one way, that still surprises me, because age does offer a perspective that youth lacks. When I lived in New Hampshire some thirty years ago, just above Newfound Lake, the lake froze so solid that every winter the lake was dotted with little ice-fishing huts, and even stake trucks were routinely driven on the ice. Now, one of my daughters reports that over several recent years, the lake didn’t ice over at all. The spotty local records indicate that there’s no record of the lake not freezing over before 2000.

I’ve lived in Cedar City for almost thirty years, and in the first ten years, we almost invariably had periods of sub-zero weather [Fahrenheit]. The infrequent snowstorms were usually severe (ten to twenty-five inches), and the local museum has a plethora of pictures illustrating just that. Until about five or six years ago, we never got rain in winter. In just the last few years, we’ve been getting winter rain, when before all the precipitation was snow. Now the infrequent storms are even less frequent, and the moisture content usually far less, and for the last week, we’ve had rain, finally turning to snow as I write this.

Whole sections of pine forests in the mountains are covered with beetle-killed pines. Why? Because, it turns out, that what kills the beetles most effectively is weeks of sub-zero winter weather, and we haven’t had anything like that in the three decades I’ve lived here.

Now, the recollections of an older man should be taken with caution, unless the statistics back them up, which in this case they do. But now that the statistics are out there, why do so many conservative older people fail to see the trends?

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.