Forget the arguments about “right to life.” They’re a smokescreen for the real issue, because the real issue is power.

Men have absolute sexual freedom biologically. They can choose to have sex when and where they wish, even when the woman or another man is not willing. And in the case of women, the only one who suffers adverse physical repercussions is the woman.

The freedom to use birth control or, if the woman desires, to have an abortion in the case of an unwanted pregnancy, gives her close to equal freedom and certainly the freedom to do as she wishes with her own body – which is analogous to the freedom men already have.

Like it or not, most men, at least subconsciously, don’t want women to have that freedom. Their answer is that if women don’t want to bear the consequences, they shouldn’t have sex. But men can have sex without bearing the potential consequences. Those are unequal rights, pure and simple.

Some men have argued that greater punishment for rape or forced sex and financial support is preferable. Those won’t prevent women from being forced into sex and bearing the consequences. Only the unfettered access to birth control and abortion will.

The fact that this is a power struggle is further supported by the renewed push by the far right not only to eliminate all abortions, even when the life of the woman is endangered, but to prohibit all forms of birth control.

This isn’t about right to life; it’s about male domination, which, apparently, some women on the far right also prefer – and that’s their choice, but it shouldn’t be forced on all women.

The fact that those religious faiths that oppose abortion, including the Catholic Church, are also male dominated, sometimes viciously and violently, should also tell thinking people that it’s not primarily about right to life, but about men’s “right to dominate.”

With the leaked draft of the pending Supreme Court decision, apparently to overturn a woman’s right to abortion as established in Roe v. Wade, has come another not totally unexpected surprise. In their meetings before their confirmation hearings, both Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh told Senator Susan Collins of Maine that Roe v. Wade was “settled law.”

In essence, they both lied to get confirmed.

Chief Justice Roberts is incensed that the draft opinion was leaked.

He ought to be even more incensed that the two newest justices blatantly lied to get confirmed.

Now, admittedly, Senator Collins was a fool to believe either, especially Neil Gorsuch, whose views on abortion were well known long before he was even considered for the Supreme Court, but the fact that they both blatantly lied speaks volumes about the far right.

We all know that too many politicians lie or mislead to get votes in the hope of getting elected. That’s nothing new. But one could hope for more from a potential appointee to the nation’s highest court. These two didn’t even have the decency to say, “My record speaks for itself.” Instead they, in effect, made a promise they had no intention of honoring.

Personally, I have a real problem with so-called idealists who will compromise every principle they supposedly hold dear in order to be able to impose, very selectively, their principles on others. But this is and continues to be the hallmark of supposed “conservatives,” who are in fact not conservatives, but religious zealots trying to impose church upon state.

The far right effectively espouses the right to shoot other people under certain circumstances, but they won’t allow a woman the right to decide what goes on with her own body. At least, the far left will let you go to hell in your own handbasket, even if they’ll overcharge you for using the handbasket.

[With apologies to The Kingston Trio]

Because I’m a registered Republican and have given money in the past to a select few Democratic candidates, over the past few months both my snailmail and my email have been deluged with appeals for money and support from both parties and from candidates from both political parties. Each party and every candidate insists that the very existence of the United States is threatened if they don’t get adequate funding in order to defeat the “evil other.”

Now, I’d be the first to admit that there are politicians in each party that the respective party – and the world – could and should do without. Parties being what they are – greedy and without ethics [ethics are only used in judging the other party] – that’s not going to happen.

Depressingly predictable is that the vast majority of these desperate-sounding appeals are close to fact-free, along the lines of “if the other party gains/maintains control of Congress, the sky will fall.” The specifics of how the sky will fall, of course, are also general, but behind the vague generalities, the implications are obvious.

If those free-spending free-sex Democrats get control, they’ll take away our guns, require abortions, indoctrinate our kids with gay and lesbian propaganda, give the vote to every illegal immigrant, require paying people for not working, and bankrupt the entire country, and that’s just for starters.

If those authoritarian Republican Trump clones get control, they’ll take away civil rights from anyone not a white male, ban all abortions for any reason, fortify and militarize the southern border, pass more tax cuts for selfish millionaires, keep the minimum wage as low as possible, accelerate climate change and destroy the environment in a generation, and that’s just for starters.

I’ll also admit that there are politicians close to those extremes, not that most would ever admit it publicly, but I did spend twenty years in the Washington, D.C., political climate and there have always been extremists, just not so many that are so extreme. Even so, I’ve never seen such vitriol on such a wide scale – not in the fifty-plus years that I’ve been in and watched U.S. politics.

And that’s why I don’t like any of them very much – this frantic sky-is-falling, violent-hatred fund-raising just exacerbates the current polarization… and by engaging in it, they may well permanently fracture the underlying consensus required for a democratic political system.

Over the last week or so, I’ve gotten proposed comments citing articles by various military “authorities,” published in magazines or by organizations of, shall we say, dubious provenance. Many of the citations or facts in the articles appear to be largely accurate, but many are not.

What they all have in common, however, is a bottom line that Vladimir Putin had no choice but to attack Ukraine because the Ukrainians didn’t scrupulously “keep” the Minsk accords and because the evil Ukrainians were shelling their own people in the Donbas, i.e., the Russian-speaking sympathizers who have been fighting for years to secede from Ukraine. In fact, for practical purposes, some of those areas have seceded in all but name, but even Russia agrees that those regions aren’t legally part of Russia.

What exactly did Ukraine do to merit an invasion? Ukraine didn’t seize Russian territory. And it did agree not to join NATO. It’s a nation of 40 million people that’s hardly a military threat to Russia. It did get involved in a nasty civil war in one part of its own territory, but that war hardly threatened Russia.

And, oh yes, the apologists also claim that the Russia of today is not at all the same as the USSR, because now Russia is “capitalist,” except that the apologists conveniently ignore that quite a few “capitalists” who displease Putin end up missing, dead, or commit suicide improbably and that the Russian economy still doesn’t function all that well.

What this also ignores is that Vladimir Putin is 69 years old and a product of the USSR. In terms of his acts, and his methodology, he’s little different from Josef Stalin. Opposition is crushed ruthlessly. Even non-violent dissent isn’t tolerated. Political opponents end up imprisoned or dead. Neighboring nations are threatened and/or invaded.

Is Ukraine perfect? Hardly. It’s experienced more corruption that it should have, and likely been brutal in dealing with the equally-brutal secessionists, but it’s made considerable efforts to improve, and it’s more than clear that its people have no desire to be ruled or governed by Russia. That, by itself, should weigh much more than Putin’s hurt feelings over the fact that the Ukrainians weren’t “perfect” in abiding with an agreement forced on them at gunpoint.

And no, I won’t publish references to such apologia that read like they were crafted by Putin trolls.

In the war between Russia and Ukraine, who’s actually in charge of the Russian offensive? Ostensibly, Vladimir Putin is. But last week Putin declared that attacks against the steel plant in Mariupol would stop and that Russian troops would “blockade” the plant. Since then, there have been a reported 35 air strikes and at least one more ground assault, apparently repulsed.

Over the course of the war, Putin has declared several safe passage areas for civilian evacuations, corridors where Russian armed forces then repeatedly attacked and killed unarmed fleeing civilians.

Last Friday, Brigadier General Rustam Minnekayev, acting commander of Russia’s Central Military District, stated that the Russian Armed Forces planned essentially to invade/occupy Moldova’s eastern territory bordering Ukraine less than 30 miles from the port city of Odessa in order create a land corridor to Crimea. What makes this interesting is that, if the translation is correct, Minnekayev is a very low-ranking general.

Yesterday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov charged NATO with waging “in essence” a proxy war with Russia by supporting Ukraine and warned the West not to underestimate the elevated risks of nuclear conflict over Ukraine.

While all these statements and actions demonstrate is that the Russian military intends to destroy as much of Ukraine as possible and will rattle the nuclear sabre in an effort to pressure the U.S. and other allies of Ukraine into restricting military aid to the Ukrainians. But it is rather unusual that, in an authoritarian state such as Russia, there are so many different, and sometimes conflicting statements.

Such acts and statements also suggest two possibilities. Either Putin doesn’t have the control he projects and the conflict is being driven by the Russian military complex or that Russia at all levels that matter at present is hell-bent on grinding Ukraine into dust.

Neither is particularly reassuring.

When the donut shop on South Main Street opened, I gave it a year at most. In the nearly thirty years we’ve lived here, I’ve seen two donut shops and three bakeries open… and close. After close to ten years, the donut shop is going stronger than ever. It’s open from six in the morning until two in the afternoon.

How did it manage when so many others failed? I’m guessing, but it has several factors going for it. First, its donuts are by far the best in town. Second, it’s open every day of the week. Third, it has a drive-up window that’s relatively easy to access. Fourth, it serves a range of coffee, tea, and smoothie beverages, and fifth, it has a range of baked pastry-type sandwiches [I don’t know how else to describe them] for lunch.

The donuts are slightly more expensive than any others in town, roughly ten percent more.

There is one thing that bothers me, though. Given my schedule, or my wife’s, we’re almost never free to visit the donut shop until it’s close to closing time, and by then, the shop is almost always out of glazed donuts – my wife’s favorite. There are old-fashioned plain and old-fashioned glazed donuts, and chocolate iced donuts, and plenty of glazed donut holes, but no glazed donuts.

Now, the owner has been successful, when so many have failed. So who am I to suggest change?

At the same time, if he’s always out of glazed donuts by one o’clock, and he has left-over donut holes, wouldn’t it make more sense – and dollars – to bake a few more glazed donuts?

Then, maybe he does, and I have the misfortune only to show up when there aren’t any left. And that’s the danger of relying too heavily on personal and anecdotal information.

In the May issue of The Atlantic, entitled “How Social Media Made America Stupid,” Jonathan Haidt offers a critical and provocative insight into how and why the United States has become so “stupid” and politically polarized. Personally, I feel that he doesn’t make the complete case for stupidity, since he seems to ignore the impacts social media has on concentration, depth of knowledge, and other factors, but his analysis of the cause of political polarization is spot on.

In the case of political polarization, there are two main factors. One is, predictably, social media. The other is the nature of group dynamics.

Social media, and features like “share,” “like,” and “retweet,” especially on Facebook and Twitter, allow users to make their views known, and given the algorithms and human nature, particularly negative feelings, which Haidt calls “social darts.” These social darts impact human behavior. When someone is vilified on social media, justly or unjustly, the economic and societal impact can be profound.

Those most active on social media are the most “progressive” liberals, followed by the activist ultra-conservatives. No other groups come close.

Why the social dart mechanism creates political polarization results from group dynamics. Those generally on the left, for example, pay far more attention to the views of those who share many of the same beliefs, usually but not always Democrats, and moderate Democrats who oppose almost any aspect of the “woke” agenda of the progressives can be and are often targeted by the “progressive” liberals.

Republicans largely ignore liberal social darts, except to mock them, but are fearful of expressing views, even views previously expressed by noted Republicans, that would get them vilified as RINOs [Republicans In Name Only].

As a result, the greatest impact of social darts falls within social groups, and because the most active “social darters” are the extremists on both sides, those social darts have the impact of silencing dissenters who in the past have exercised a moderating influence.

Add to that the fact that social media, because of its very structure, oversimplifies complex issues, and the result is that both the “left” and the “right” have become more and more dominated by the simplistic extremes.

In short, no matter how much you blame the other “side,” the real problem lies within your side.

There’s been a certain amount of commentary about “understanding” Putin.

Most of the world understands him quite well. He wants to re-create an authoritarian empire that never worked all that well and couldn’t really be supported by the fifth-rate economy that was all that the Russian political structure would allow.

He’ll also kill or incarcerate anyone who he thinks is a threat, and he’ll try to smash anything that he can if he believes that it stands in his way, just like the overgrown petulant child he is – if an intelligent, ruthless, scheming, and merciless child. Ukraine is just the latest example.

Although authoritarian societies can mass and direct concentrated forces in ways difficult for freer market-based economies, that concentration is inefficient and stifles economic growth and development. That’s one reason why both Russia and China work hard at stealing information and ideas from other nations, particularly the U.S. It’s also why Russia can’t, for example, build sufficient numbers of both military and civilian aircraft, or why it’s actually reliant upon U.S. oil production technology and equipment, and why Russian exports are predominantly either natural resources or agricultural products.

Vlad the invader either doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to accept the fact that comparatively freer market-based economies can out-produce and out-engineer command-and-control societies, even while we “waste” incredible amounts of resources on goods and services others would term frivolous.

The current Chinese leadership certainly does understand the economic limitations of command-and-control governments, which is why that leadership is attempting to create a system of “controlled capitalism.”

But because Putin isn’t about to even try to follow that path, he’ll bleed the Russian people dry in pursuit of his goals. Over the long run, he can’t compete against freer societies, except by destroying them. The problem is that, while he can’t “win” in the long run, right now he can create extreme atrocities and destruction, and with his nuclear arsenal, in the short run, he could make everyone lose.

As a world, several decades ago, we reached the position where the weapons systems we have developed can easily destroy all human civilization and wipe out all but a small fraction of the human race… and possibly all of it. The planet will endure and possibly even recover, over eons, from such destruction, but at a terrible cost.

For the last few decades, the world powers have managed not to unleash such destruction, but now we’re closer to that possibility than ever before. So what has changed?

The idea that mutual assured destruction would avert nuclear calamity rests on a fundamental assumption – that no political leader wants to destroy the world, because such destruction would result in self-annihilation. There’s a sub-assumption behind that premise, which is that political leaders will act rationally, but what’s rational to most people isn’t necessarily rational to those with extremist beliefs.

“Give me liberty or give me death” is a powerful statement, but what about Vladimir Putin’s attitude of, “If you interfere with my attack on Ukraine, I will loose nuclear fury,” and possibly destroy civilization?

Yet the Ukrainians are fighting for freedom, for their liberty, and most likely tens of thousands have already died, just to remain free of Russian control. But if the United States enters that conflict militarily, Putin might well use nuclear weapons. If the U.S. provides defensive weapons that allow Ukraine to force the Russians from Ukraine, or even force a stalemate, might not Putin issue the same threat?

Putin is capable of using tactical nuclear devices. The question is whether he is willing to use them. If he does, then what? If the U.S. replies in kind, so will Putin. And if Europe and the U.S. back down, what happens if he goes after Poland or Finland next?

Once again, the world is faced with a leader who wants to force oppression on others, leading a people unwilling to remove him…but Hitler didn’t have nuclear weapons.

The other evening, I attended a university opera program featuring two Puccini one-act operas. After the production was over, the Dean of the College of Performing Arts spoke to the Director of the Voice and Opera program. Her remarks were largely about the female leads, talking about how talented and impressive they were.

As I’ve mentioned some time back, this sort of talk infuriates me, especially from someone who should know better.

Why? Because the two leading singers she mentioned came to the university several years ago with nice but hardly outstanding voices. The head of the voice area worked with them, and many other students, over that period. They didn’t come as stars, as most singers don’t. It took time and effort and the expertise of the voice professor and others to bring out the best in their voices, but all the dean could rave about was their “talent.”

Singing that well isn’t just talent. It requires not only hard effort on the part of the student but a good technical and artistic voice professor to develop that “star” quality. It requires good accompanists and instruction beyond the mechanics of singing. But that effort by faculty is seldom if ever recognized. It’s as though such “stars” arrived at the university as stars.

This lack of understanding is hardly new. I’ve watched it for nearly thirty years at the university, but it’s not just here. It permeates American culture. The students did it all. The actors or actresses did it all. The athletes did it all.

Behind every “star” is a plethora of individuals who contributed to that “stardom.”

Society isn’t built on stars; it’s built on the people who developed them and who continue to support them. Stars – or billionaires – wouldn’t be possible without that support, and the excessive praise of talent and stardom is just another factor behind the current social unrest and discontent.

Last week, part of one comment on a blog post read: “I don’t think the average parent’s behavior regarding their children has changed over time.” The poster then went on to blame teachers for the attention deficit problems of students and for not adapting teaching to the internet.

Parents’ behavior hasn’t changed? Oh, really? Over what time period? Twenty-five years ago, I never saw parents buried in their cellphones all the time, as I do now. I never saw mothers with earbuds on talking on their cellphones and ignoring their children as they drive them wherever. Children weren’t spending an average of seven hours a day looking at screens. I walk daily, and have for over forty years, and it’s only been in the last ten to fifteen years when all the “younger” joggers are trotting along talking apparently to no one. I see parents using cellphones as baby-sitters all the time.

Until about twenty years ago, when college students switched classes, they talked to others they encountered. Today, classes change almost silently, and students walk along looking down at screens or concentrating on what they hear in their earbuds.

This is a seismic social change in American culture [and likely others as well], and it’s had seismic impacts on young people’s ability to concentrate, as well as on their social development. Far too many young people literally don’t know how to make conversation, and they’re awkward in social interactions. Their social maturity is 1-2 years behind that of the previous generation.

Now… the vast majority of these habits and patterns are developed before children ever enter a classroom – by the parents and the example they set. Is it the teacher’s fault that a student cannot concentrate because the student effectively has electronically-established ADHD? Or because the student is conversationally deprived?

Usage studies show fairly conclusively that parents aren’t very effective at monitoring their children’s screen time.

But, if the poster meant that parents ignored their children too much twenty years ago, I can’t really argue with that. But the cost of that ignorance is far higher now, and blaming teachers for not “solving” the habits and patterns learned at home isn’t going to address the problem… or help the children.

Also, insisting that teachers need to “solve” the problem is just passing the buck. Because teachers have always been underpaid and still are, there have always been some bad teachers, but previous generations still learned. Now, too many aren’t, because skills aren’t gained by looking things up, and real learning takes concentration that too many students not only don’t have, but find boring.

But… go ahead and blame the teachers. It’s easier than looking in the mirror.

Societies and civilizations cannot exist without one basic element, and that element is trust. What is too often overlooked, however, is that, the greater the complexity and technological level of a society, the greater the need for trust.

If you grow or hunt your own food, you don’t need to worry about others tampering or degrading your food to make a few extra coins. You may be poisoned by your own failings or carelessness, or you may be a terrible farmer or hunter, but you don’t have to trust someone else.

Throughout history, there have been those who abused trust, those who sold spoiled food, debased coins, misrepresented goods, and the like. And that’s why laws against such acts have been part of cultures from early on.

Such laws become more important as technology advances. If a potter covers a flaw in a pot with glaze, or uses substandard clay, and the pot later breaks, the damage is limited to the cost to the buyer and whatever food is lost or spoiled. If a ceramics factory uses substandard clay in making a batch of electronic power insulators, the damage is far greater and far more wide-ranging.

The same is also true with regard to speech. Falsehoods used to be limited to a given community and communities were small enough that people generally knew who to trust and whom not to – based largely on the observations of actions. It wasn’t perfect, but spreading “big lies” was difficult. That’s not to say it didn’t happen. The Egyptian records involving interactions between Ramses II of Egypt and the Hittites read quite differently from the Hittite records.

The problem today is technology. Technology is neither good nor evil; it’s simply a system of knowledge and technology that multiplies the effect of everything. The associated problem is human nature. Humans are hard-wired to react more to what we perceive as dangerous. So we react more strongly to what is presented as evil or dangerous – even when we should know better. And the combination of technology and that aspect of human nature makes it difficult to combat big lies that prey on our fears.

Yet, human nature being what it is, there are always those who, for personal gain or misguided ideals, abuse trust. When a society refuses or is unable to deal with and prevent such abuses more and more people take matters into their own hands. The result is usually either anarchy and growing lawlessness or a societal reaction that results in a restrictive and authoritarian government.

Vladimir Putin has effectively claimed that Ukraine poses an existential threat to Russia, and that claim has been widely disputed and ignored. But Putin is correct. Merely by existing, Ukraine in its present mode of government, with all its flaws, poses an inexorable threat to everything that Putin believes and holds dear.

Ukraine has discovered the appeal and the effectiveness of greater personal and economic freedom, and the current level of success in resisting Russian efforts to conquer Ukraine flows from that greater level of economic and personal freedom.

Just before the Russian Revolution, Russia had the fifth largest economy in the world. Today, it’s not even in the top ten. Except for military technology, Russia relies heavily on western technology all across its economy. Most of its best petroleum equipment comes from the west, and Russia cannot build enough commercial aircraft to supply its own airlines, which may be another reason why Putin just confiscated all foreign-owned commercial aircraft in Russia. He’ll worry about the spare parts he can’t get later, or cannibalize some of those aircraft for the parts.

In addition, much of the Russian economy rests not on technology, but the export of natural resources and agricultural crops.

If Ukraine had been able to continue on its current economic and political path, within a generation, if not sooner, more and more Russians would have been moving south for economic opportunity and greater freedom.

Putin may talk military terms, but those are only a cover for the fact that Russia, as it is now ruled and structured, cannot continue to exist without leeching off its “vassal” states, and Putin cannot help but know that, at least subconsciously. By crushing as much of Ukraine as possible, even if he cannot obtain an absolute victory, he can at the least postpone the comparative decline of Russia, although, obviously, he is hoping that by destroying Ukraine, he can totally halt that trend.

For him, it is, in fact, a fight for survival of all he holds dear, and the United States and Europe need to understand that.

As many of my readers know, I’m married to a lyric soprano who’s a full-time Professor of Voice and Opera. She teaches everything from voice lessons to Vocal Pedagogy [grad-level courses on the anatomy and physiology of all body functions required to sing, as well as proper techniques and common vocal difficulties].

Contrary to popular perceptions, as well as to the beliefs of incoming students, music, especially vocal music, is one of the more difficult college majors. First of all, opera singers – the successful ones anyway – have to not only sing well, but have to learn and know cold a tremendous amount of music in multiple languages. The usual standard opera is at least two hours long. On top of that, they have to act and move on stage while singing powerfully enough to be heard over an orchestra.

Unfortunately, in recent years a large percentage of incoming students has never had to memorize or learn music of any length, nor have they obtained much of the background knowledge necessary to learn what they need to know to succeed in music. They think that they can just Google it – or find a video. Except when they Google music terms, they discover that much of the time they don’t know enough to use what they find or to apply what they find correctly.

And, surprise of surprises, the internet doesn’t have videos of everything. As with everything else on the internet, there are lots of videos of the most popular operas and incomplete snippets, if that, of the rest. Singers have to have the tools to learn on their own, and that means basic piano/keyboard skills. In fact, voice students can’t get into upper division courses without passing a basic piano proficiency test.

Then, there’s the “reading problem.” Too many incoming students can’t read well, and they certainly can’t read anything complex or at length because they’ve never had to before, and when they get to college it’s a bit late to start learning how. Far too many never even read the class syllabus, even when it’s online.

Add to that a low boredom threshold, and a total loss of focus every time their cellphones ring, flash, buzz, or vibrate. They can’t even concentrate that long on multi-media presentations. Lectures? Five minutes of attention, if that. They also have trouble retaining knowledge, possibly because they perceive every bit of knowledge as a separate unrelated fact [likely the result of a lifetime of standardized multiple choice tests] and can’t integrate what they read and hear.

There’s always been a significant number of students who leave college music programs for easier majors, but the numbers are going up, and, as a result, the administration puts pressure on music faculty to retain students, but pressure doesn’t solve the problem of missing skills, basic skills that should have been learned well before they arrived in college.

So far, the situation isn’t getting better. For the most part, success is going to the students who aren’t ruled by the internet, social media, and their cellphones… and there are fewer of them every year.

Is it any wonder so many college graduates have trouble finding high-level employment?

As I’ve often tried to point out in my novels, the greatest evil lies in extremism, and that especially applies to governments and the economic systems they foster.

Tsarist Russia economically wasn’t all that different from the time of the Robber Barons in the United States and, just before World War I, had the fifth largest economy in the world, even with a government best described as monarchist-authoritarian with some democratic window-dressing. With the Russian Revolution, the Russian equivalent of the Robber Barons, the monarchy, and the democratic window dressing (mostly) got thrown out and Russia ended up with pretty much a straight autocracy. At present, it bears an eerie modern-day resemblance to Tsarist Russia, except that the head autarch makes the last of the Romanovs look like an incompetent milquetoast by comparison. And it’s still an autocracy with an economy hobbled by the requirements of surviving in an autocracy.

This is a problem that the Chinese recognize, and what they’re attempting to do is to create a sort of semi-free market circumscribed in various degrees by an authoritarian government.

On the other hand, true capitalistic free-market systems are efficient at producing massive amounts of goods, but extremism in capitalism tends toward excessive concentration of wealth and power, which, if unchecked, isn’t that much different from an authoritarian government in repressing wages and in creating unhealthy workplaces, except that the autarchs are the business owners and not the government. Also, without strong government oversight, capitalistic systems tend to create continual boom and bust economic cycles and to neglect creating strong infrastructure on a national basis, as well as underfunding national defense.

At the same time, too much regulation/regulatory control in a capitalistic economy has a hobbling effect similar to that of an authoritarian government, as unfortunately the state of California is beginning to demonstrate.

History demonstrates, pretty conclusively, in my opinion, that countries dominated by the extremes of authoritarian governments or of free-market capitalism are pretty miserable places to live for anyone but the elites, but that’s something that the elites always rationalize away.

It’s been said that the only thing that thugs and bullies respect is power. That’s not true. They deride power lesser than their own and despise power greater than their own, and the more they find their actions constricted in any way the angrier they get and the more likely they are to take it out on those with less power.

That certainly appears to be true with regard to Vladimir Putin, but what Putin doesn’t seem able to recognize is that the more authoritarian his government is the less likely it, or he, will be able to survive over time.

The strength of authoritarian governments lies in their ability to concentrate and focus power, but the greater the control exerted by the government over the people and the economy, the lower the overall efficiency with which the economy, and usually the government, operates. This is why the old USSR collapsed. Its highly controlled and restricted economy was much less economically efficient than a freer economy and system was and couldn’t support the economic drain of an enormous military establishment. Putin has modernized many aspects of the Russian military machine, and paid for that modernization through a combination of energy exports and what amounts to Ponzi-type financing, at least from what I can tell, but those finances are limited, and taking over, first, Crimea, and now Ukraine offered the possibility of more economic plunder.

While the Russian army is having difficulties as a result of the authoritarian nature of the Putin government, the sheer mass of forces concentrated against Ukraine means that the conflict, if it continues, is likely to decimate both countries. The innovative and creative ways in which the Ukrainians have managed to blunt and sometimes stall the Russian advance will fuel Putin’s anger and desire to win at all costs. The more it becomes clear that Putin cannot win an immediate victory makes an arrogant narcissist like him even more dangerous, both for the Ukrainians and the world.

Yet failing to stop him will likely result in yet another attempt on Putin’s part to recreate a new version of the old USSR.

Over the past few years, there’s been a continual concern about the growing pharmaceutical “opioid crisis,” and there’s no doubt that it is a severe and continuing problem. But a significant part of the problem lies in the fact that there are essentially no non-addictive pharmaceutical products to deal with severe pain. Given this basic fact, which seems to be willfully ignored by crusaders who seem intent on condemning sufferers to live with a life of severe pain, and which results in increasing suicide rates, as I’ve noted earlier, I don’t see much progress in resolving the pharmaceutical opioid crisis until better non-addictive methods to alleviate severe pain are developed because, at present, either prescribing or not-prescribing opioids for severe and continuing pain causes “excess deaths.”

But there is another “opioid” crisis which is continuing to develop, particularly among younger people. That’s the electronic opioid/drug of social media among teenagers and young adults. Teenagers now spend an average of 7.4 hours a day looking at screens, and one in four check their social media at least hourly. Some try to check social media every few minutes, according to my wife the professor, now that the university has banned confiscation of cell phones [just for the class period] from problem users.

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), teens who spend over three hours daily on social media are at high risk of mental issues. A number of other studies have established that social media is addictive in the same way as gambling or other recognized addictions. Facebook’s own internal documents acknowledge that 8 to 12 percent of its customers are ‘problem users.’

A recent study conducted by the University of Southern California and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that students without previous attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who then engaged in high levels of social media use were 53% more likely to experience ADHD symptoms for the first time.

Anxiety, depression, self-harm, and teen suicide risen significantly since 2009, the same year social media platforms became widely available on mobile devices, and suicide is the second leading cause of death among Americans between the ages of 10 and 24. The suicide rate for those aged 10 to 24 increased nearly 60% since 2008, and the increase has been 151% among girls aged 10-14, which is hardly surprising since cyberbullying is among the prime reasons for suicide attempts.

So… we have an addictive electronic social media network/system, which, with all its components, reduces the ability of users to concentrate on anything at length, enables cyberbullying, worsens existing mental problems, and appears to be the primary cause of a rising suicide rate among young Americans. Yet this crisis isn’t getting anywhere near the emphasis of the pharmaceutical opioid crisis.

With President Biden’s nomination for the next Supreme Court justice, standardized tests are once more in the news, along with the fallacies offered on both sides.

What both sides fail to admit, at least publicly, is that standardized tests are a tool, nothing more and nothing less. If the tool is poorly constructed, it won’t work well. Even if it’s decently constructed, if it’s applied poorly, the results may not be accurate.

Often overlooked is the fact that tests such as the ACT and the SAT were initially effectively designed to measure the qualities needed by white, predominantly male, upper middle class students to succeed in college. The tests have proved to be, despite claims to the contrary, moderately effective for determining collegiate success for that socio-economic group and for certain hard-working Asian minority students. They’re less effective for other socio-economic groups, for a number of reasons.

Well-designed standardized tests will measure certain results accurately, no matter what detractors claim. The problem is that the results they measure aren’t precisely what the proponents of such tests claim. Tests such as the ACT, SAT, LSAT, MCAT, or GRE measure not only certain types of knowledge, which is their stated purpose, but they also measure indirectly other abilities.

The tests measure the ability to read and comprehend quickly, to recognize and analyze patterns, and to quickly recall facts and techniques and to apply them to a situation, problem, or text presented in verbal or mathematical form.

That means that someone who takes the test who reads quickly and accurately has a tremendous advantage on timed tests, and that advantage effectively allows the test-taker more time and places more pressure on the test-taker who knows just as much if not more but who cannot read as fast. In addition, the tests often don’t measure depth of knowledge or the ability to solve complex and multi-faceted problems.

Tests given at the primary school level can reflect as much the students’ socio-economic backgrounds as their intelligence, because a student from a well-read and well-educated upper middle class background will often have greater exposure to the terms and structures of testing.

Such tests are biased, no matter what backers of the tests say, against individuals who do not read the test language quickly, against individuals from a differing socio-economic background who don’t know all the indirect cultural referents embodied in the test, and against those who have high intellectual levels but who do not process information quickly.

What that does mean is that the tests are generally more accurate in assessing the abilities of an upper-middle-class male who reads moderately quickly than in assessing actual intellectual abilities of someone who comes from a different background.

Such tests can be a useful indicator, but they shouldn’t be used as the sole indicator. Unfortunately, the problem today is that many of the other indicators used previously have become useless. Grade inflation has gotten to the point where there’s almost no statistical difference between students in many schools, and where class rank is often decided by a single bad mark in a single course in the ninth grade [FYI, this isn’t hyperbole]. Neither are outside activities.

Tests also don’t reflect the character and determination of the test-taker. Every year, my wife the professor sees students with good high school grades, high test scores, and good native ability flunk out because they were unwilling or unable, for other reasons, to do work that should be well within their capabilities.

But right now, standardized test scores, flawed and biased as they are, are the most accurate predictor of performance for their original target population, simply because there aren’t any other reliable measures.

For everyone else, whatever other yardsticks are being used to determine their abilities are in fact somewhere between estimates and guesstimates.

Last week, amid the personal, geo-political, and humanitarian disasters caused by Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, it also dawned on the tech world that between forty and seventy percent of the world’s pure neon gas [depending on which source is reporting] has been refined and provided by Ukraine. We can certainly do without any more garish neon signs, but nearly perfectly neon is required for the production and manufacture of the majority of computer chips, and it takes time to build and get into operation a plant that can provide the 99.9% pure neon required for high-tech uses..

Most chip manufacturers appear to have between three to eight weeks supply of neon, but some have less than that. China also has neon, likely enough for its needs, and Linde built a neon plant in Texas in 2016, but some chip-makers will soon exhaust their supplies, and that means another chip shortage in the months ahead.

Outsourcing and offshore manufacturing to get the cheapest costs is based on the assumption that trade patterns remain stable and reliable, and that all nations value economic stability over military objectives, but Putin’s attack on Ukraine illustrates the dangers of national and industrial policy based on that assumption.

And this doesn’t even take into account that Ukraine also supplies the majority of wheat and vegetable oil for countries like Egypt, where shortages could also result in hardships and socio-political unrest.

So long as the world contains nation-state powers that can disrupt trade and supply lines, it’s foolhardy not to have critical reserve capabilities. So…in effect, to maintain a stable industrial economy, the U.S. either needs to maintain overwhelming military power and considerable economic power to keep rogue regimes in line or an industrial policy and programs to insulate our manufacturing and wholesale production economy from supply interruptions.

Right now, it appears that we’re not doing that well on either front, largely because politicians won’t or can’t address either and because too many of the giant corporations don’t want to do anything that adversely affects their immediate profitability in the slightest… and because too many Americans fail to understand that cheaper at all costs is seldom better in the long run.

But, hey, who cares about the long run (at least enough to really do anything about it)?

The other day, I was in the local Walmart, which actually has a good grocery and produce section, and which might be because it sits right next to I-15, and I-15 is the main interstate for produce flowing out of Southern California. On my grocery list was either Chinese plum sauce or sweet and sour sauce. Now, the oriental food section in Walmart isn’t huge, but it runs from floor up to eight feet and extends twelve to fifteen feet from side to side.

In that entire space, I could not find any form of sweet and sour sauce or plum sauce. In fact, I couldn’t find anything besides soy sauce and sesame oil that wasn’t hot, hotter, hottest, or super hot. Except for soy sauces and sesame oil, everything was spiced with some degree of heat, many vowing to be the hottest ever.

That got me to thinking, and as I went searching for some plain Cheetos, I found one bag, barely visible, surrounded by various versions of “hot” Cheetos, again in copious quantities. The same was true of the Dorritos. In the meat section, almost all of the Italian sausage is “heated,” with two lone packs of “sweet” Italian sausage.

I could go on in detail, but it seems like everywhere, from grocery stores to fast food chains, even to upscale restaurants, there’s a heat craze. I don’t like bland food, and I’m quite fond of cinnamon, but I draw the line at food spiced so much with chilies of various sorts that all I can taste is the intensity of the chilies, and that only for an instant before my senses and taste buds burn out.

Not only that, but now I’m even seeing chili ice cream, and there’s an Italian chili ice cream that you can’t get without signing a liability waiver.

Apparently, not only are our politics going to heated extremes, but so, it seems to me, is far too much of our food.