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.

Americans, in particular, embrace a conceit that the United States is special because it has, if you will, “a government of the people, by the people, for the people,” and they tend to believe that the United States is unusual and almost unique in that regard as being the first modern nation to embrace that ideal without transitioning from a monarchy.

And I have to admit that I semi-consciously bought into that general feeling, that is, until I began to read The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a massive and quite scholarly tome that in the first 400 pages [which is how far I’ve read to date] effectively disassembles factually so many myths about human history. As the authors document, there have been quite a few societies, some of them powers in their own time, that were not ruled by kings, monarchs, oligarchs, emperors, or other authoritarian systems of governance. The book also shows examples of cultures run by sophisticated and intelligent people who chose societal structures based on a need to maximize individual freedom. From what I can determine, none of those cultures survived contact with more aggressive cultures, possibly because maximizing personal freedom minimizes the cooperative sacrifice of freedom necessary to fight off aggression.

There are several points implied by these analyses (and I’m making the implications, because I haven’t finished the book). The first one that struck me was that egalitarian societies tend to be more vulnerable because they reject or minimize physical coercion for societal ends, while authoritarian societies can more easily and readily mobilize and employ force on a massive scale. The second is that, effectively, money in a culture with a banking system is a means of storing and wielding power. Without a banking system, the value of tokens, i.e., money, rests on either the value of the token itself or voluntary acceptance of the value of those tokens, which allows a would-be recipient to refuse the tokens. Some earlier societies consciously rejected the use of money because they believe it concentrated power in too few individuals.

One of the basic points hammered into me in economic history was the fact that a society cannot develop much in the way of tools and technology without an agricultural surplus, that is, that those growing or hunting the food have to produce considerably more than they consume. There are effectively only two ways to get that result: either pay the growers more or compel them to do so.

From these basics, it seems to me, certain results are almost inevitable. Because the creation and maintenance of higher technology requires concentration of wealth/power, and of individuals with specific skills, higher tech societies must either bribe or force workers. If bribery (the free market way) is employed, those with skills deemed less valuable or useful are going to be less and less satisfied.

If the examples cited in The Dawn of Everything are accurate, and they seem to be, authoritarian societies persist in some form or another until they’re destroyed by a more successful authoritarian regime, or very seldom, by a successful and popular egalitarian movement, while more egalitarian societies are destroyed by greed and dissatisfaction or by conquest because the culture cannot or will not sacrifice enough to be able to defend itself.

Over the weekend, both Bill Maher and The New York Times made essentially the same observation – that large U.S. corporations are engaging in wide-scale self-censorship with regard to China. Movies are being censored as they’re being made to remove any subject matter, no matter how small, that might offend Chinese authorities – like removing the flag patch of Taiwan from the Tom Cruise’s flight jacket in the next “Top Gun” movie.

It doesn’t matter to corporations that the Chinese government is an autocratic surveillance police state that is operating concentration camps against minorities within its own borders or that Chinese corporations are the largest-scale thieves of intellectual property. All that matters is the bucks to be made by access to the Chinese domestic market.

“Bucks above all” isn’t limited to corporations, of course. The International Olympic Committee has continually turned a blind eye to the rampant Russian doping scandals, and allowed the fiction of the “Russian Olympic Committee” to send athletes to the Winter Games, clearly for financial reasons.

This kind of behavior by corporations also isn’t new in the United States, either. Even before the U.S. entered WWII, both General Motors and Ford allowed conversion of their German plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents showed they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their U.S. plants. Ford’s German subsidiary, Ford-Werke, even used slave labor from a concentration camp to produce military materiel.

IBM supplied the punch card technology that allowed the German government to identify and track “undesirables,” such as Jews and Gypsies, so they could be exterminated by the Nazis. Even after it was apparent that the system was being used for the Holocaust, IBM continued to supply Germany with machines. IBM subsidiaries in Europe still delivered punch cards to Nazi Germany, and IBM executives directed operations through neutral Switzerland.

Until the US officially entered WWII, Standard Oil re-registered its oil tankers under the flag of Panama, enabling the ships to carry oil to Nazi Germany, and also provided tetraethyl lead to Japan.

The bottom line is fairly simple. For far too many large U.S. corporations, the opportunity to make more bucks transcends U.S. national interests, environmental stability, basic morality, and truth. And that hasn’t changed in over a hundred years, which is why corporations need strong federal oversight… and why the corporate sector fights such oversight. They want the freedom to maximize their bucks, regardless of the impact on everyone else… and the world.

Over the past several years, there have been considerable furor, claims, and counter-claims over political statements by prominent candidates that have in fact been proven not to be accurate in the slightest. Those statements are usually justified under the general concept of “freedom of speech.”

As many have said, and I’m among them, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts, meaning that you shouldn’t be allowed to present false or untrue facts, at least not publicly. Yet politicians, especially those such as Donald Trump, repeatedly reiterated proven untruths.

Despite assertions that all speech should be free, the Supreme Court and other courts have held that certain forms of speech are not protected by the First Amendment. In general terms, there are nine categories of unprotected speech: obscenity, fighting words, defamation (including libel and slander), child pornography, perjury, blackmail, incitement to imminent lawless action, true threats, and solicitations to commit crimes. So it’s legally clear that not all forms of speech are protected.

So far, at least, under current law and legal precedents, politicians and those running for office cannot be prosecuted for statements that are untrue or misleading.

What I find both interesting and appalling is that while various state and federal laws prohibit false or misleading advertising about products, there’s no restriction on untrue or misleading statements by politicians.

What the Supreme Court either ignored or dismissed in the Citizens United decision is that political speech conveyed by any media, whether print or electronic, is not just speech, but an advertisement for what is actually a commodity – the services which a politician or would-be politician promises to undertake for his or her constituents if elected.

When someone expresses an opinion or even wrong or false facts in conversation, they aren’t selling a product, but when they do it in public arenas and/or through the media in pursuit of a political goal, they’re trying to sell a commodity… and the claims for that commodity should be regulated and legally penalized for blatant falsehoods, just as corporate advertising is, at least theoretically.

From what I’ve read lately, the Republican Party is now proposing the very thing that it finds objectionable in certain segments of the Democratic Party – censorship by the extreme minority.

Now, what the GOP has proposed doesn’t sound like that, at first glance, because the proposal is to make every bit of every teachers’ curriculum publicly available, apparently online. It sounds so eminently reasonable, and it feeds into another Republican line of attack that surfaced in the last election – the idea that parents should control what their children are taught.

Part of this belief comes from the idea that, if we’ve been to school, we know what should be taught and how. If we’ve played a sport, we know as much as the professional coach, etc. But the plain fact is that most people don’t know as much as the teacher does about the subject being taught, nor do they know as much as the professional coach. They’re entitled to their opinions, but, unless they have equivalent professional experience, their views shouldn’t override the professionals in professional matters.

Years ago, some family members were discussing music with my wife the professor, who’s sung opera and art song internationally and taught and directed opera at the university level for over fifty years. They asked some questions about her views of the comparative excellence of various works, then decided that their beliefs were superior to hers, despite the fact that none of them, despite their advanced degrees in other fields, had any academic training or professional experience in music. But they were still quietly totally convinced of their “expertise,” as are too many parents who have little to rely on but their own personal experience.

Then there are the practical downsides to this latest Republican proposal, one that might as well be termed “educational populism.”

To begin with, such a proposal will add an enormous workload to teachers, many of whom are already burning out and leaving the field. And given that most teachers and curricula are already heavily scrutinized, generally the only parents who will peruse such data are those who already object, which, in effect, becomes a form of censorship by the minority.

If something like this becomes law, wherever it does the result will be to further dumb down the curriculum, because the teachers who need to keep their jobs will avoid controversy at all costs and more of the teachers who are trying to get children to think for themselves will leave or be driven out.

But the Republicans are politically astute in capitalizing on the innate belief that parents know more about what their children should be taught than the teachers do. And this “astuteness” is likely to result in even greater damage to public education in the United States.

Over the past year, banning books in U.S. libraries, both public and school, has reached an all-time high. Now, to be frank, trying to ban books in the United States has a long and odious history that dates back to the arrival of the first “colonists,” or if we’re being perfectly truthful, the first European invaders, but, all too often, truth is one of the reasons why people want to ban books, because, if it’s not their truth, or it contradicts or shows flaws in their truth, they don’t want a contrary truth out there, especially where their children might encounter it.

The books banned somewhere in the United States are too numerous even to list them all, but among those banned are titles that are classics of one sort or another: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lord of the Rings, The Jungle, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Slaughterhouse Five, Gone with the Wind, A Farewell to Arms, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Catch-22, Of Mice and Men, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, Beloved, Ulysses [James Joyce], The Color Purple, The Grapes of Wrath [also an older book, released in 1939 by Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck], The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man [Ralph Ellison], Song of Solomon [Toni Morrison, another Nobel Prize winner], and Native Son [Richard Wright]

The vast majority of books being banned currently deal with race or racial identity, gender issues, and systemic injustice, and the majority of the current bans are by schools and public libraries.

In 2020, the latest year for which statistics have been compiled, the most challenged book was George, a novel about the life of a transgender fourth grader. The other nine books that made the 2020 top 10 banned list were Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You; All American Boys; Speak; The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian; Something Happened in Our Town: A Child’s Story About Racial Injustice; To Kill a Mockingbird [some 60 years after it was first published]; Of Mice and Men; The Bluest Eye [Toni Morrison]; and The Hate U Give.

The latest high profile attack by the book banners is Maus, a serialized comic book published as a graphic novel in 1992 [and the only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize] by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who channeled his Polish-Jewish, Holocaust-surviving parents’ experiences into the semi-autobiographical masterpiece in which Jews are represented as mice and Germans as cats.

From what I can see, the book banners all share one common trait – they want to decide what published work they, their friends, and their children can even see on the bookshelves, and they’re angry and afraid that views contrary to their own will pollute or contaminate people, or heaven forbid, make them think and change their views. In short, the book banners want control.

And that kind of control is antithetical to the First Amendment, pure and simple.

If a parent can’t instill basic human values in his, her, or their children before they start really reading, banning books isn’t going to help. In fact, banning a book might even spur greater interest in the banned book. Apparently, after the attack on Maus, the book moved back onto the bestseller list.

What book banners all have in common is a dislike of something depicted in the book they wish banned, and these dislikes spring from both ends of the political spectrum, and rarely from those with more moderate views.

Like all true believers, the book banners are firmly convinced that they, and only they, should control the books their children and others in their community can even see on the library shelves or be taught in school, regardless of whether they’re literary classics or present an accurate depiction of events or beliefs that have created harm to others.

But then, while there just might be a connection between people who don’t want their children to have open minds and those who insist that an honest and fair election was stolen because they didn’t like the results, there are also those at the other end of the political spectrum who also don’t want facts, presentations, and views contrary to their beliefs represented on the shelves.

Censorship is censorship, regardless of political, social, or economic views.

Particularly with regard to COVID, there’s been a huge debate over “freedom.” As I pointed out earlier, a society that is densely populated or one that has densely populated urban areas that make up the majority of its population will, by necessity, need to restrict the freedoms of its citizens, if it doesn’t want its society to drown in chaos, anarchy, and violence.

I’m scarcely the first person to note this. Theodore Roosevelt observed, “Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.”

The historian Will Durant put it another way, “When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty.”

The United States has a unique demographic problem. It contains vast areas of land with extremely low population density, but most of its population [86%, according to the 2020 Census] lives in urban or suburban areas with much denser population. Yet the 14% of the population that lives in non-urban/non-suburban areas occupies 72% of the land area of the U.S.

In Utah, where I live, 82% of the population lives in five counties, which hold only 15% of the land in the state, for a rough population density of roughly 203 people per square mile in those five counties. The population density in the rest of the state averages 8 people per square mile, but many counties have far less dense populations. On average, Daggett County has 1.4 people per square mile. And Utah is a low-density state.

New York City averages 26,403 people per square mile, while San Francisco has 26,403 people per square mile and Los Angeles 8,485 people per square mile. Yet even in states with densely populated cities, there are often large areas with low population densities.

What does this have to do with “freedom’? Damned near everything. People in rural Utah, or rural anywhere, don’t think they need as much government and regulation because not everything they do impacts thousands of people.

But there are two problems with that. First, those people in the more densely populated areas do need such regulation to keep order and maintain a reasonable level of safety. Admittedly, there are urban areas suffering excessive and unnecessary regulation, i.e., California, but some of California’s bigger problems, like the explosion of homelessness, might well be tied to not only the lack of affordable housing, but also to the lack of regulation of where people can live and under what conditions. Perhaps their “freedom” to squat or erect tent cities in public parks and thoroughfares is a bit excessive, but talking about that is has become political suicide.

Second, like it or not, lack of regulation and order in rural areas has adverse impacts not only on those areas, but on everyone, because everything is connected to everything else.

COVID, for example, while often late in coming, still hit rural counties and almost always had a more devastating effect because those counties don’t usually have strong health care infrastructure. In addition, most of those who have died disproportionately of COVID in rural counties were people who didn’t get vaccinated, largely because they didn’t want the federal government infringing on their freedoms. But now they’re demanding far more federal and state health care and support than they’re paying for.

While rural counties tend to be conservative and anti-government, they also benefit disproportionately from a wide range of federal government programs, even while their inhabitants complain about the government that provides those services. Counties like Daggett County would have difficulty even maintaining roads without financial aid from the state and federal government.

The other associated problem is that too often under-regulated companies operating in rural locales not only ruin the local environment, but far more. For example, in 1972, in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, Pittston Coal’s sludge dams collapsed,sending hundreds of millions of gallons of black polluted water down the valley, killing 125, injuring 1,100, destroying 16 communities, 1000 homes, and in the end, the company paid little more than a million dollars, despite all that, as well as polluting all the drinking water for years in a large section of West Virginia for years.

PG&E in California has been found legally responsible for massive groundwater pollution, fatal natural gas pipe explosions, and, most lately, for massive wildfires, almost all of which have occurred in rural areas where the company faced less intense regulatory scrutiny.

The bottom line is pretty simple. The less populated areas get a disproportionate share of federal resources, but they don’t want to operate under any laws that they see as unnecessary, even when those laws are for everyone’s benefit. Yet they want the funding from those higher density areas to fund services they want and can’t afford without outside government assistance. What’s worse is that all too many of the local politicians in such areas either don’t know or won’t admit that they receive such subsidies.

The vast majority of fast food restaurants here in Cedar City have gone to drive-by service because they can’t hire enough people. I see “now hiring” signs where I never saw them before. It took almost two months to get my snow blower repaired, partly because of COVID and partly because the power equipment dealership couldn’t find qualified mechanics.

Record numbers of people are quitting their jobs, especially in hospitality, retail, and healthcare. There have been articles in several periodicals lately about people quitting jobs or not wanting to work at “shit jobs.” I have to wonder what world they’re living in. All jobs have shit components – even writing – and historically most jobs haven’t been all that easy. There’s a reason why the term “job” is synonymous with “work.”

People want others to do unpleasant jobs, but there aren’t enough American citizens who want to do the jobs for the wages offered. Yet far too many of those who want the goods and services provided by low-paying jobs don’t want to pay for what it would cost to hire people. Nor do they want to allow immigrants who would do those jobs at current pay rates into the United States.

We have housing shortages and rapidly rising housing prices in the U.S. In nearby St. George, the price of a median-priced home has almost doubled to $500,000 over the last six years, with almost a 30% increase in the past year alone. In all too many cities, Americans with median incomes can’t afford rent, let alone mortgage payments. Yet it gets harder and harder to build a house every year, and harder and harder for builders to find qualified workers.

Students complain about the high cost of college, yet, at the same time, every year, my wife the professor has students who complain about not having enough money, but who don’t do assignments and papers and don’t show up for classes – and end up losing full-tuition scholarships because they flunk out.

Republicans complain about government ignoring the average person, but they continue to elect predominantly politicians who either graduated from expensive elite colleges or who are rich, if not both. And even though the Republicans are against everything except barring immigrants and lowering taxes at a time of massive deficits, their supporters still think they’re good for the working man, especially white males with limited skills and education.

Democrats say they’re for the working people, but they’re having a hard time reaching agreement among themselves because of the so-called progressives who are pushing so many policies with regulations and price tags even most Democrats find excessive. And a likely result is that they’ll get too little done before the mid-term elections and will wonder why they lost seats in Congress.

The first basic point about freedom is that absolute freedom does not exist and never has. Every object and/or entity is constrained by its environment and by other entities.

The second point is that, above the forager/near subsistence level of human culture, material improvement is linked to population density and the production of an agricultural/food surplus, i.e., those producing food need to produce more than they consume to feed others who design and produce tools that make life above the subsistence level possible. All technological improvements come from communities, not isolated individuals. Virtually all major advances in human technology have been developed and been implemented in urban centers and cultures, or financially and technically supported by those centers.

Third, increasingly urban areas and areas with high population density cannot continue to exist without restrictions on human behavior, either through manners and custom, through laws, or through some combination of both. Moreover, the greater the density, the greater the need for more restrictions on the excesses of human behavior.

At least so far, every advancement of human technology has created more toxic waste products, and the need to manage such wastes requires enforceable rules. If such wastes aren’t managed, then substantial segments of the population have their freedom to a healthy life restricted by the freedom of those benefitting from the sale and use of those goods.

The bottom line is very simple. Functioning societies need restrictions on “freedom.” To remain functional over time, a high-tech, high consuming society needs more restrictions than a decentralized low-tech society.

Who enacts such restrictions and upon whom? In an autocratic state the ruler does. In a state that has some form of popular government, those elected to govern do.

The greatest problem for either form of government is understanding that everything affects everything else and that simplistic maxims don’t work well in practice. In essence, the struggle over the direction of U.S. government has been the conflict between two “principles.”

That government is best that governs least.

The government is best that strives for the maximum good for the maximum number.

The first is, at best, in effect a defense of the status quo, and at worst a maximization the power of those with power, wealth, and skills that can be easily monetized or turned into wealth and/or power.

The second, at best, puts the determination of “good” totally in the hands of government, and at its extreme, becomes a socialism that disproportionately rewards those of lesser ability and determination.

A government that governs least is highly unlikely to restrict the abuse of personal freedoms. A government determined to obtain maximum good for the maximum number is just as likely to crush innovation and excellence, and in doing so, bring about its own eventual downfall.

Neither extreme position works, or not for long, yet the Americans who control the two political parties, at least lately, are polarizing to the extremes, while the majority of Americans in the middle bemoan the lack of middle ground even as they largely vote for the most extreme politician on “their” side, and then attack the few in the middle who try to work out compromises.

As many pundits and non-pundits have pointed out, freedom isn’t free. And most people would agree. But what is seldom discussed are the costs of various freedoms.

Freedom of speech, for example, means that I get deluged with unwanted and unordered advertising mail. It means that political demagogues can assert that falsehoods are true. It means I have to spend money in court to stop someone from falsely libeling me, or at the least pay an attorney.

But there’s a new form of “freedom” being extolled that’s also far more costly, especially on others. And that’s the so-called freedom not to obey public health mandates, currently being pushed by anti-vaxxers, particularly COVID-anti-vaxxers. Since vaccinations reduce the chance of being hospitalized for COVID by close to 90%, those who don’t get vaccinated place enormous costs and strain on the health care system and those who staff it, as well as additional costs on their own families and neighbors.

A study by the Peterson-KFF Health System calculated that the additional hospital health care costs created by unvaccinated individuals being treated for COVID, just for the period from July 1, 2021 to November 30, 2021, was almost $14 billion. The cost for hospital treatment of COVID patients can range from around $11,000 to well over $300,000, but comes out to average between $20,000 to $25,000 per patient, according to various studies. Other reputable studies peg the average costs more in the $40,000 per patient range. These figures don’t include follow-up visits or the costs associated with long COVID. In addition, unvaccinated individuals hospitalized with COVID had a 10% higher rate of complications, which increased their costs of treatment.

And these costs don’t just fall on the unvaccinated individuals. Some costs fall on insurers, who will cover those costs by raising premiums on everyone. Other costs will fall on family members because insurance and government programs don’t cover all COVID medical expenses. The costs of treating uninsured or underinsured unvaccinated individuals will require increased fees on others or funding from government sources… or in some cases, closure of the health facility.

Then, when hospitals are filled with largely unvaccinated COVID patients, those hospitals won’t have enough space or staff to treat urgent non-COVID patients, or not to treat them as quickly or effectively.

The increasing number of unvaccinated COVID patients is also taking a toll on doctors and skilled nursing staff, with a workload and stress level that makes them more vulnerable to breakthrough COVID and other opportunistic infections. In turn, over time, that reduces the level of care for all patients, which means that those comparative few vaccinated COVID patients, usually older people or immune-compromised individuals have to suffer more as a result of the “freedom” of the unvaccinated not to be vaccinated.

So…for those of you “freedom-loving” anti-vaxxers, your so-called freedom isn’t free. You’re just imposing the costs on everyone else… and, in my book, that’s called “freeloading,” not freedom.

I’ve lived in Cedar City for close to thirty years, but I’ve almost been hit by drivers blatantly running red lights three times in the last month, compared to once in all the years before. Red lights, not yellow lights that turned red. I’ve also seen four drivers running stop signs, not slowing instead of stopping and then speeding up, but running them full speed… and not in the middle of the night when no one was around. I know of at least two recent accidents where a driver ignored a red light and caused an accident, one of which resulted in the death of a motorcyclist.

The Utah State Highway patrol has also reported that highway speeds, accidents, and deaths are up dramatically in the past year – the average speeds appearing to the fastest ever, even though speed limits haven’t changed. I’ve been passed on Main Street, when driving the speed limit [25-45 mph, depending on locale] by drivers who had to be going close to sixty, and frequently, not just occasionally. On the interstate, while going 82 mph in an 80 mph area, I found that to avoid causing a traffic back-up I had to move up to 85 mph, and people were still passing me, going at least 90 mph.

But this isn’t confined to Utah, either. Neighboring Colorado registered the highest number highway deaths in twenty years in 2021. And late in 2021, the federal government reported that road fatalities spiked the first half of 2021, the largest increase ever recorded in its reporting system’s history during a six-month period, nearly a twenty percent increase from the same period in 2020. Incidents of speeding and not using seatbelts were also found to be higher than before the pandemic.

Then there’s this pandemic, where statistics demonstrate rather conclusively that being vaccinated and wearing a mask reduces your chance of being hospitalized and/or dying. Data from New York shows that of those recently hospitalized for COVID, the unvaccinated were more than 32 times likely to be hospitalized than those who were vaccinated and even more likely than that to die and/or suffer long-term complications.

I just wonder if all those people speeding and running red lights are the same ones who aren’t getting vaccinated, especially here in Cedar City, where only 47% of the eligible population is vaccinated.

One of my readers made a telling comment last week – that Republicans believe the election was “stolen” because they cannot believe they’re in the minority.

The first reaction of those who aren’t Republicans is likely disbelief. How can they believe something that’s so manifestly not so?

The answer to that lies in a simple observation. Given any choice in the matter, people tend to surround themselves or join with people who are like themselves, and they also tend to buy houses in places where they feel comfortable. Add to this the combination of the growth of cell phones, the internet, and a range of news services that all allow people to wall out anyone or any news they don’t want to believe in. So they instinctively come to believe that “most people are like me.”

This has almost inexorably led to a mindset whereby they believe that people like themselves are the only ones who count, and, in the case of Republicans, that mindset can be justified by the past, where all those who mattered were essentially white males. Since Republicans find it difficult to believe that there can be large numbers of women and minorities with money and political power, they attack specific individuals, particularly women, as “outliers” and unrepresentative, claiming that these individuals don’t represent “true” American values.

This leads to the dual fallacy that not only are Republicans really in the majority but also that those who don’t believe as they do aren’t truly “real Americans.”

So, if those who aren’t real Americans aren’t in the majority, they must have stolen the election from real Americans.

Of course, that line of thinking ignores the fact that the only real Americans are American Indians, because they were here first, and the ancestors of the Republicans’ “real Americans” stole the United States from those American Indians.

More than 200 years ago, Edmund Burke made the following observation:

“Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are
what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us… They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”

Admittedly, the law touches each of us a great deal more now than in Burke’s time, but the essential truth of his observation remains, simply because law cannot encompass everything in social interaction, business practices, government, and personal life – and when it tries, it fails on some and often many levels, even in the most authoritarian states.

All functioning societies have a shared culture, or at times, more than one culture, each shared by a significant fraction of the population, and each culture embodies a standard of manners. Much of what has been historically manifested in the operation of the government of the United States was never codified into law. It was based on manners and custom. Losing candidates accepted their loss, sometimes grudgingly, but they accepted it. Except for Andrew Jackson, Presidents generally accepted Supreme Court rulings they didn’t like, as did Congress.

All this was based on a mannered acceptance of authority.

Then came the 1960s and 1970s and what amounted to a combination of an assault on manners as phony and hypocritical, the Civil Rights movement, which was a slow-burning explosion against the cultural, legal, and long-standing physical repression of black Americans, and the feminist movement, another slow-burning explosion against thousands of years of male dominance. Over the years that followed, these led to significant but delayed changes in the legal system.

But what revolutionaries and reformers have too often failed to understand is that while laws can, immediately after enactment and enforcement, require different requirements of behavior and conduct, when such laws are enacted, they’re often in conflict with cultural beliefs and behavior. And cultural beliefs and manners are highly resistant to change, particularly when those in power have a vested interest in resisting change.

We’ve seen this around the world in often futile attempts to change social structures and cultures into societies that are more “democratic” and egalitarian.

Yet we’ve failed to notice that we have the same problem here in the United States. We’ve also failed to notice that since the European invasion of North America [a phrase studiously avoided by almost all politicians and historians], the forms and control of culture, business, political and governing structures have been and continue to be dominated by white males, but with legal changes over the last generation or so that complete dominance is no longer assured.

And because so much of the American political and social system has been based on cultural acceptance, when the impact of profound legal changes has truly begun to change the political, social, and economic power structure of the United States, those believing themselves to be disadvantaged by those changes, and who feel they’re the ones being discriminated against by their relative loss of power and influence, have effectively decided to reject the traditional mannered acceptance of popular political change, since it no longer benefits them. Given that, it appears, unfortunately, that more unrest and violence are likely.