Way back right after 9/11, when the Bush Administration decided to go into Afghanistan, my wife the music and opera professor said, “It’s going to end up like Vietnam.” I didn’t disagree. We weren’t alone, but I’d hoped that the Bush Administration would get Osama Bin Laden and bow out.

Getting Bin Laden didn’t happen until much later because, as I understand it, when Bin Laden crossed the border into neighboring Pakistan, the Administration didn’t want to invade two countries simultaneously, and back then drones weren’t quite as far advanced as they are now, or if they were, the Bush Administration was leery of using them, at least if they could be discovered. Even before Bin Laden’s death, too many U.S. politicians and policymakers endorsed the continued idiocy of the idea that the U.S. could create a democratic nation in a land split by ideology and tribalism where the concept of national identity had never really existed.

My wife has had a rare perspective on the war in Afghanistan because a number of her students were National Guard and Army Reservists who were deployed there [interrupting their schooling considerably] who kept in touch with her, admittedly, often sporadically, but all of them were of the opinion that (1) the country was too “tribal” to successfully unite against the Taliban and (2) the Taliban could and would wait us out. One spent his deployments in forward area intelligence, and his comments were more than a little eye-opening.

This understanding of Afghanistan certainly wasn’t rare among U.S. troops – and their junior officers – serving in the Afghanistan or even in other Middle East locales. So why didn’t it ever filter into upper levels of U.S. policy [and if it did, why was it ignored]?

Based on my own experiences, both as a Navy helicopter pilot with two deployments to Vietnam and as a political staffer in Washington, D.C., in the last years of South Vietnam and later, and from what I’ve learned from others, realistic assessments of the situation were continually discarded by upper level politicians… or ignored for “political” considerations

When I was a junior pilot being briefed on the Vietnamese government and social structure in 1969, instructors laid out the point that the government was almost entirely from French influenced Catholic families, as were most of the senior military officers, that the wealth was held by a minority that came from Buddhist-related families, and that more than 80% of the population was comparatively poor and held folk beliefs or beliefs in various combinations of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Those were broad-stroke generalizations, but essentially true. Yet I never saw any public or policy acknowledgement of those factors.

The same lack of cultural and belief understanding has been repeated in Afghanistan, and, not so strangely, even here in the U.S. Too many of those on the far right simply do not or cannot understand the cultural and political concerns of even moderates, let alone liberals, and the same is true for the liberals who fail to understand those on the far right, whose beliefs are, in effect, who they are.

Yet policy-makers who don’t understand much of their own culture and have trouble working out legislation to benefit all Americans continued to believe that they could create a democratic nation in a culture that has no history of or understanding of democracy?

And now, everyone is shocked that the Afghan government folded so quickly? I strongly doubt that most of the front-line U.S. military members who served there are. So why is it all such a surprise? Because too many were wedded to an impossible illusion?

A certain percentage of human beings have addictive personalities. They may be addicted to substances or behaviors. Thrill-seekers are often addicted to the adrenaline rush that comes with successfully surviving dangerous sports or activities. Substance abusers may become addicted to smoking, to alcohol, or to more dangerous drugs or substances.

But there are other addictions that are also dangerous and destructive, such as excessive gambling. In recent years, there’s also been recognition of so-called sex addicts.

In the end, a percentage of these addicts will overdose. They may seek too much danger, or the ultimate high of some sort, and many die every single year. Not only can overdosing destroy the addict, but the costs to family and others, and to society, can be enormous.

But there’s one kind of addiction that we as a society have been unwilling to recognize as an actual addiction – and that’s the addiction to power.

Seeking power for the sake of power is indeed an addiction, but there are also those who seek power to do good or for some cause or another and subsequently become addicted to power itself. We see this most often in politics and on the national level, most recently with a President so addicted to power that he attempted what amounted to coup in order to stay in office.

But it happens in other areas as well – the corporation president who bends laws and customs and stacks the corporate board room to maintain power, or the one who micromanages everything. Perhaps it’s even the head of local arts or cultural organization who ends up running the organization into the ground rather than give up that position, all the time insisting that no one else could possibly do it as well.

Unlike more personal addiction overdosing, where the results affect a limited number of individuals in each instance and where the ultimate price is the one paid by the overdoser, those who overdose on power ruin more people and can destroy large organizations and even governments, all the while lying and rationalizing their actions with misleading statements and statistics, as well as often with blatant lies.

Yet today no one seems to recognize, directly, this most deadly of addictions, although the Founding Fathers did. Isn’t it about time we do?

Today, in the United States, we have a tremendous amount of anger, most of it because people feel disenfranchised in some way or another, but despite this anger, and the efforts of people on both sides – often misguided and sometimes merely oppositional – almost nothing significant in a structural sense is being accomplished, and when something is, it takes much longer.

There’s a fundamental reason why, as illustrated by an old anecdote. A drunken man keeps circling around a street light on a dark night, muttering, “Not here… not here.” A police officer arrives and asks what the man is looking for. The man replies, “My keys. I can’t find them.” “Have you looked anywhere else?” asks the officer. “What’s the point?” replies the man. “I can’t see anything where there’s no light.”

Every statistic about the U.S. education system indicates that it’s failing the majority of high school graduates. Yet a huge amount of rhetoric and funding is devoted to increasing the number of high school graduates, as well as the number of college students and graduates. The numbers of graduates aren’t the problem, despite all the “light” focused in this area. The most important problem is that the majority of those graduates aren’t learning what they need to know. While study after study shows that basic learning patterns and abilities are acquired in early childhood and primary school, the emphasis remains on high school and college, despite the fact that, if solid basic reading, writing, and mathematical skills aren’t learned before puberty, the vast majority of students who don’t acquire those skills by then will be handicapped permanently for the rest of their lives.

Immigration is another significant problem, but history has shown that walls don’t work, not when the immigrants face near-certain death in their own country and not unless every foot of your wall is manned with armed soldiers who will shoot to kill. That’s enormously expensive, in more than a few ways, and it doesn’t work over long periods of time. If you’re willing to shoot, it would be more effective to remove corrupt governments in the countries from where the immigrants are coming. If you don’t want to do either, then you’d better find a way to teach and employ those immigrants, because the solution to the problem doesn’t lie in all the “light” at the border.

The current COVID situation illustrates the same pattern. We know who is getting vaccinated and why, but we avoid truly shining any light on the unvaccinated, under the rationale that they have the right to remain in the darkness, even though that darkness is where 97% of the new cases are occurring.

In all these instances, as well as others, we spent too much time in the existing light, rather than lighting the darkness.

Even the best logic in the world can result in terrible outcomes if the basic premises or the assumptions behind those premises are incorrect or not factually accurate.

The biggest flaws behind “libertarian” ideals lie in certain underlying assumptions. The first is that we all have equal power. The second assumption is that those with power and ability earned it. The third assumption is that, even if we don’t have power, we have no right to band together to stop the abuse of power by others through government because it restricts the freedom of those with more power and/or ability. The fourth unspoken assumption is that life is unfair, but that all those without power and resources are personally responsible for their situation, and that it is entirely up to them to improve their situation. The fifth assumption is that society bears no or limited responsibility for providing opportunities for those with less power or ability.

But Libertarians aren’t the only ones with unexamined assumptions. Liberals have more than a few as well. There’s the assumption that more government funding will solve every problem. The assumption that more regulation is better, when it’s clear, just by examining California, that there’s a definite limit to what regulation can do, and that overregulation creates more problems than it solves. There’s also the assumption that government mandates can create economic processes. Or that you can change economics and government by forcing cultural mores on people, when all historical evidence suggests that economics drive culture, rather than the other way around.

Conservatives generally assume that a largely unregulated marketplace provides the best economic outcomes, even though history has consistently shown this is not so, but conservatives still tend to persist in making that assumption.

A huge percentage of Americans from all groups are making the assumption that a college education is an automatic passport to economic success because it has been in the past, but they ignore the facts that a diploma no longer necessarily equals an education and that we’re already creating more college graduates than there are jobs for them.

The states of the U.S. west and southwest made the assumption that the water flows of western rivers, especially the Colorado River, would remain as they were in the early years of the twentieth century, and planned on that basis – except geological and ecologic studies have shown that the water flows during that period were the highest in the last several thousand years. Now, western cities and states are facing drought and crisis because that assumption wasn’t questioned early enough or rigorously enough.

History is littered with assumptions that should have been examined… and weren’t, and we’re continuing to make that mistake.

Civilizations are built on cities, not on small isolated or rural communities. Even the word “civilization” is based on the Roman word for city, not the Greek, possibly because the Greeks never built a true unified civilization – only cities and a semi-shared culture. Given human nature, cities require rules, as do large cultures and civilizations.

Some of those rules have to be authoritarian, or cities and civilizations will collapse. The idea behind this is the public good, often expressed as the maximum good for the most people, without creating actual physical harm to the minority. We don’t allow the “freedom” to shoot people you don’t like, or to dump garbage anywhere or force people to breathe toxins or drink poisoned water [or at least we didn’t].

Because rules for the maximum good infringe on everyone’s behavior, such rules should be applied to preventing those actions which could harm the most people. That’s why laws against murder and theft or requiring clean air and water and vaccinations against diseases that could kill millions are a good idea.

It’s also why zoning laws that prohibit modest dwellings anywhere in a municipality or town are a very bad idea – simply because most people aren’t well-off and that includes most of the people who provide basic services. So, as could have been predicted, such zoning increases homelessness, imposes huge burdens on low income earners, and increases the costs of doing business.

As in everything, a middle course works better. If you over-regulate, you get less progress, less innovation, higher costs, and, in the end, a lower standard of living for everyone but the very wealthy. If you under-regulate, you get more deaths, more monopolies, less progress, less innovation, higher costs, and, in the end, a lower standard of living for all but the rich.

Neither extreme freedom nor extreme regulation works well. History shows this fairly convincingly… if one bothers to look closely and carefully.

And yet, today, the United States seems polarized into the extremes, neither of which provides the maximum good for the greatest number.

The reason for prohibiting smoking in confined spaces is simple. Study after study has shown that smoking is hazardous to the health of smokers and those nearby who inhale secondhand smoke. The tobacco industry fought against public dissemination of those findings for decades as well as against regulations restricting smoking.

The public generally accepts the rationale that bystanders in enclosed spaces shouldn’t be forced to inhale toxic substances, yet a significant percentage of the American people refuse to accept the idea that innocent bystanders shouldn’t be forced to inhale air potentially filled with COVID droplets and aerosols from people who refuse to get vaccinated.

This isn’t even a new issue. Governments have required vaccination against other diseases for decades in the interest of public health. So why, all of a sudden, is there this sudden push for “freedom to infect others,” albeit disguised as the personal freedom to reject government public health requirements?

Here in Utah, the legislature has prohibited the state government and public schools and colleges from imposing vaccine mandates. In short, the only institutions who could, on a wide-scale basis, significantly reduce the spread of the Delta strain of COVID are forbidden to do so. That means more people will be exposed, and more will die, in the name of “personal freedom,” particularly children too young to be vaccinated and people with compromised immune systems.

If this idiocy had been adopted in the 1950s or 1960s, millions more Americans would have died, but too many Americans born in 1970s and later have no experience with the ravages of infectious diseases, nor do they apparently understand history, epidemiology, public health, or common sense.

It’s a mindset on a par with the states’ rights arguments of the Confederacy, who claimed that the government was infringing on their rights to enslave others, except this latest incarnation says that no one can infringe on someone’s rights to infect others.

We all rely on beliefs to get through life, but there’s a range of beliefs. There are beliefs based on hard verifiable facts; beliefs based only on wanting to believe; and beliefs that have elements of facts and elements of desire unfounded in hard reality.

Despite the beliefs of billions of people for tens of thousands of years, there still exists no replicable, verifiable proof that there is a god – or supreme deity. There are reports and prophets and scriptures, but there exists no proof of the sort required by science. Obviously, this hasn’t stopped people from believing in various deities, or for that matter, in believing there is no deity.

Every individual, one way or another, decides to what degree his or her beliefs are based on facts, rather than on considerations that cannot be supported by facts.

In this context “facts” present a problem. While the universe is complex, human understanding of that complexity continues to improve, but, all too often, that with that complexity comes a degree of uncertainty.

Covid-19 provides a good illustration. The early tests of the Moderna vaccine indicated an effectiveness of 94% in preventing symptomatic Covid-19 after the second dose. The Pfizer vaccine was rated at 95%. But even most of those few vaccinated individuals who do catch Covid and show symptoms only have mild symptoms. But the vaccines are not 100% effective. No vaccine is.

Currently, the recent cases of Covid-19 are showing that 93-97% of hospitalized cases and deaths are in unvaccinated individuals. Those are hard facts. Yet in some states, such as Utah, barely half the population is vaccinated.

All the “belief” in the world won’t change the fact that 95% of people hospitalized for Covid-19 are unvaccinated.

The problem is that people seize on single “facts,” anecdotes, proclamations by individuals or politicians not based on ALL the facts as a confirmation of what they want to believe. There are almost always exceptions to anything, but wagering your life on exceptions isn’t the best of strategies.

The associated problem with people who do this, for whatever reason, including citing their “freedom,” is that they endanger others… and restrict those others’ pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Which means that they’re not only stupid, but selfish… and in a sense, also criminal because their failure to protect themselves can result in the unnecessary deaths of others.

One universal characteristic of people, even highly educated individuals, is that we tend to prefer simple and uncomplicated answers, even to problems that are anything but simple.

That’s one of the reasons why getting people to understand the danger of global warming and climate change is so difficult, and when you add in the problem that the effects of what world industries and what billions of people choose to do today won’t fully impact the world ecosphere for years, if not for decades or generations, the difficulty becomes much greater.

The heat waves the U.S. is experiencing right now are the result of “normal” summer weather patterns boosted by years of underlying incremental changes, and these changes have impacts in all sorts of interlocking changes. There have been literally thousands of studies confirming these effects, and essentially no reputable ones refuting the overall trend, yet people see all those numbers and throw up their hands.

The article here [ https://www.tomorrow.io/weather/blog/global-warming-status/] [brought to my attention by a reader] presents those interactions without presenting the myriad of numbers and calculations behind the descriptive analysis. But the numbers do exist, supported by thousands of studies over years. Despite claims to the contrary, there’s no reputable evidence against global warming or against the human contribution to it.

Yet, accurate as I believe the article to be in general terms, there are always outliers that climate deniers will cite, using hard numbers for a specific instance. For example, the vast majority of glaciers in the world are shrinking, but there are a handful that are increasing. Antarctic ice shelves are crumbling in overall extent, but inland build-up of Antarctic ice is increasing in some areas because warmer ocean air around the Antarctic holds more moisture that turns to snow in colder areas.

People also rely more on personal experience and anecdotal evidence than on statistics. But anecdotal evidence and experience only persist as long as individuals live. I can personally testify how the importation and stockpiling of massive quantities of water by the Denver Water Board fueled runaway growth in the Denver Metro area, with a resulting local micro-climate that is far more humid than the dusty plains where I grew up [which are now damper and hotter wall-to-wall suburban houses]. But there are fewer and fewer of us who can testify to those times, and if there’s no one left to relay those stories and you don’t trust statistics and records, the actual facts get ignored… or ignored even more.

Dialogue is a key component of the vast majority of fiction, and certainly of the kind of books that I read and write. While readers and writers can have distinctively different views on dialogue, often what readers, and even some editors, think is “realistic” dialogue is nothing of the sort.

Over the years a small number of readers have occasionally complained that my dialogue is too formal. And compared to the way many people talk today, it probably is, but throughout history, the educated and professional classes in any society have used more formal dialogue. Some languages even had “high” and “low” versions. Ideally, dialogue should be specific to the characters and their culture, not to what’s comfortable or familiar to editors, but in writing there has to be compromise. I’m not about to write in the equivalent of high German, but the word choice of those who would be speaking in that fashion should suggest formality.

What many Americans, in particular, fail to understand is that most cultures have far tighter social customs and restrictions, as did an earlier United States, than the U.S. does at present. The January 6th attempted “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol reflects this. In no earlier U.S. period would that many Americans ever thought it proper to storm the Capitol. It wasn’t “the way” things were done. And certain phrases and terms just weren’t used in “polite society.” What tends to be forgotten is that in most societies and times, the equivalent of “polite society” is where the power lies.

In practice, that means less formal dialogue belongs to the outsiders, not the insiders. It also means, even in fantasy and science fiction cultures, if they’re to be realistic, that there should be unlegislated or customary restrictions on what is proper to be said in public, and in private, and on what actions are “beyond the pale.” Obviously, customs change over time in any culture, but history has shown that societies without unspoken restrictions seldom endure, while enduring societies have more unspoken restrictive customs and speech patterns than are obvious to the casual or careless observer.

Over the weekend, I read a letter to the editor in the “local” paper (it’s mainly about St. George, but includes regional news and some stories about Cedar City). The writer was deeply concerned about the rapid and uncontrolled growth in St. George, and how the pleasant and friendly town had changed into a small city with traffic and rude drivers, growing air pollution, runaway building that would lead to water shortages, and other urban problems.

Then the writer went on to describe how the same process had occurred in the Los Angeles in which he’d grown up.

Now, the writer was totally accurate, possibly even understating how much St. George has grown in the past twenty years, but it didn’t even seem to occur to him that he represented the reason why St. George has grown so much. In both Cedar City and St. George, the “immigration” numbers from California are staggering.

When we moved here from New Hampshire twenty-eight years ago, the reasons were purely economic and professional – the only full-time job in her field that my wife could find (after massive cutbacks in the New Hampshire higher education system) was here. Writers are portable, female soprano opera directors not nearly so much. At that time, the move was far from ideal, but there weren’t any other feasible options. We bought an existing house [which we slowly spent twenty years repairing and upgrading] on a street where only one other family happened to be “immigrants” – and he was another academic from the east coast.

For the first fifteen years after we arrived, only three houses in the two block stretch in our area changed hands. Since then, more than half the homes have been sold, and every one of them, except possibly one, has been bought by a family from California, most of them retirees.

This is happening all across the southwestern corner of Utah. I understand why people want to leave California, particularly retirees who can sell homes in California for ridiculously inflated prices and buy a retirement house in Utah (often larger) for far less, but it does mystify me that those who come here don’t seem to understand that, when so many of them descend upon a largely rural and arid area, they’ve become part of the problem, particularly when a good percentage of them oppose local government controls on growth, but then complain about uncontrolled growth.

When I was a teenager, all too many years ago, I knew a few other “guys” [how else can I refer to males of that indeterminate age too old to be teenagers and too immature to be adults] who doted on their cars. Now, I’ve always liked cars, but I never obsessed over them. I once thought I wanted a Jaguar XKE, that is, until I drove one and discovered that its only redeeming quality was the speed it could attain, and that its handling left a great deal to be desired.

And until I was much older, my cars were all used, and, frankly, their original owners had bought them for practicality, except for the cherry red Corvair, and I have no idea why the grandmother who owned it previously had bought it. I got it because it was affordable.

But back in the late 1950s, the car guys all seemed obsessed with lowering and/or raking their vehicles and then replacing their mufflers with glass-packs, which apparently, in those days, met the legal definition of mufflers. The result was, predictably, that you could hear those vehicles coming from blocks away, possibly for a good mile in the then-exurban area where I grew up.

I thought that era was gone, and it seemed to be, except in the last year or so I’ve begun to see giant trucks with lifted suspensions. I can also hear them a good half mile away because they’re even louder than the 1950s vehicles equipped with glass-packs. They vibrate the double pane windows in the house, and set every dog on the street either to barking at the intrusion or whining in terror, depending on age and breed of the canine and the temperament of the owner. These are not old clunkers driven by post-teens, nor are they driven by men of my age and older trying to relive a misspent youth. They’re usually massive late-model shiny pickup trucks, usually either gleaming white with lots of chrome or jet black… and occasionally metallic red. What they pick up is another question, because some of them have a truck bed so high that it would require a cherry-picker or forklift to load it. Oh, and the worst of them belch black smoke.

Now, I can understand the need for hauling things. We have two vehicles. One is an economical 21 year old Toyota RAV, and the other is an 11 year old Tahoe, necessary for hauling such things as opera props, stage furniture and the like, but I still can’t figure out the appeal of the monsters that roar up the hill on which we live… or what else they’re useful for… and for that matter, how they’re even legal under current emissions and noise standards.

I couldn’t see the appeal when I was a teenager, and I still can’t… unless it’s the desire to be as assertively and ostentatiously obnoxious as possible.

The other day we received a box delivered by one of the major package delivery services that looked like it had been through a battle zone of some sort. Despite double-walled thick cardboard packaging and copious internal packaging, the contents reflected serious and repeated impacts of some force. Now, I’m not mentioning which of the three major outfits serving us [USPS, FedEx, or UPS] delivered this package, because I’m not seeing much difference between those carriers. No matter which entity delivers packages, at least one in ten arrives looking that way.

As I’ve mentioned before, thanks to the “success” of Amazon, Walmart, and Home Depot, for us, shopping for much besides basic hardware, home maintenance, and food requires either a three to four hour drive [one way] or online purchases. The only boots that fit my feet are no longer sold here, nor are any shoes my wife can wear. The same is true of my shirts, trousers, and vests, and anything my wife would want to wear, either in public or private.

It didn’t used to be that way, but that’s the result of the undeclared monopolization of the United States, at least for anyone who doesn’t live in a major metropolitan area. And from what my offspring who live in such areas say, it’s even sometimes true there.

That’s one big reason why, all across the country, more and more gets delivered. But the problem with this is that it’s put enormous stress on all the delivery services. Too many people in those services could care less about labels such as “fragile” or “perishable.” So… there’s more and more damage.

As a result, shippers are resorting to bigger boxes, more bracing, and more padding. That increases shipping costs, and those packages take up more space. The extra packaging creates more waste, and there aren’t enough recycling operations to handle it.

But the monopolists aren’t the ones bearing all the additional financial and environmental costs of their operations. Everyone else is, one way or the other.

Earlier this summer, Naomi Osaka, the then number one woman in the world in professional tennis, refused to attend press conferences and then dropped out of the French Open and subsequently decided not to play at Wimbledon, citing her mental health. Officials at the French Open noted that the terms for playing included the requirement to attend press conferences and threatened to fine her for non-appearances at press conferences.

Being a successful professional athlete requires years of grueling preparation and takes a toll on the body, not just in contact sports such as football and basketball, but even in sports that don’t seem as physically damaging, such as golf and tennis. That’s why sports careers are usually short, and why players want to make as much money as they can while they can. This can create personal stress.

I understand that. It’s part of the structure. What I have trouble with is when players get upset with the media, whether it’s in football, basketball, golf, or tennis. Like it or not, without the media there wouldn’t be the money behind professional sports, and that’s because professional sports are entertainment. High-stakes, high-personal-impact, high-stress entertainment, but still entertainment.

Professional musicians get paid for how they entertain. The same is true of writers. Both can face a great deal of adverse public criticism.

Now, no entertainer, athletic or otherwise, should be subjected to abuse from the media or the general public, but neither should athletes or entertainers be exempt from reporting by or meeting with the media, especially when they’ve signed contracts that require media contacts, and particularly when they’re making what top athletes and entertainers earn. A certain amount of press second-guessing and pressure comes with the territory, and not all of it will be favorable. If an athlete or entertainer doesn’t like it, then maybe they should reconsider their choice of profession.

Almost every true professional in any field faces criticism, either from superiors or subordinates, from clients and/or customers, or from media or government regulators. And for most of us, opting out isn’t an option. I don’t see why it should be for professional athletes, particularly given how much those like Naomi Osaka make, and when the terms are laid out in advance.

This August will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the initial publication of The Magic of Recluce. It was not nominated for any awards in the field when it was initially published or thereafter.

The World Fantasy Award for books published in 1991 had six finalists for best novel. Of those six titles, one is no longer available in any form, except possibly through rare book dealers. The other five are available in Kindle, but not from their original publishers. Of those five, the only new print format is trade paperback or print on demand form. Only one of them is selling at even a mid-list level currently.

There were five Hugo finalists for books published in 1991. Again, from what I can tell, all five are available in kindle format. Only one of the five is listed as having a current in-print paperback edition. Three have modest mid-list sales.

The Magic of Recluce is obviously available in Kindle, audio, and mass market paperback, and has been continuously in print for thirty years, unlike most of the award winners initially published in the same year.

Now, I’m far from the only author who can make such a claim. Perhaps the most notable example is Robert Jordan. None of the books in The Wheel of Time were even nominated while Jordan was alive, and the one Hugo nomination The Wheel of Time received was in 2014, seven years after he died.

Betty Ballantine, the co-founder of Bantam and Ballantine Books, once observed that there were other more important honors for a book than immediate awards. Awards are often fleeting, but sales over the years are more likely to indicate, at the least a lasting appeal, and, at times, true excellence unrecognized by awards too often based on “standards du jour.”

I don’t think it’s any surprise to most thinking people that the federal government is spending too much money that it doesn’t have. Yes, we need infrastructure improvements, desperately. We also need to spend more money on basic, basic research, because that’s the foundation for future technology and it’s the kind of research that U.S. industry doesn’t spend enough on, but we need to pay for that spending by increasing taxes, not by printing money and creating more debt.

And we need to increase taxes now… before we destroy our economy.

Right now, we’re told that the economy is recovering…and it is, but barely, and that recovery is being pushed by increasing debt. We cannot keep funding more and more programs based on debt. While liberal economists claim that these programs will generate more tax revenue, the facts show that the marginal revenues generated by such programs are less than the additional costs of the programs.

So far, the government has been able to manage the debt by artificially manipulating interest rates to keep them low, and, as I’ve also pointed out more than once, the federal government has changed the criteria it uses to calculate inflation. This combination, if continued, will have disastrous several results.

First, lower calculated inflation rates allow the government to pay less interest on federal debt instruments. Those lower “official” inflation rates also reduce cost of living increases on Social Security benefits and military retirement, and any other federal programs indexed to official cost-of-living indices.

One financial expert, Jared Dillon, pointed out this week, “If we calculated inflation the same way we did in 1990, the inflation rate would currently be 8%. If we calculated it the same way we did in 1980, it would be at 13%.”

But… if the official interest rate were anywhere near that, the government would have no way to pay the interest on the national debt – except by printing more money, which would spark runaway inflation. The government can’t afford to do that.

So, in the meantime, the actual purchasing power of Social Security benefits is being even further eroded. The purchasing power of the dollar continues to decline, and that means maintaining federal programs takes more and more inflated dollars.

At the same time, those low interest rates discourage traditional private saving and investment and encourage people trying to maintain the value of their savings into more and more highly speculative investments, which has led to an asset “bubble” and inflated housing prices nation-wide.

Without a significant tax increase, this inflationary bubble will just get worse, and no matter what happens, the U.S. faces turbulent and difficult economic times ahead, times that cannot be resolved by artificially low interest rates and printing more money.

Almost never does a day go by when we don’t receive at least one solicitation from a charity, the vast majority from charities to which we have never contributed and to which we most likely never will. But even charities to which we have contributed continue to “remind” us of how great the need is, often in the same letter in which they offer thanks and a receipt for a previous contribution.

Our personal policy is never even to answer telephone solicitations – we monitor the call screen – and do not answer unknown numbers. People we don’t know can easily leave a message if it’s that important. We also have a firm policy of one contribution per year to each charity, although there are two or three for which I might occasionally – very occasionally – make an exception.

Despite years of adherence to those policies, we still get attempted telephone solicitations and an average of more than twenty charitable solicitations by mail every week. There are a number of “charities” whose name I recognize because they’ve sent so many appeals that we’ve never acknowledged. Some of the charities we do support still attempt to obtain multiple donations, which I ignore.

These days there seems to be a charity for damned-near everything, and they each want to persuade potential donors of how great their need is. Some of those needs, I know, are real. Some are real in the minds of those who created the charity, and a great many, I suspect, address a “need” of some sort as a way of doing well for those who administer the charity.

I’m old enough to recall when there were few enough “national” charities that one could remember most of them – The Red Cross, United Way, March of Dimes, and a few others. Now there are literally thousands, if not more. Yet what puzzles me is the fact that as national health and living standards have improved, charities have proliferated, and, according to the Treasury Department, American individuals, foundations, and corporations donate $450 billion every year.

Some of this charitable proliferation is likely because many people have become more aware of needs and inequities not addressed by government and religion. Some of it is because, as medical care and social support networks have improved, people who would have died early or from battlefield injuries are surviving. Some of it is because the definition of need has broadened enormously, to include animals, as well as international and environmental needs.

For all that, somehow, I have a hard time believing that so many people are so much worse off now than they were a generation or two back.

The other day I read about a 31year-old National Guard veteran who is dying of stage four colon cancer because of two things: excessive exposure to airborne toxic chemicals created by U.S. Army disposal techniques by deployed forces and a lack of effective medical care by the V.A. after discharge from active duty.

I wish this surprised me, but it didn’t. It’s merely a newer version of what happened in Vietnam with Agent Orange and other exposures, and it’s due to a basic flaw in U.S. society. As a society, unless required by law, we never plan to follow through adequately, in terms of both maintenance and funding. Let’s send troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, but don’t plan for safe disposal of waste and damaged or abandoned equipment because it’s either too costly or too dangerous and, especially don’t plan for and fund adequate rehabilitation for those who come home injured and possibly disabled. The failures of DOD and the V.A. in these areas have been exposed and publicized for decades, but nothing has changed that much.

That’s not the only military aspect, either. At one point several years ago, something like thirty percent of military aircraft were unavailable for flight because of the lack of maintenance and spare parts.

But it’s not just about veterans. It’s everywhere. The United States built the greatest highway system ever, but it’s falling apart everywhere, especially the bridges, because there’s never been enough funding for maintenance and repair. The same is true of the electric power grid – especially in Texas. It’s true of dams and water projects.

It’s true in education. We’ve created a system where the only way for most young people can hope for a decent-paying job requires going into debt for years. From what I can tell, almost no one in authority ever seriously asked about the economic, social, and practical repercussions of such a system while it was being created. Nor did anyone ask if “the college for everyone” model made sense for young people or for the nation as a whole.

The principal reason why the college cost fiasco occurred is that almost every state in the Union decided years ago not to maintain the state’s per pupil funding at public colleges and universities while expanding enrollment and facilities (lower state taxes were clearly a higher priority). And it’s often worse than that. At my wife the professor’s university, in order to serve the increased enrollment mandated by the legislature, the university has raised funds for new buildings from donors, but the legislature skimps on maintenance funds for those buildings, and big donors are far less willing to support the less glamorous business of maintenance and support. A previous dean of the library system was removed from his position because he had the nerve to tell the provost that there was no physical way to supply the services demanded by the administration with existing funds. They eliminated his position, but haven’t found any way to fund those services. Now, this year the university has had to cap new enrollment for the coming school year because the soaring price of housing has created a severe shortage of affordable student housing – not to mention housing affordable for anyone in Cedar City who is not comparatively affluent.

The southwest of the United States is suffering the worst drought in 1200 years and reservoirs are at all-time lows. Yet more and more people are moving there every year, and until the last year or so, the politicians and industrial leaders ignored the experts who kept warning of the problem.

And those are just a few examples of the failure to look ahead and to follow-through on commitments.

While public opinion polls currently are less than infallible, at least when they’re attempting to forecast election results, their margin of error is usually within a few percentage points. This means that polls are often not terribly useful in predicting national election results, but they can be very useful in quantifying public sentiment… and sometimes that quantification is frightening… if one considers the implications.

For example, public opinion polls show that roughly half of Americans are unconcerned about election laws that effectively restrict voting access or otherwise give a partisan advantage to one party, including continuing gerrymandering. This group of roughly half of American is much more concerned about infrastructure, immediate pay improvement, and climate change. From what I can determine, more people appear to support Trump’s lie about having the election “stolen” from him than the number who are concerned about election restrictions.

I can certainly agree that for someone unemployed or underemployed, getting a job or getting a better job is of far greater concern than future electoral restrictions, but ignoring current and future election law restrictions is only going to make it harder to improve problems such as inadequate education, wages suppressed by a low federal minimum wage, a crumbling public infrastructure, and the growing challenge of climate change, because the people who back restricting the right to vote, both directly and indirectly, are predominantly the same people who oppose dealing with the problems of low-income, unemployed, or underemployed people. Those who push election voting restrictions are also among those who benefit the most from keeping wages low and who oppose increasing the minimum wage.

Yet far too many Americans fail to understand that restricting voting access, over time, is just as much an economic issue as a legal issue; it’s just not as obvious to most people.

Almost all the time, novels – and their authors – are judged by how they depict what happens in their work, and how the protagonists and possibly the antagonists act, either to further or thwart the action. Sometimes, the protagonist must accomplish something against great odds, and sometimes he or she must thwart the diabolical plans of the antagonist.

In real life, however, sometimes there’s a third possibility – that an evil is occurring slowly and inexorably and that very few people are aware of that evil or that they’re aware of the events and don’t see them as evil. As a result, no one does anything, or too few people do anything.

Now, there are more than a few novels where the protagonist appears in such situations and attacks and miraculously and quickly brings the evil and the evildoers to an end. In history and real life, however, that usually doesn’t happen… and when it does, it usually takes time and/or a war or two and also, usually, very few people are pleased with the results.

In the first century or so after the creation of the Islamic faith, women played notable and powerful roles, but as the clerics (male) became more powerful, women became less so and were marginalized on a continuing basis… and few if any men with power did anything about it, certainly nothing that reversed that trend. Now, personally, that strikes me as a growing evil, but it clearly didn’t bother the men of the faith.

Certainly, the western European conquest of North America didn’t seem in the slightest evil to the conquerors even though the results were effectively genocidal as far as Native Americans were concerned, and, from what I’ve seen, even to this day, more sympathy and publicity goes to the descendants of slaves than to Native Americans.

But to write a novel where evil grows… and is either praised or ignored? There are some – such as The Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World, 1984, and others – but, face it, how many books as dark as those do most people want to read, especially in stressful times? Most readers want excitement and uplifting stories.

The “problem” with uplifting stories is that they can either become wish-fulfillment escapes or create the idea that change for the better is the norm and that it’s not that hard to accomplish.

So what’s a writer to do?

The other day I came across an interesting article in Archaeology dealing with an ancient city I’d never heard of – Ugarit. The city was founded around 2000 B.C. on the coast of what is now northern Syria, presumably because it had a good harbor. As an independent city-state located on the northern border of the Egyptian empire and on the southern border of the Hittite empire, for roughly 800 years Ugarit maintained semi-independence and prospered as a trading hub. At some time in the period 1350-1315 B.C. Ugarit became a vassal-state of the Hittite Empire, but remained self-governing, and continued trading with both Egypt and the Hittite Empire, as well as with other Mediterranean lands.

Unfortunately, Ugarit was attacked, burned, and leveled by the “Sea Peoples” in roughly 1185 B.C., during a period when the “Sea Peoples” also obliterated states and cities in Cyprus, Canaan, and Turkey . The area around Ugarit was not reoccupied for almost 300 years, and the ruins of the city were covered and never reoccupied. But because all records were kept on clay tablets, more than 5000 have been recovered since the 1930s, and many have been translated, revealing that the city was a wealthy commercial hub, where five separate writing systems and eight languages were in use simultaneously. Ugarit also boasted a large royal palace and a hundred and fifty foot tall temple to Baal that was likely also a lighthouse towering over the harbor.

Culturally, Ugarit was also different in other ways from neighboring lands. Women had far more autonomy compared to contemporaneous cultures, and records show that women owned property in their own right, that unmarried or widowed women could be heads of households, and that queens had separate estates and held prominent diplomatic and religious positions. Poems and what appear to be scripts for plays with stage direction have also been discovered, written in the Ugaritic language, as well as works from other cultures.

In the century before Urgarit’s fall, the scribes there developed and began to use the first alphabetic system that included signs for vowels, but the destruction of the city was so thorough that no one survived or returned, even to claim buried hordes of wealth, and it was more than two centuries later before the Phoenicians re-developed alphabetic writing.

In reading all that, I couldn’t help wondering how much else was lost, and whether history would have been different if a city-state I’d never heard of had survived.