College professors today are facing an ever-increasing number of students who seem either unable or unwilling to learn.

In practical terms, there are only three basic ways to learn: reading, listening, and doing. All learning comes from these, either separately or in combination with the others.

The current generation entering college has grown up with computers, cell phones, Google, and social media. They’re a Google away from any specific fact. Their attention is fixed on their cell phone, and they’d rather be on the cell phone than doing almost anything else – even sex, according to some studies. And fewer and fewer of them read, either for school or pleasure.

The result of this devil’s brew is that the majority can’t read or write that well. Because of social media’s constant interruption and attraction, they also can’t focus or concentrate that effectively, and more and more of them show ADHD symptoms. They’re so used to visual or audio-visual stimulation that they can’t listen well enough to process information aurally. Nor can they concentrate enough to remember anything that the cell phone or social media doesn’t pound into their skulls.

All retained skills or knowledge require memory at some level, and STEM fields and music, as well as others, simply can’t be mastered without learning and retaining facts and procedures. A number of professors have remarked on the inability of students to retain knowledge and mental process skills. On one day students show they understand the matter or skills being discussed or demonstrated, but within a day or two, they recall or retain little, even when they’ve demonstrated the first steps the day before.

What’s missing? The ability to focus for any period of time and concentrate on material and skills one doesn’t know. That ability is also required for actual thinking.

Under these circumstances, is it any wonder that the United States, despite its wealth and size, can’t produce enough high-level professionals in STEM fields? Or that the drop-out rate in music and other information intensive programs has increased over the years?

Or that more and more people in the United States believe simplistic slogans that can’t be supported by facts.

Having observed politics for quite a few years can give one a perspective that most voters don’t have. That perspective can also be rather frustrating.

Right now, the United States is experiencing higher inflation rates than at any time since the period from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, and polls show that inflation is the greatest concern of most Americans coming into the mid-term elections. Because the Federal Reserve is deeply concerned about the economic impact of continuing inflation, the Fed has increased interest rates sharply over the past six months, which effectively increases costs for consumers in addition to already increasing prices.

The major causes for inflation are the massive government aid during the COVID epidemic, the historic low interest rates [which spurred increasing housing demand and boosted prices and inspired other purchases], and the Russia/Ukraine war. Now, most Americans were happy about the first two causes, but they’re unhappy with the longer-term costs of higher prices and higher interest rates to damp inflation, and many will vote against Democrats in the mid-term elections as a result. But the majority of causes were begun by the previous administration, and people generally supported the continuation of aid and low interest rates by the present administration.

This is a pattern that has recurred over much of the last century, where the administration in power gets the blame or credit for actions undertaken by the previous administration. President Carter got blamed for situations created by previous administrations, while Reagan got credit for the impact of Carter policies. The first President Bush had to deal with the excessive spending of the Reagan administration by increasing taxes, and lost his bid for a second term, while Clinton got credit for the better economic conditions created by the Bush reforms.

The reason this happens is because the fundamental economy usually doesn’t change that quickly, except in the rare cases such as COVID, and people vote on what they see and feel NOW, not on whose policies and actions created the present economic conditions, which means that many of those voters are, in effect, voting for or against the previous administration, not the present administration.

Every so often I get a comment like that, more often lately in the books of “The Grand Illusion,” and I just want to shake my head. In fact, sometimes I do. I feel the same way when someone makes comments about just wanting to get rid of politicians and politics.

What many of these people fail to understand is that, like it or not, politics are responsible for all the achievements of the human race, and that the declines of past great civilizations largely resulted from the failure of politics.

Why do I say that?

Because individuals acting alone are limited in what they can do. Cooperative effort is what enables technology pretty much anywhere above late stone age, and cooperative effort requires social organization. Social organization falls apart without a political structure of some sort. While some theorists will claim that a market system trumps politics, even market systems need politics to function above the stone age.

Regardless of which is more important, there have never been any societies with a technology at or above the bronze age without some form of unified political and economic system.

Now, I understand the need for entertainment in fiction. If a fiction book doesn’t entertain a reader, it’s generally a failure. But just as non-stop action is totally unrealistic, as I pointed out in an earlier blog, so are societies without at least plausible economic and political structures.

You can’t maintain an autocratic kingdom or even high-tech society without enforcers of some sort, and a set of enforcers, whether a military-police structure or a secret police, requires organization and structure, which in any system involving human beings requires politics. Non-autocratic technological societies have differing structures and differing politics, but politics remain necessary.

I could ask the question of why at least some “action-oriented” readers readily accept the impossibility of non-stop action and reject the impossibility of societies without workable politics, but the answer is most likely that, because they don’t see or understand that politics can be as deadly, and often more deadly, than military or other action, they find direct violence and action more emotionally satisfying. That lack of understanding on a larger scale in society is why autocrats like Putin, Hitler, Mussolini, Orban, and more than a few others gained power through political means, rather than by direct military force.

One of the biggest rationalizations/copouts in politics today is one used by far too many voters, usually when someone makes an observation about one politician’s unethical or potentially illegal behavior or the politician’s blatant falsehoods. Those who want to support the politician, despite that behavior or those lies, all too often say, “All politicians are crooks” or “They all lie.”

To begin with, every single human being who reaches adulthood has lied. That’s not the question. The question is what kind of lies they told and to whom. Were they white lies to spare someone’s feelings? Or lies to excuse their own failures, like claiming they were late to work because an accident backed up traffic when they really overslept because they were hung over. Or were they lies like those told by former President Trump? The other question is how often and how blatant the lies.

When we deal with acquaintances, most people weigh the “shades of gray” in judging people, but when they deal with politicians, from what I’ve seen, the smallest fault in a politician one doesn’t like or who’s of the “wrong” party is enough to justify voting for a politician with far greater faults who comes from the “right” party. People shy away from dealing with shady merchants or car dealers, but they don’t show the same reluctance when a shady politician from their own party spouts blatant falsehoods.

And usually, neither candidate is perfectly pure. When that happens, a large segment of each party tends to justify staying with the party candidate by magnifying the sins of the opposition candidate, rather than by comparing their actions and statements of the two [now, most people say they do this, but it’s clear from election results that many don’t].

Sometimes, voters believe that the principles a politician opposes or supports justify voting for that politician, despite his or her flaws, but how large do the flaws have to be before voters turn away from a flawed politician? How outrageous do the falsehoods and lies have to get before voters reject a politician from their own party?

Some voters never do, and that was how the Germans ended up with Hitler, the Italians with Mussolini, the Russians with Putin, and why Trump believes he can run and win a second term.

The other day, I got an email cartoon listing nineteen goods/categories whose prices have increased 10% or more over the past year. Nine were grocery products and one was men’s suits. The others were categories: gasoline, airline tickets, used cars, gas utilities, hotels, delivery costs, electricity, furniture, and cleaning products. The bottom line caption was: So how is inflation only 8.6%?

I checked the numbers against the latest CPI-U, and some were exaggerated. The email said used car prices were up 35%, but the CPI lists the annual inflation at 7.8% The email also listed gasoline increases at 49%, when the actual was 29%.

But the most misleading aspect is that all of the items listed by the email together comprise less than 30% of all the items that comprise the CPI-U. All food items comprise only 14%. Eggs [up 44%] only amount to 1/10 of one percent.

Overall food prices (comprising 14% of the CPI-U) increased 11.4%, but all commodity prices, excluding food and energy, only rose 6.3% over the last year.

Now neither 8.6% nor 6.3% is good, but citing huge price spikes in small segments of the economy is definitely misleading. It’s also politically effective. People don’t notice the prices that don’t rise or rise more slowly. They notice that gasoline and egg prices are way up, or that used cars are getting pricy.

Yet, I’d be willing to be that the majority of people who received that email or saw the original posting of the cartoon and its statistics will have the reaction that the government is grossly “cooking the statistics.”

And the government has been “readjusting” the statistics for years, but in little ways, such as reducing the impact of food and energy costs on the CPI, but its figures aren’t “readjusted” by the two and three-fold magnitudes suggested by the cartoon.

This statistical “discrepancy” also illustrates one of the biggest problems faced by a democratic high technology society, that fewer and fewer of the people who vote really understand either the technology or the economy underlying their society, and that lack of understanding becomes fertile ground for demagogues who offer falsified/incorrect facts, gross exaggerations, and beguiling simple (but unworkable) “solutions” to complex problems.

All fiction rests on, as the British poet Coleridge put it more than two centuries ago, “the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment.” But what continually surprises me is what aspects of “disbelief” various readers are willing to suspend (and what they are not), as well as what suspensions various authors expect of their readers.

As authors, we all have beliefs and preferences. As my readers know, I try hard to provide workable economic and political systems as a framework for my novels, and this carries over into my reading. While I’m more willing to accept an unworkable economic or political system in a fantasy, particularly when the plot doesn’t depend primarily on either, if I’m reading science fiction, especially hard science fiction, totally unworkable politics and economics are usually a total turn-off for me. Likewise, a cast of characters with no visible means of support tends to make suspension of disbelief difficult for me. But that’s me.

Everyone has different parameters for what aspects of “disbelief” can be suspended, and sometimes I find what readers can and cannot accept as “literarily believable” rather, shall I say, interesting. There are readers who can easily accept order and chaos magic but cannot believe the way certain female characters in my books behave [even though that behavior is modeled on that of my wife and my numerous daughters].

There is, of course, a difference between willingness to suspend disbelief and disliking the way characters are portrayed, but there’s a definite crossover. Readers who aren’t fond of strong women are going to have more trouble suspending disbelief when they encounter a female character who’s not particularly tolerant of male chauvinism, misogyny, and patriarchal power. Readers who are fond of action will be less likely to suspend disbelief when a character has to deal with a great deal of bureaucracy, subtlety, and intrigue.

From what I’ve observed, readers are far more likely to suspend disbelief about politics, economics, and technology than about interpersonal relationships and social structures, although this has changed significantly over the past thirty years. Even so, radically changed socio-economic structures are still comparatively infrequent, possibly because they’re hard for many readers to even imagine, let alone accept as “realistic” enough to suspend disbelief.

And, in the end, because one of the reasons why people read fiction is to escape reality, fiction that is apparently “farther” from reality draws more readers than fiction closer to reality, but that’s often an illusion, because while the magic or technology vary greatly from reality, societal basics seldom do, which is why an older book such as The Left Hand of Darkness still stands out.

For the past three months I’ve been inundated with appeals for funds by various Republican and Democratic candidates and both political parties. But I’ve noticed that there’s a fundamental difference.

Almost every Republican appeal is not only fear-based, but it’s always about how those vile Democrats are going to take away “your freedoms.” They’re going to take away your freedom to own a gun [despite the fact that the Second Amendment preludes that, if admittedly, Democrats possibly might not allow high-speed, multiple-shot, mass-killing weapons]. Republicans charge that Democrats will have the FBI raiding your home [especially if you have top-secret documents illegally]. They’re going to hire 87,000 new IRS agents, and all of them are after you [even though the point of the agents and the additional funds is to answer phone calls the IRS hasn’t had enough people to answer for years; to handle tax returns that have taken extra months, if not years, to process; to fill vacancies that have existed for years; and to have enough people to go after high-income tax cheats, who’ve gotten away with fraudulent tax returns for years]. Yes, those Democrats are going to take away your country [that is, they want true equality for all ethnicities and genders]. They’ll take away your freedom to infect other people [can’t have required immunizations even when they’ve proved to reduce and eliminate childhood and other deaths from infectious diseases]. And, of course, they’ll actually charge the Republicans’ beloved Donald Trump with the crimes he’s already committed.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are more concerned about freedoms that the Republicans have already restricted or attempted to restrict, such as women’s freedom to control their own bodies and reproductive rights. Democrats also oppose Republican initiatives and recent laws that make it harder for ethnic minorities to vote and thus to hold office, as well as legal and legislative initiatives to allow state government officials to override election results, which Republicans have already done in several states with regard to legal ballot initiatives. Democrats also oppose Republican bans on books that only Republicans seem to find objectionable.

So, from what I can see, Republicans are fearmongering on what Democrats might do, even when such acts are Constitutionally impossible, while Democrats are fearmongering about what Republicans have already done and what they want to extend to the whole country.

Whether many people, especially Republicans, will understand the difference is another question.

I’ve recently noticed a trend – or maybe it’s always been there – in various reviews, both of my books and others, of a view of ethics by reviewers that seems to believe that compromises to power and reality are always sell-outs.

Unhappily, this view has also dominated U.S. politics for at least the last decade, if not longer. The far right wants to ban all abortions all the time; the far left wants no restrictions on abortion. Polls show that the majority of Americans want something in the middle, roughly along the lines of Roe v. Wade. But the battle lines remain.

For years, Congress has been stalled on issues dealing with climate reform, a better IRS system, the high cost of prescription drugs, getting wealthy corporations to pay taxes, and the need to reduce health insurance costs for poorer families.

In early 2021, the President proposed a $3 trillion program to address such problems. The Republicans’ counter was to say that they were opposed to all of it, despite the problems. For a year and a half, the Democrats, despite having control of Congress, if only by one vote in the Senate, couldn’t agree on anything.

Once the Democrats realized that only by compromising among themselves could they get anything done did they finally pass the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which everyone should know won’t do all it promises. No one got all of what they wanted. Did that mean that the Democrats lost their ethics? Or did it mean that they did the best they could?

As for the Republicans, their “ethical” position was that they’d oppose anything. Most likely, if they’d really agreed to compromise, the final legislation would have been better. But they opposed compromise.

But what too many people tend to ignore, forget, or fail to acknowledge is that getting almost anything done in government requires compromise, not getting all that you think necessary, and having to accept things you think are unnecessary or even wrong.

Accepting compromise doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve lost your ethics. It may mean that your opponents have more votes and/or power. And for those who refuse compromise, especially when not acting means people will suffer, it suggests that some people believe so highly in their view of what’s ethical that they’d rather have people suffer or die than do what they think is “unethical.” And what does that say about their “ethics”?

As happens periodically, I’ve had to update and replace my old computers. Fortunately, I made the switchover before the two older computers [seven and ten years old] completely died, and because I’d backed things up. I salvaged almost all my critical files.

Unfortunately, I’m stuck, for professional reasons, with the latest version of Word, which has some “features” that strike me as glitches. For example, there’s no quick “save” command. While Word insists it saves documents as I type, that’s not accurate. It does such backup saving sporadically, from what I can tell.

So that means, when I want to save a document, I can’t just save it. No, I have to hit “save a copy,” and then click a separate “save” icon, and then be asked if I want to replace the previous file, and then be told that it’s already been saved, and that what I’m doing is redundant – except it’s not.

I also can’t add icon commands to the ribbon, where they’d be convenient. Nope. At least, I haven’t been able to find a way. Instead, I have to create a “new tab” linked to the ribbon and add the icons there, but that means I have to call up the “new tab” when I want those commands.

Does anyone who does these re-designs actually write for a living. I mean really write, with revisions, moving texts around, or redrafting?

Or are they just coming up with all these “nifty,” but useless, changes to justify their jobs?

A number of economists and commentators, including me, have raised the question of how the Russian economy can sustain such a powerful military force with such a comparatively weak economy, one with a Gross Domestic Product roughly equivalent to that of Spain, a relatively prosperous nation, but certainly no military heavyweight.

The simple answer is that Putin and the oligarchs direct more resources proportionately to the military than other industrialized nations, and much of that funding comes from agricultural and natural resource exports. Some comes from the depressed wage structure that requires labor and services, even high-skill services, at little more than survival level, if that [which, ironically, is an improvement over the 1990s, and one reason why the Russian people put up with Putin]. And some likely comes from plundering re-conquered parts of the former Soviet Union.

The Russians also steal any technology that they can, so they don’t have to develop it, and rely on foreign suppliers to provide parts for some of their industries, because they’ve never been able to afford to develop those technologies. At times, they’ve been unable to produce advanced weapons systems they’ve developed because they lack the funding. They’ve announced ambitious ship-building projects, but in reality, the actual numbers of new vessels aren’t that large, and most are submarines or smaller surface or amphibious ships. At the same time, they have difficulty maintaining and operating all of their existing fleet, particularly capital ships. They also lack the ability to gain clear air superiority over Ukraine and appear to be losing aircraft faster than they can replace them.

All that being said, Russia has a substantial backlog of artillery, ammunition, and tanks [if of older models] and the ability to induce/force men into the army as well as to stifle public dissent almost totally. So Putin will expend those assets until he no longer can, which could be years, based on the assumption that the U.S. and western European nations will give up before he runs out of artillery, ammunition, tanks, and the soldiers who are little more than cannon fodder to him.

And all that provides an example of why military-authoritarian nations continue to exist, because weaker nations can’t stop or contain them, and stronger nations that maximize individual freedoms often ignore them until they provide an imminent national threat.

In The Dawn of Everything, a heavily documented history of the human race by David Graeber and David Wengrow, the authors show conclusively that until the last two centuries or so, a range of human societies existed, ranging from hunter-gathers to socially complex and working societies that actually maximized freedom to the point where money and wealth were prohibited, and that the “progression” from hunter-gathers to agriculturally-dominated societal structures and then to commercial oligarchies or military-authoritarian societies is at best a misleading simplification and at worst a dangerous and inaccurate myth.

What Graeber and Wengrow fail to address directly is why, after tens of thousands of years of wide-ranging societal proliferation, present societies fall within a narrow scope, ranging from commercial authoritarianism to either religious or military authoritarianism. Their book certainly gives hints, in the fact that all too often societies that elevated individual freedom and severely restricted the power of elites tended to collapse after a time or were dominated and destroyed by societies that were more authoritarian and that could mobilize more force more effectively.

Money, in whatever form, is stored power. In effect, then a capitalistic society uses that stored power to force and/or induce people to follow the dictates of those with that power. And that power is in fact necessary to create a modern technological society. You cannot build anything complex without mobilizing, organizing, and directing large numbers of people and without obtaining large amounts of resources. The effective options are buying those people and resources or conscripting/forcing their use. And paying people for their skills and resources has proved to be more efficient and requires less governmental coercion than mandating work and confiscating resources.

Even so, the organization required by early capitalism – and the requisite loss of personal freedom – was totally unacceptable to most of the indigenous cultures of North America. It wasn’t unthought of. In fact, Wengrow and Graeber document detailed philosophical discussions between French and other intellectuals and wise individuals in indigenous cultures. But those cultures found the degree of individual oppression required by European cultures repulsive and unacceptable.

The reason why such cultures were subdued or obliterated is simple. Either commercial authoritarianism or military-political authoritarianism are far more effective at developing technology and at creating and mobilizing force than societies maximizing personal freedom. Although commercial authoritarianism is more effective at creating and innovating new products and technology, and allows a greater range of freedom than other forms of authoritarianism, politico-military authoritarianism can focus force more effectively… at least until commercial authoritarian societies decide to focus their efforts on the military sphere, which they won’t until the threat is clear, and sometimes not even then.

What seems never to be acknowledged is that compared to many earlier societies, we have sacrificed a notable degree of individual freedom of action in order to obtain better health and less infant mortality [at least in the industrialized world], greater comfort, and the mixed benefits of higher technology. Personally, I’m willing to give up some of that freedom, but it’s more than clear that, first, most commercial entities don’t recognize that the “system” requires most workers to give up a considerable degree of personal freedom for sometimes dubious economic and personal security, and, second, that most Americans don’t understand that, without that commercial authoritarianism, we’d be at best on a high stone age culture level.

More than a few Republicans and even some Democrats think that Trump spurred or led the Republican Party to the “dark side.”

Unfortunately, that explanation ignores the fact that there’s been a dark side to the Republican Party for at least seventy years, beginning with Joseph McCarthy in 1950, and his mythical and essentially non-existent list of 205 Communist Party members working at the State Department. Republicans were so fearful of losing McCarthy’s support in the 1952 election that they insisted that General Dwight Eisenhower remove a paragraph in a speech in Wisconsin that attacked McCarthy as a dangerous demagogue and fabricator. Although Eisenhower later said he regretted that decision, he never did confront McCarthy directly.

Richard Nixon used abusive and misleading anti-Communist themes in getting elected to Congress and the Senate (where he claimed that a “pink sheet” proved that his liberal opponent was an avowed Communist, which she never was).

Then in 1961, Senator Barry Goldwater pushed William Buckley and the conservative National Review to go easy on Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, even after Welch had claimed that Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” because the John Birch Society had become a well-funded source of volunteers and donors for the Republican Party. The Birchers [who declared that fluoridation was a Communist plot] enthusiastically supported Goldwater and his infamous statement that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

In turn, in 1968, Nixon courted Strom Thurmond, the arch-segregationist senator from South Carolina and said he opposed forcing integration and opposed busing and had his campaign manager tell southern Republican party leaders that he’d pick a vice president acceptable to the south and would “lay off pro-Negro crap.”

Despite efforts to whitewash matters, Republicans tend to forget that in July of 1980, Reagan’s first campaign stop was in the heart of Ku Klux Klan territory, Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he declared “I believe in states’ rights,” which was and is the mantra of southern segregationists and white supremacists. The religious right lined up behind Reagan, particularly the preacher Jerry Falwell, who waged a crusade against homosexuals because he claimed they threatened the very existence of the United States. When then-President Jimmy Carter tried to point out Reagan’s ties to the religious extreme right, he was attacked for being mean.

Throughout the 1990s, Pat Robertson claimed that all sorts of Satanic dupes – otherwise known as J.P. Morgan, the Rockefellers, the Federal Reserve, the United States, Henry Kissinger, the liberal elites – were out to destroy the United States, and threw his weight and that of the Christian Coalition behind Newt Gingrich to help the GOP get control of the U.S. House, and six years later backed George W. Bush over John McCain in 2000 (possibly because McCain had far more scruples than George W.).

Then in 2009 came the Tea Party, filled with paranoia, racism, and rage, waving Confederate flags at rallies and claiming that Barrack Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya, that Obama’s health care plan would set up death panels, and that Obama was a full-fledged Marxist who hated white people and was setting up concentration camps for his political opponents. When the Tea Partiers rallied at the Capitol in 2009, the Tea Partiers carried posters showing Obama as Sambo and calling Obama and his supporters “Nazis.” Those same Tea Partiers were welcomed by House Republican leader John Boehner, and Representatives Eric Cantor [later House Majority Leader] and Mike Pence.

Donald Trump didn’t create the hatred and viciousness out of nothing. He merely called it up out of the Republican Party, thrived on it, and encouraged it in every way possible… and only a handful of elected Republicans protested.

The other evening, I was watching a news show, and a commercial came on. Fancy that.

But that commercial stunned me, because it was about shoes, and it began by saying how much trouble it was to have to bend over and put on or tie your shoes. Then it went on to suggest that these new slip-on shoes would save you from the drudgery involved in footwear.

Oh, the work and effort involved in putting on shoes!

Now, while I realize that putting on shoes can be quite an effort for people with physical limitations, this commercial was aimed at prosperous and quite physically able individuals and pictured them as well.

But then, I’m definitely dated. I not only wear footwear, usually boots, but I also keep them moderately well-polished, another habit that appears to have vanished.

Hasn’t the sloppiness and comfort at any cost movement gone far enough?

We already see tank tops and flip-flops on commercial flights, in grocery stores, in many restaurants, and I’ve even seen them in theatres.

Is it such a trial to wear actual clothing these days?

Well… perhaps it is. Perhaps actual clothing has become as passe as actual facts.

“The Democrats and Merritt Garland raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, and now they’re coming for you.”

Republicans are flooding the internet with that sentence, or something like it.

But it’s a scare tactic with almost no elements of truth behind it. First off, the Department of Justice has been trying for months and months to get Trump to return the classified materials.

Trump ignored the requests. Then several months ago, some fifteen boxes of classified material were returned. FIFTEEN BOXES of sensitive material that many nations would love to get their hands on, and that was stored with virtually no safeguards, documents he was supposed to return a year and a half ago. A Trump attorney signed an affidavit declaring that all material had been returned. Someone lied, because an informant tipped off the DOJ that more documents remained at Mar-A-Lago. A search warrant was issued.

The FBI didn’t burst into Trump’s mansion. They presented the warrant and were admitted – and found more sensitive and classified material.

They didn’t make it all public. Trump did… claiming he was raided, as if he were some innocent person and that it was all unexpected.

Really?

Trump was briefed on how to handle such material. All presidents and senior government officials handling such matters are briefed routinely. He didn’t follow the law, and now he’s complaining because he was caught. What he’s really claiming is that he should be above the law.

But the right-wing Republicans, which is what most of them are today, who’ve been so behind law enforcement officers suddenly aren’t supportive of law enforcement. Those very same Republicans are howling as if Trump were innocent and this is some miscarriage of law enforcement. Just like they think that rioters who staged the January 6th insurrection should be above the law.

Because, after all, white males, especially wealthy ones, don’t have to be law-abiding if the law gets in the way of what they want. And they certainly don’t believe in democracy if anyone else gets more votes.

Right now, it appears to me as though the majority of elected Republicans are cowardly, lying, hypocritical apologists for both Trump and the rest of the American oligarchic class.

When someone like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning makes off with classified documents, Republicans are all for throwing the book at them, but when Trump does the same thing, and the FBI tries to recover the documents – not even to charge Trump with anything criminal – Republicans scream that it’s a raid and an outrage. Their attacks against the FBI make it even more apparent that they prefer that the law only be enforced against the poor and the powerless.

The majority of them deny that the January 6th insurrection was violent or that Trump did anything wrong, and they attack any Republican who dares to tell the truth about what did happen, especially those few who remained law-abiding and principled. Yet many of these senior Republican officer-holders deplored the attack immediately after it occurred, and now they’re repudiating what they said then… which can only mean that they’re not only unprincipled, but they’re also self-serving cowards who care more about being re-elected than being truthful or upholding the principles on which this country was founded.

They bend over backward, at least in public, not to offend Trump, despite all his lies and misdeeds, and they depict him as a victim because the FBI used a search warrant to find and remove classified files from his Mar-a-Lago mansion, files that he had no right to retain – and that was only after months of efforts by the FBI to obtain and return the records.

Trump has called avowed and criminally violent white supremacists “good people” and even said that he loves them – actions that elected Republicans conveniently ignore. When being deposed about possibly criminal business dealings, Trump obviously didn’t want to tell the truth or lie under oath; so he took the Fifth Amendment to avoid making statements that could incriminate him.

And the vast majority of national Republican officeholders go along with Trump and so does a significant fraction of the Republican Party, all of whom obviously believe that Trump’s lying words and illegal actions matter less than truth and honestly… and that no crime is too great so long as it serves to get votes.

And people want to re-elect him President? What does that say about the Republicans?

I’m sick of companies that send me reminders and requests to rate them or the products/services that I’ve purchased. I’m also more than a little tired of polls that guesstimate how the public feels about this or that issue or politician, almost on a day-by-day basis, and particularly the pseudo-polls sent by both parties that misrepresent the issues in order to beg for contributions. Not to mention companies that legally misrepresent prices and interest rates… and, of course, politicians who declare that the election was stolen when recounts, investigations, and audits show that it wasn’t.

I purchased the product or service. Whether I purchase more is what really counts for the company. What I especially hate are those questions asking how the company could improve its products and services. If a manufacturer or service provider doesn’t already know its shortcomings, the odds are that they won’t take my suggestions anyway. And why should I provide free market research that they’ll ignore? The bottom line isn’t what I think, but whether the product/service is good and the company sells enough to remain in business.

While good polls can reveal what those polled feel at the moment, what such polls don’t reveal is, in most cases, more important than what they do. Today, everyone is most concerned about inflation. It takes a poll to verify that? The more important question is why they blame the current administration, when it has only a minor part in creating the inflation. This isn’t an apology for Biden; it’s been a problem for decades, if not longer. The factors that influence the economy have long lead times, and whoever’s in office now gets the credit or blame for the acts of his predecessor. The polls just focus the blame/credit on the wrong person… and most of the public is either too stupid to understand or doesn’t care, because they want someone to blame.

And far too many companies misrepresent prices, like the replacement window company that offers your second window at forty percent off, provided that you buy four, which means that you get the first four windows at ten percent off, but the number that sticks in most people’s mind is forty percent. Or the car dealers or others who advertise no payments for the first year, but don’t mention that the payments after that include interest on the entire amount for that first year.

As for the Republicans who insist the election was stolen, the bottom line is the final authenticated vote count, and, interestingly enough, the bottom line in Kansas on abortion was that sixty percent of the voters voting [which was a record turnout for a primary election] didn’t want abortion banned, no matter what the right-to-lifers claim.

There’s a certain trade magazine “serving” the F&SF fiction field that’s facing considerable financial difficulties caused by limited subscribers, increasing print costs, and declining advertising. Now I’ve subscribed to this magazine for years and years, and over at least the past five years, I’ve donated modest sums to the foundation that publishes the magazine. But one of the biggest revenue problems the publication faces is the significant decline in advertising revenue. And frankly, from what I see, that decline is largely one of the publication’s own creation.

Years ago, the head of one of the larger F&SF publishers pointed out to me that the magazine had never really done any significant interviews, reviews, or stories on a mega-selling series or on its author. In fact, virtually none of that publisher’s best-selling authors received any significant coverage. The magazine tended (and still does) to focus more on “avant” authors or those perceived to be new and/or cutting edge, many if not most of whom do not sell even mid-list quantities of books. While that’s a laudable goal, essentially minimizing coverage of more “mainstream” F&SF authors means that larger publishing houses, in a time of tighter budgets, decided that they didn’t need to advertise as much, or at all, in the magazine. This was compounded by the attrition of older publishing executives who regarded advertising in the magazine as a form of public service.

As far as advertising funds go, small presses don’t have much money to spare, and successful indie authors are going to put spare funds into activities and venues that show a direct result. The authors and presses who benefit the most from the magazine don’t have the funds to support it, and the publishers who do have the funds no longer see much point in doing so.

If, over the years, the magazine had included more articles and interviews that benefitted more mainstream authors, the advertising drop-off might not have occurred or been so drastic, but from what I’ve seen, the magazine’s editorial choices and slant have become more and more focused on works appealing to a smaller and smaller segment of the reading and writing marketplace.

Over the years, I’ve intermittently received comments along the lines of “you don’t get/understand [fill in subject].”

What this usually means is “you can’t possibly understand.”

Occasionally, the commenter is correct. Very few people living – possibly only those with a near-death experience – can understand death from the first person personal view. Or being incinerated in a by a huge fireball. For everyone else, including authors, trying to portray such circumstances requires research, extrapolation, and imagination… and you still might not be accurate, which is why I don’t stray too far from what I’ve experienced and seen. I haven’t actually crashed an aircraft, but I have lost the only engine I had and survived the autorotation into a field, and I’ve rescued survivors of a crash moments after it happened and seen the bodies of those who didn’t make it.

And most times, though, this author does understand; I just might not “understand” it in the way the commenter feels or sees it. That’s only natural. We’re all different, the difference ranging from attitudes and feelings we share and understand about others to total emotional incomprehension.

I’ve given my best advice, both personally and professionally, and seen people disregard it… and then lose their careers and futures. I’ve also taken my own advice… and failed miserably on more than one occasion.

I doubt that I’ll ever feel the seemingly blind love and joy others take in personal weapons of mass destruction or feel the undoubting self-righteousness of a true believer, possibly because I’ve always had a lot of doubts. But that’s why I only portray such individuals from the outside. And most times, at least for me, that’s the best way, because people usually react to what they see and experience from others’ behavior.

Also… perspective matters – enormously. The man or woman who kills someone shooting up others is likely to feel a lot less guilt than someone who murders their boss over something trivial [but then, maybe not, given some bosses].

And, sometimes, the author doesn’t get it, but with good writers, that doesn’t happen as much as the critics think, if more than the author would like to believe.

Once upon a time, a young teenager operated a lawn-mowing business with his younger brother. This was long before powered string-trimmers. I was that teenager, and I did a lot of hand-trimming [hand-powered clippers] and edging [muscle-powered half-mower], although the main mower was Briggs & Stratton powered. It was hard work, and when I got old enough to drive I left the lawn-mowing business behind and became a lifeguard.

Even though I was one of the better competitive swimmers in the region, I still had to be Red Cross Water Safety Certified and pass a rigorous test against a number of other candidates. Getting a lifeguard job in Denver back then wasn’t all that easy.

Fast-forward to the present.

Because I know what drudgery lawn-mowing is, when I became successful enough, and when my children were long out of college, my first personal luxury was hiring a lawn service, and it definitely wasn’t cheap, but I was tired of mowing the lawn.

For a time, that was fine, but then that lawn service just vanished, literally overnight. I found another lawn service, but over the past several years the quality of mowing and trimming has diminished. My neighbors, with other lawn services, have noted the same problem. Then last Friday, the lawn-mowing team arrived, spent twenty minutes, and vanished, leaving the lawn two-thirds unmowed and totally untrimmed. I haven’t yet had a response to my inquiries.

On a related note, several weeks ago, I ran across a syndicated news story about how quite a number of public swimming pools across the United States were closed or unable to open because of a shortage of lifeguards.

I definitely have to wonder.

The other day I came across a comment to the effect that authors who portrayed society where the majority of power wielders and decision-makers were white were in effect supporting racism. That’s a rather broad brush. If you’re writing historical fiction, fantasy or not, that’s the way the culture was. If you’re writing present-day or near-future fiction of any sort, that’s the way most cultures are and will be for at least a generation. Accurate portrayal isn’t racist, although glorifying or rationalizing existing racism certainly is.

In writing Isolate (and it’s forthcoming sequel, Councilor), I changed the “color” palate. Those of the aristocracy and older commercial wealth tend to have darker skins, whereas farm workers and lower-class manual workers have lighter skins. While I believe that would be the outcome in that society, it’s still “racist,” in a reverse way, but every culture in human history has had a way of “discriminating” against some group. Even animals do on occasion.

As I’ve noted before, the Roman Empire was far less race-conscious than American culture is today, but they discriminated, nonetheless, mainly by economic status. Slaves came in every color and so did people of wealth and power, especially outside of Rome, and even a number of emperors were not of Roman birth.

A similar problem exists for a writer with regard to gender. Like it or not (and I don’t), in the U.S., men, as a group, still tend to minimize women and attempt to keep them out of positions of power and to restrict their rights, and in the near future, for a number of reasons, it can’t and won’t change [even if the Supreme Court were to be drastically re-structured overnight and equal rights and pay legislation became law tomorrow].

That should be changed, and, in time, I’m hopeful that it will be, but to declare that fiction that doesn’t represent racial or gender “equality” as racist or gender-biased is unrealistic, because all societies “discriminate” in some fashion. Depicting a racist or gender-discriminating society isn’t by itself racism or discrimination, but endorsing or glorifying such a society is.