Donald Trump has nasty nicknames for almost everyone. Why hasn’t anyone come up with one that sticks to him? After all, he’s lied about everything, and his supporters not only don’t care, but many of them revel in his various “capers,” from stiffing workers and contractors, to conviction of sexual assault and character defamation (twice, no less), and conviction on thirty-four counts of business fraud.

Donald, aka Boy Orange and pseudo-billionaire, already has multiple crime convictions, and that doesn’t count all the other charges, including an attempted coup, and continuous out-and-out lies (not exaggerations or misstatements, but bald-faced lies), not to mention even implying that his vice-president ought to have been hung by the mob that Trump unleashed on the U.S. Capitol, a mob he left to its own devices and violence for hours while gloating in the White House. But none of these seem to stick in the public memory, which means people don’t even seem to understand the extent of his cons and crimes.

So little sticks to him that he almost seems to be made of Teflon, but calling him that would be so unfair to Teflon, because it has honest uses and practical purposes… and yet he needs a suitable nickname that sticks to him.

The best I can do is MultiCon Don.

What about you?

Now that Kamala Harris is officially the Democratic Party’s nominee for President, both the Republicans and the media are hounding her to provide specific detailed policy proposals. My advice to Harris and her campaign is simple.

DON’T DO IT!!!

First, despite all their claims to the contrary, neither Trump nor his campaign have come up with much in detail. Saying that you’ll Make America Great Again, deport illegal immigrants, stand up to Putin, and stop taxing income from tips are hardly a policy framework. They’re campaign slogans, and that’s about all anyone will get from Trump. More slogans, if that.

Now, there was a detailed Republican plan – Project 2025 – and, once leaked, Trump immediately claimed he never heard of it, and that should tell anyone that you shouldn’t believe any policy suggestion from Trump. As for deporting all illegal immigrants… anyone who does will destroy the American economy, because those illegal immigrants comprise an estimated 20% of the U.S. construction industry, doing dirty jobs that most Americans won’t or can’t do, at a time when we’re already short of housing that costs too much.

Second, the media only wants those detailed policy plans so that they can nitpick and criticize them to death, finding fault in every phrase. Such plans are just red meat to the media wolverines, no matter how much they claim they’re only seeking the truth. The truth is in fourth place behind audience support, advertising revenue, and newscasters’ egos.

Third, no detailed campaign policy proposal ever survives intact after contact with reality and economics. No economist can predict accurately what the economy—or the world political situation – will be five months plus from now. It’s fine to say that the U.S. needs to restructure homebuilding and home-buying to deal with high prices and inadequate supplies of shelter, or to restore bodily legal rights removed by state laws, but leave the details to the time when the new president actually has the power to do something. Because, if you don’t, the media – and the other side – will trash all too many good proposals in their attack to gain a few more percentage points of audience approval.

Being detailed in a campaign is one of those ideas that sounds wonderful… and can only lead to disaster, in all too many ways.

While all political figures have a tendency to overstate their “case” and to take liberties with facts, I find that J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are the greatest misstaters/liars of any major party presidential candidates I’ve seen in the fifty years I’ve been in and followed U.S. politics.

Unlike Trump, who’s an outright liar, Vance is a cunning misstater, often using actual and largely accurate facts to paint a seemingly convincing picture that’s primarily inaccurate, and he and a number of other very articulate right-wing Republicans are succeeding in convincing people in large part because of the ignorance of the American people.

For example, take the “comparison” between how people feel about their economic position in the Trump years to their economic position now. Of course, many people are unhappy at present. Prices and interest rates are much higher. But very few people ask why or look into the reasons. They just blame the incumbent – and they’ve been suckers that way for years.

Economic policies and laws are like a ship. It takes a long time to implement policies and laws. It takes months if not years to get legislation reforming or creating programs. After passing such legislation, it usually takes well over a year to write and even begin to implement the regulations and procedures to put a law into effect (and those procedures are required by law!). Even Executive Orders of the President can take months or longer, depending on what’s involved. The full impact of Biden’s medical and drug price reforms won’t begin to take effect until next year and later. The chip and microchip factories created by Biden’s initiative are barely under construction.

This applies to Trump as well. All the “good times” in the first years of Trump’s administration were created by the policies of previous administrations. The greatest impetus for inflation began with the reaction of the Trump administration’s massive spending on Covid and Trump’s enormous tax cuts, but the full impact didn’t occur until Biden was in office.

So, Trump and Vance are taking credit for the policies of their predecessors and blaming the inflation and economic problems that Trump caused on Biden. Just as Bill Clinton took advantage of the stable economic conditions and balanced budget handed to him by the unpopular tax increases of the first President Bush, which contributed to Bush’s defeat.

And, by the way, more than a few economic studies have pointed out that the massive increases in corporate profits were a significant factor in creating higher inflation, yet very few politicians bring this up, and fewer news media sources report on it.

So… it might be wise to look at the assumptions of who’s really to blame and who’s really the one to praise before jumping to conclusions. Not that many people will because it upsets their preconceived views.

Over the past several years, but especially over the past few months, I’ve noticed a growing trend in advertising, one which amounts to “insuring” everything.

The most obvious example is that of CarShield, which bills itself as the answer to unexpected car repair bills. But there are other examples, from pet insurance to appliance insurance (in addition to warranty coverage). A month or so I was asked if I wanted insurance for a replacement coffeemaker that I was buying.

Now… some forms of additional insurance are likely worth the price, such as a homeowners’ policy or supplemental health insurance, because most people can’t afford major structural repairs from weather or fire damage and because most health insurance doesn’t cover everything by a longshot.

But replacement insurance for a $35 coffeemaker?

What troubles me most about this is the idea that people need insurance for everything. Perhaps I’m old school, but when I was a child and a young adult, my parents emphasized that life was uncertain and that everyone needed to set aside money for expected events or the so-called “rainy day.”

While most Americans offer lip service to the need for a rainy day fund or emergency savings, according to a July 2024 survey by Empower research, some 37% of Americans can’t afford an unexpected expense over $400, and almost a quarter (21%) have no emergency savings at all. And one in four Americans dipped into emergency savings last year, not for emergencies, but to cover basic living expenses, while sixty percent of Millennials are stressed about a financial emergency striking.

Part of me wonders about whether this is really all about economic deprivation, but when I look at the student parking lot at the local high school or the local state university and see that most of the cars are newer than my 15 year old SUV, I have certain doubts. These doubts are bolstered when I see brand-new twenty-foot powerboats in the driveways of the most modest homes in town, or when students who protest that they can’t afford textbooks drive late model cars, presumably without CarShield insurance.

The guiding principle of the Founding Fathers was to maximize freedom within a framework of ordered secular laws and to keep religion out of the Constitution except to allow people to believe as they wished within that framework of secular laws.

That’s why the Constitution plainly states: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Unfortunately, too many Americans don’t seem to understand that. Nor do they understand or want to understand what the word “secular” means, which is “having to do with attitudes, activities, or other matters that have no religious or spiritual basis.”

Secular laws are a system of rules that a government or society creates to address issues such as business agreements, crime, and social relationships. Secular laws are created by non-religious institutions, such as popular assemblies or governments, and the purpose of secular law is to create a framework that allows people to live peaceful and orderly lives.

Now, if one looks around the world, it seems that a great number of conflicts, including here in the United States, center on groups wanting to impose their religious or faith-based beliefs on others.

Most of the conflict over abortion lies in belief, whether “life” begins with separate sperm and egg, at conception, at the time a fetus can survive outside the womb, or at actual birth. There’s also the basic conceptual question of whose rights are paramount and when, those of the mother or those of the fetus. People with different faiths/beliefs have different – and strong – opinions about each of those points.

They will never agree. Yet the right-to-life group insists on legally codifying its beliefs and imposing it on others, even when that imposition will kill other women, all too often totally needlessly, as recent events throughout the United States have shown.

Allowing women to choose when and if they have children does not preclude the right-to-lifers from following their beliefs as those beliefs affect their own lives. That removes religion and belief from the law, but the right-to-lifers want their religious beliefs imposed on others.

This only creates more conflict.

Look at the internal conflict in Iran, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan, where male religious zealots insist on imposing all manner of religious requirements by law and force, not by personal choice. Or Sudan. Or in all too many other Middle Eastern countries. In the past, wars over religion decimated nation after nation. The Thirty Years War in northern Europe killed roughly eight million people and fifty percent of the population in some parts of Germany.

Yet… for some insane reason, all too many human beings feel that they have to mandate religious beliefs on others by force of law, because only they have the “right” beliefs.

The Founding Fathers understood this all too well, unlike far too many Americans today.

J.D. Vance’s has attacked Tim Walz’s military record as misrepresentative, but, like most political attacks by the Trumpists, Vance’s charges do have a few grains of truth in them.

Vance charged Walz with resigning from the National Guard when Walz learned that his unit would be deployed to Iraq.

The actual facts tell a somewhat different story. By early 2005, Walz had served twenty-four years in the Minnesota National Guard, including a disaster deployment in the U.S. and an Iraq support deployment to Italy in 2003, and he could have retired at any time. In February 2005, Walz filed the paperwork to run for Congress. A month later, Walz’s battalion was informed that it might be deployed to Iraq at some time within the next two years. After considerable self-debate, Walz put in his retirement papers. The actual orders for the battalion to deploy were not issued until August, and the battalion did not leave on that deployment until March of 2006. Basically, Walz chose to try to serve Minnesota as a congressman, rather than continue in the Minnesota National Guard, since he couldn’t do both.

J.D. Vance enlisted in the Marines and did four years of active duty. He also recently made the statement that when his country asked him to go to Iraq, he did it, but that Walz “dropped out.” What Vance conveniently ignores is that he was on active duty with the Marine Corps, and it wasn’t a choice – unless Vance went, he’d face desertion charges, and his time in Iraq was as non-combat press specialist with a Marine air wing.

After his time in the Marines, Vance completed college and Yale law school, followed by two clerkships and a brief stint in corporate law. Then he began working in venture capital, including Mithril Capital, a firm backed by Paypal founder Peter Thiel. Along the way, he married a law school classmate who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and who remains a well-paid corporate attorney. Yet, as a product of “the establishment,” and someone who was once a “never Trumper,” Vance brands himself as “anti-establishment” and trades on his Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir of his Appalachian younger years and tends to forget his entire post-graduate corporate law/Wall Street/Silicon Valley career .

Just who is doing the misrepresenting?

My previous post seemed to ignite a small controversy over whether smart phones were the principal cause of the growing problem of students who seem unable/unwilling to learn and/or think/work hard.

That controversy illustrates a longstanding problem with human beings, what I’d call the reliance on single-factor analysis – the attribution of the cause of something to a single factor. Over the years, I’ve observed that most outcomes – good or bad – are based on more than one factor.

In the case of students, there are more factors in play than smart phones, including the parental background, the genetic background, the educational system, the local environment, and social media, just for starters.

Admittedly, smart phones enable social media and create isolation while amplifying the impact of negative social pressures (bullying) and increasing distractibility.

Then there’s the impact of an educational system which increasingly focuses on teaching to the test (usually multiple choice) rather than on analytical thought. Also, the use of computers has lessened reliance on memory-based mathematical skills, which has weakened the ability of many students to accurately estimate quantities, make change, or mentally project future trends with any degree of overall accuracy.

There’s also ever-increasing parental pressure on teachers not to criticize students for bad behavior or poor educational performance.

The increasing reliance of some parents on technology as a babysitter also reinforces the idea that everything, including education, should be entertaining and easy.

This tendency to limit causal factors goes beyond education. As a naval aviator, I came to realize that aircraft disasters almost always involved multiple factors, and that was the reason behind standardizing procedures based on experience, i.e., to limit contributing factors and thus reduce multiple-cause incidents or accidents.

The ATR 72 crash in Brazil last week is a good example. The ATR has a good overall safety record, but the aircraft has some weaknesses, as do many aircraft. Its de-icing equipment can be overloaded in extreme icing conditions, and this has led to at least several fatal crashes. The aircraft was also close to its load limit, according to early reports, because a number of passengers were denied boarding, even though the aircraft was certified to carry more passengers than were aboard.

The Brazilian pilots knowingly flew into extreme icing conditions with a fully-loaded aircraft, then went into a flat spin, and crashed. While the exact causes haven’t been firmly established, what we do know suggests that the pilot(s) were either unaware of the danger of icing with that aircraft or chose to proceed anyway and could not recover from what appeared from the video to be a stall/flat spin. Prior to the crash, there was no evidence that the pilots attempted to descend or otherwise avoid the icing conditions.

Obviously, multiple factors led to the crash, and that’s usually the case with most disasters, including students who cannot or will not learn.

In another week or so, my wife the professor will return to work full-time, and she’ll be faced with the often blank faces of students who are or who think they want to be voice majors, either as teachers or performers. Of course, what few of them comprehend is that all successful voice major graduates will end up both performing and teaching. The only question is what percentage of their careers is spent performing and what percentage is spent teaching.

Unfortunately, despite “good grades” and standardized test scores, far too many of the students she teaches:

Cannot or will not read, especially textbooks, unless forced, and often not then.
Have great difficulty concentrating enough to be able to listen.
Have great difficulty actually thinking.
Expect to be spoon-fed knowledge rather than actually learning it.
Want everything in education to be interesting and entertaining.
Don’t have the faintest idea of how to work intellectually or vocally.

The students with these difficulties also generally are wed to their cellphones.

Students like these used to be a small minority, but every year for roughly the last fifteen years, the percentage of students with these difficulties has increased. These are not stupid young people. They just haven’t developed the skills of reading, writing, listening, concentrating, problem-solving, and working hard, and by the time they reach college it’s too late for most of them to do so.

And they wonder why they’re struggling, and often blame their difficulties on their professors, the school, and/or their classmates. Some go into deep depressions. Some drop out, and some muddle through, and the university categorizes them as successful graduates.

The other day I got to thinking about family… as I suppose many people do when they get to my age. So far as I know, we don’t have any famous or greatly distinguished forebears. Slightly distinguished perhaps, by my paternal grandfather, a mining engineer who essentially founded the U.S. potash industry (twice) and sold it for a comparative pittance…and my uncle, a largely commercial artist who died young but whose work adorned such products as Coca Cola and Uncle Ben’s rice, or my father, an attorney, whose unseen legal efforts partly shaped U.S. antitrust law.

Needless to say, my father hoped I’d become an attorney, while my paternal grandfather, a doctor and noted surgeon, married to a nurse, urged me toward medicine.

After my tours as a Naval aviator, I got accepted to law school and then decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer – but after failing as an industrial economist and real estate agent, I ended up spending almost twenty years in politics – all of it in positions usually held by attorneys, writing on the side, at least partly to keep my sanity.

Among my immediate family, and aunts, uncles, and cousins, there are doctors, lawyers (of course), engineers, and business types, but the profession most represented is that of teachers, thirteen of them, ranging from primary school teachers through graduate school university professors. And, among them are two of my three wives, one a secondary school teacher/counselor, and one still a university professor. Also, in transitioning from politics to writing full-time, I spent three years as a college lecturer in English and writing, where the university actually let me teach a course in science fiction and fantasy.

And you wonder why I have to curb my desire to lecture?

As I’m certain, many of my readers already know about J.D. Vance’s comments about the Democratic Party’s leadership consisting of “childless cat ladies” and his insistence that people who aren’t parents have “no physical commitment to the future of this country.”

Vance, of course, is free to state his opinions, but like too many on the extremes of the left and right, particularly the far right, he seems to have difficulty in understanding that his opinions aren’t facts.

How many thousands of young men and women in the armed services died for their country before they could have children, an example typified by Nathan Hale, executed by the British, and memorialized by the line, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Hale and all the other thousands of childless members of the armed services who died in the line of duty sacrificed their lives for their country despite having no children.

As for being great Americans without biological children, how about starting with George Washington, who was “only” a stepfather to Martha’s son and daughter?

Or how about Betsy Ross, Rosa Parks, Susan B. Anthony, the Wright brothers, Dr. Suess (Theodor Geisel), Howard Hughes, Amelia Earhart, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Helen Keller, Tennessee Williams, Harlan Ellison, George R. R. Martin, Sally Ride, Julia Child, Dolly Parton, Henry David Thoreau… and this is just a sampling of “childless” Americans who have made physical and intellectual commitments to the country.

And, by the way, three other U.S. Presidents had no biological children — James Polk, Andrew Jackson, and James Buchanan… and certainly Jackson and Polk acted in ways very much committed to the future of the United States.

But then, like Trump, Vance too often believes that what he says are facts, rather than looking to see if what he believes actually has a factual basis.

Decades ago, in school, I had to read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a book about middle-school-age boys marooned on an island, and how all the social norms quickly disintegrate into unvarnished cruelty in the absence of adult supervision.

I found the book all-too-true-to-life then, and recent revelations in social media suggest that the nature of “pre-adults” hasn’t changed much from what Golding perceived, if in a different context, that context being social media, where “adult” supervision is sadly lacking.

A recent New York Times story revealed how “seventh and eighth graders in a Pennsylvania town set up fake TikTok accounts impersonating teachers and shared disparaging, lewd, racist and homophobic videos.” Investigations revealed that roughly a quarter of the school’s faculty discovered they were victims of fake teacher accounts rife with pedophilia innuendo, racist memes, homophobia and made-up sexual hookups among teachers. In addition, students created 22 fictitious TikTok accounts impersonating teachers at the middle school. Hundreds of students soon viewed, followed, or commented on the fraudulent accounts.

The only disciplinary action was the brief suspension of several students and a lecture to an eighth grade class. Most interestingly, few of the perpetrators exhibited any remorse for their actions.

Not only has social media helped normalize anonymous aggressive posts and memes, leading some children and teenagers to weaponize them against adults, but it’s also fostered an attitude that destroying reputations, bullying other users, and attacking others with falsehoods is acceptable. Teen suicides have increased by more than 60% since 2007 and continue to rise with the growth in social media use.

Currently, social media linked suicides are primarily in the 10-25 age group, but what will happen when older individuals are increasingly targeted and their reputations savaged anonymously? And with the increase and technical sophistication of “deepfakes,” how long before no one will be able to verify the difference between real and fake – and what happens in an increasingly “online” world, when no one can trust anything or anyone?

After Saturday’s attempted assassination of Trump, a wave of media comments issued forth along the lines of “tone down the rhetoric’ and “hatred and violence have no place in the United States.”

Most of the commentators, well-meaning as they appeared to be, seemed to forget who exactly had been the one who started the “hate talk,” with his calls to his supporters to “fight like hell” on January 6th, calls that touched off the attack on and invasion of the US Capitol. Over the next three years, Trump fanned the flames with various extremist posts, including calling anyone who opposed him “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” saying that shoplifters should be shot on the spot, and proposing deporting eleven million people. Not to mention restricting women’s ability to control their own bodies and opposing any additional limitations on firearms (which is ironic in itself, given that he was shot with an AR-style 556 rifle).

Yet when those opposed to Trump’s views of imposing a right-wing authoritarian government pointed out the loss of freedoms involved, and the restrictions on democracy those would entail, the Trumpists called those opponents extremists, and, now, after the Pennsylvania shooting, many in the media are telling everyone to tone down the rhetoric, conveniently forgetting who dialed it up in the first place.

The other media/popular misconception is the characterization of the United States as a peaceful society. This misconception is embedded in most of the media commentary about how this violence wasn’t what America was all about.

More than fifty years ago, H. Rap Brown said, “Violence is as American as apple pie.” He was unfortunately right. The United States was created by violence. The South was originally built on the violence of slavery. New England, the upper Midwest, and the great American West were subdued and the indigenous peoples conquered and suppressed by violence. We’re so violent a society that, with only five percent of global population, the U.S. has more than 20% of the world’s prison population. Since 1970, our incarcerated population has increased by 500%, far outpacing population growth and crime.

Yes, we’ve made an effort to channel and conquer that violence, but the U.S. is one of the more violent countries in the world – in large part because an unspoken part of our culture is the freedom to be violent, so long as it’s not too violent.

The problem with Trump remains. That problem is that he believes violence and power in support of his ends are justified, and he and his followers also believe that those who point out his desire to destroy those freedoms Trump doesn’t like are evil extremists.

Far too much of the media is buying that “equation of extremism,” and now that Trump has already re-created himself as a “bloodied patriot,” it’s even more likely that, inadvertently or not, they’ll help him become President.

Throughout history, and in literature as well, we’ve tended to see two kinds of “age” tragedies – those of great individuals whose stars shone too brightly too early – from Alexander the Great to Orson Welles – and especially those who could have relinquished power at the peak of their greatness and who chose not to, only to see their reputation tarnished or destroyed in their efforts to hang on to power they struggled over a lifetime to obtain.

It doesn’t always happen this way, but it occurs often enough, largely because power tends to blind those who hold it, or to make them think that the inevitable won’t happen to them. Age is cruel. As the coach in Any Given Sunday says, as we get older, things get taken from us, often our judgement of what we can accomplish.

Joe Biden is no exception, both in losing capabilities he once had, and in failing to see that he’s lost some of his abilities. And, as in all tragedies, too many of those around him have a vested interest in not being truthful, while he is rightfully leery of trusting the truth spoken by his enemies because they want the power he is losing.

Then add Biden’s concerns about his opponent — a lying, conniving, power-mad narcissist who effectively wants to undermine if not overthrow the basis of democracy – and Biden’s belief (based more on the past than the present) that only he can stop Trump, and the United States faces a potential disaster well beyond Biden’s personal tragedy.

The entire scenario would make an incredible movie, but, in this instance, I’d definitely rather see the movie than be a bit player in the coming real-life reality show that combines the worst of King Lear and The Apprentice.

Please, Joe, open your eyes and exit gracefully, preferably stage left.

After more than fifty years in collegiate academia, my wife the professor has observed a lot. One of the most predictable aspects is what happens all too often when a new president, provost, or, occasionally, a new dean takes office. Too many of those individuals immediately want to change things, or as she puts it, to “reinvent the wheel.”

There are reasons for change, the most common being an attempt to improve the way things run, but all too often change only makes matters worse.

That’s because systems in any institution, whether political, commercial, or academic, come to be because they work. At times, they don’t function well, but they function after a fashion. Yet, seldom does any new administrator ask the most basic questions, such as how a system came to be, or whether the alternatives would be any better.

Usually, the system can’t be measurably improved because of the requirements placed on it. Improving the quality of education and the abilities of graduates requires asking more of both professors and students.

Asking more of students invariably results in more students failing, transferring, or complaining, if not all three. All of these reduce graduation rates at a time when professors are being pressured to increase graduation rates.

As most good teachers know, not all students learn in the same way, and the greater the diversity in students, the more that multiple different approaches are required to reach all the students. Any single approach will not reach some students. Reaching all students requires more time and/or more teachers, if not both. In the past, students whose learning styles weren’t addressed were effectively marginalized or flunked. Under current political conditions, this isn’t acceptable, and administrators pressure professors to use multiple approaches. Practically speaking, having a professor use multiple approaches without increasing the classroom time and homework or by keeping classes small (which aren’t economically feasible because universities are under pressure to keep costs down) means less material is taught, effectively dumbing down the curriculum.

At the same time, almost all college administrations require student evaluations of faculty. The majority of students downgrade demanding and challenging professors, and lower student evaluations result in adverse consequences for professors. So, often, the professors who require better work and accomplishments are rewarded less than “cheerleading” professors who require less… and professors who require excellence are often “counseled” to be more “positive” – or simply pushed out in one way or another.

The results are that, today, “cheerleading” seems to be prevailing, particularly because it keeps students happier and increases graduation rates.

This isn’t likely to change. Since the U.S. produces twice as many college graduates every year as there are jobs requiring a college degree, employers and graduate schools are cherry-picking the best graduates, and the employers are hiring a smaller percentage of graduates and using an increasing range of AI-styled systems, leaving a higher percentage of formerly “happy” students saddled with student loans they’ll have trouble repaying.

The system does work… after a fashion… but the increasing pressures on the universities and faculty result in more students flooding most campuses and less being learned by each student, while paying more.

This isn’t sustainable, but few in politics or academia will admit it, and those who try are usually marginalized or removed.

The usual reason for change in an organization is a professed desire to make the organization more effective and efficient. Yet many organizations, especially colleges and universities, make change after change without any significant improvements, and often those changes aren’t for the better.

Those running such organizations aren’t usually idiots; so why do they persist in seeking change that seldom results in anything but cosmetic change?

From what I’ve observed, they all believe that, in any organization, there’s room for improvement. And in an overall theoretical view, it often looks that way, but the problem is that too many managers/administrators are looking at managing people as if they were machines or tools.

In this sense, if largely subconsciously, the legislators in my home state of Utah regard colleges and universities in just that way. The state is paying the university in question to be a graduate-producing factory and the faculty and staff as machines in that factory, a factory that needs to increase the percentage of students obtaining degrees.

The factory analogy doesn’t work that well for colleges for several basic reasons. First, the raw materials (i.e., the students) aren’t, if you will, a standardized feedstock or even standardized parts. They exhibit a wider range of abilities, and over the years, universities have effectively been coerced and forced into accepting an ever-greater diversity of students.

Seventy-five years ago, that wasn’t nearly the case. Students were predominantly white males, largely from at least middle-class backgrounds, graded for possibilities and intelligence by standardized tests, and by far more rigorous secondary school grading than today. Colleges were designed to smooth off the rough edges and impart a basic ability to think and solve higher-level problems. Those with greater abilities, including the ability to roughly conform, were groomed for higher education in select professions. Along the way, those who lacked adequate intelligence (as measured by the system), lack of persistence, and lack of ambition (as defined by the system) were weeded out, with the result that in 1950, only a little more than 6% of Americans had a college degree.

Since then, universities have diversified the range of applicants that they accept and the fields of studies that they offer, so that 61% of high school graduates enter college, and over half of them graduate. As a result, today 54% of working age Americans have a college degree, either a four year degree or an two year associate’s degree, while census estimates for 2024 indicate 37% have a four year degree. On average, it also takes more time and resources, with 22% of students gaining bachelor’s degrees taking six years to do.

The U.S. higher education system has moved from a limited factory model where a high percentage of pre-selected students graduated (particularly those who survived their first year of college, since a number of state universities tended to flunk out disproportionate numbers of first year students in the years prior to 1960) to a non-factory model with far wider opportunity… but with a far higher cost for that education.

The second problem with the current factory model is that it doesn’t reflect the changes in the economy and society, yet politicians and too many educators tend to cling to the “factory model,” even though it’s no longer applicable, and keep tinkering with the system, year after year, seeking even higher graduation rates without realizing that roughly 40% of graduates end up unemployed or “underemployed” every year.

Tinkering with universities to increase graduation rates isn’t a solution particularly beneficial to students when there aren’t enough jobs for existing graduates, but I’ve yet to see any university leader or politician address that issue, most likely because universities have become job creation centers for not only the administrators, faculty, and staff, but also for the local community – especially if the college or university has a strong and profitable athletic department.

Given the astronomical cost of higher education, there’s also an incentive for the financial community to provide student loans. All the economic beneficiaries of college are supported largely by student tuition and fees, including the funds paid by the forty percent of the students who will never get a job making enough to pay off their loans.

But the pressure to increase graduation rates continues, even as college students, in general, learn less than their predecessors and pay more for that privilege.

That’s my summary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision dealing with Donald Trump’s assertion that the President is immune from all criminal charges by virtue of his position.

Superficially, but only superficially, the decision makes sense. From the way I read it, as do virtually all legalists commenting thus far, the Court declares that the President is immune to criminal charges for actions related to his official duties, but is not immune for acts unrelated to his duties.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s guidelines for what constitutes an official act are so broad that, effectively, almost all conversations and acts with other federal officials could be considered as part of his official duties, even deeds as clearly criminal as tasking special ops to remove a political opponent.

Yet, at the same time, the Supreme Court did not really define what duties were official and what were not and returned the case to the federal district court. This took months to determine?

But the delay and the guidelines effectively foreclosed Trump coming to trial before the election, both actions reflecting political calculations to benefit Trump, and cowardice in keeping the lower courts from making a decision before the election.

In real terms, the Court has overturned the long-standing precedent that no one, even the President, is above the law.

More important than that, however, the Supreme Court’s decision is another step toward establishing in law what amounts to an Imperial Presidency in which the President is answerable to no one – and that is truly frightening, since 150 years of futile attempts to convict an impeached President have proven that Congress is incapable of reining in the President.

In the latest edition of Aviation Week & Space Technology, a reader wrote in asking why the Transportation Department was spending unnecessary federal funds and threatening to crack down on the airlines for abuse of “ancillary fees” when out of the millions of people who flew last year only 2,442 complained about those excessive fees.

This is yet another case of using irrelevant numbers to justify an abuse of power. Like millions of other travelers, for years I’ve resented having to pay extra to check a bag, to get a few inches more leg room, and in some cases, even having to pay extra to sit next to my wife. But did I complain to DOT?

Of course not, because I knew it would be futile. Even with DOT’s recent regulation requiring airlines to reveal all those extra fees, DOT doesn’t even have a mechanism for quantifying the complaints, let alone an accurate quantification of the cost of the fees.

So the fact that 2,442 passengers did complain only reveals that a small number were angry enough and had enough time to make a fruitless complaint. Also, the numbers are from last year, before DOT issued its ruling and provided a more open way to lodge a complaint. In addition, last year’s complaint numbers – and this year’s, when they become available – reveal little or nothing about the number of passengers inconvenienced or forced to pay additional fees at the last moment or for the total additional costs and aggravation imposed on airline passengers.

Another factor is that in a large number of cities and towns, there’s no effective competition. Take Cedar City. The only choice is Delta. In neighboring St. George (an hour drive, one way), we have American, Delta, and United, but there’s still no choice, because each of those airlines flies to radically different destinations.

Of course, since Aviation Week & Space Technology is an industry trade publication, there was no apparent comment by the magazine on the misleading figures. Now, I may have missed an article or two on the “ancillary fees” issue over the years, but I’ve been reading it since I was a Congressional staffer in the 1970s, and I don’t recall that much discussion about this issue. Even if I did miss such stories, allowing such a brazen misuse of numbers is poor journalism at best.

The other aspect of the letter that’s equally disturbing is the direct implication that neither the government nor the airlines should address problems unless lots of people complain. No reason to change unless people bitch, even if there’s no effective way to complain? And when there’s no real competition, more often than not? That’s just another example of corporate America at its worst.

For reasons of occupational necessity (jobs for lyric soprano opera directors/voice professors are rare), my wife and I moved to Cedar City in late 1993. At the time Cedar City had a population of a little under 14,000 people, while Iron County’s total population was 22,000. Today, Iron County’s population is 66,000 people, of whom 42,000 live in Cedar City, with an additional 9,000 people living in adjoining Enoch (which wasn’t even incorporated until 1996, and only had 2,000 people in 1993). In addition, the university, which had 3,500 students in 1993, now has an enrollment of 16,000.

When we arrived in 1993, we could see every house for sale in less than a day, and the pickings were slim. Every house we looked at was comparatively modest, and almost all the houses on the market were priced at less than $200,000. There were very few large houses, and fewer even on the market. We settled on the best existing house among those few we could afford… and then spent 20 years improving and adding to it.

Today, the average house for sale in Cedar City costs $400,000, up from roughly $114,000 in 1993. While $400,000 for a house sounds like a bargain to people from Colorado, California, and Las Vegas, and the lower cost draws retirees and others to build their “dream house,” all too many houses and even apartments are out of reach for most local young families, because Iron County has among the lowest average income of any county in Utah, roughly $36,000. And now, for the first time ever, we have a measurable population of the the homeless.

Yet now, we also have at least three “gated” communities with houses over a million dollars. Developers are building everywhere. The area around the university is filled with apartment complexes newly built for students, primarily because the university has only built two new student dorms over the past decade. And the formerly empty hills west and northeast of town are filled with mansions and mcmansions, largely occupied by immigrant retirees, while the flatlands that once held sheep and ranch and farm land hold newly-built cookie-cutter “average” houses that get inundated with every, if occasional, flash flood.

Cedar City has been discovered, but that discovery has been a mixed “blessing.”

For better or worse, I read comments on my work by readers. I call them comments (although a tiny percentage are rants) because they usually reflect an emotional reaction rather than a deeply considered assessment. That’s fine with me because people largely buy books based on how they feel about them.

At the same time, I’m still surprised by some of the comments I read, where two readers of the same book (at roughly the same time) experience it so differently, one claiming it’s one of my best books, and the other declaring it’s the worst book they’ve ever read.

Sometimes, the reason for that discrepancy is obvious. When I write a book in the present tense, I don’t do it to be “literary” or pretentious. I do it because that brings a greater immediacy to the character and events and because I feel that’s the best way to tell the story. But I also know that a certain percentage of readers hate tales told in the present tense. That’s one reason why editors and agents are leery of books written that way, especially by new authors.

Another reason for differing reactions has to do with what I’d call the degree of mental openness of readers, and that openness – or lack of it – takes many forms. Although he was a brilliant attorney, my father never could get into what I wrote. His world view was circumscribed by cold hard reality. My mother was the one who understood and accepted change and other possibilities.

At the time I was first getting published, a majority of science fiction readers were male, and many of them were quite comfortable in accepting everything from faster than light speeds to time travel, conventions widely used, but still practically and theoretically impossible, but those readers were very skeptical about strong, well-rounded female characters. They were open to technological change but didn’t want to read about basic social change. In short, their enjoyment was restricted by the limits of what they could find socially/culturally acceptable.

Another aspect of why the same book gets differing reactions is because some readers conflate the behavior of a character with the author. If I write a character who is socially awkward in dealing with women, I get a percentage of readers who will say that I cannot write romance well. If I write a strong female character, certain readers will comment on the fact that I don’t understand women well. I’ve written several young women characters who embody characteristics of women I know, sometimes quite well, and been told that those characters are unrealistic because they’re not anything like the women the reader knows, i.e., my presentation conflicts with their reality envelope.

In general, most readers will accept fantastic technology and improbable magic systems set in economically and politically impossible societies more easily than a realistic portrayal of a society based on different cultural mores, which is something that all authors need to keep in mind.

What most people fail to understand is that all working societies are based to a great degree on trust, but the type of “trust” varies from society to society, ranging from open and cooperative trust to forced trust.

In general, in authoritarian societies “trust” is based on fear and respect for power, the idea that if one doesn’t follow the rules, both those laid out in law and those enforced by those in power, those in power will either insure you follow the rules, willingly or not, or remove you from society in some fashion.

In the most democratic societies, trust is based primarily on shared values and the expectation that others will follow the rules, with a moderate policing system for those who refuse to follow the rules and a justice system to provide a check on that policing power.

Obviously, human societies cover a range between those extremes, although at present, the majority of nations tend to be either on the authoritarian side or extremely repressive authoritarian regimes.

That’s unfortunately understandable, because with the unrest and the comparatively rapid shifts in the ethnic/cultural mix within nations, large segments of the population in many nations don’t share the same values, or even the same language, and, while very few politicians or sociologists seem to want to talk about it, every language reflects and embodies a culture.

Among the reasons why the United States was initially successful was that the founding fathers shared a basic value system and language, and that those pressures also forced immigrants to adopt the English language and customs, which tended to reinforce those values, particularly in the non-slave states.

One of the seemingly unrecognized problems caused by slavery was that, in the slave-holding states, there were two conflicting value systems – the laws of the land and the values behind those laws and the absolutely authoritarian rule governing slaves, which also instilled a belief in both slaves and slave-holders that the most important value in life was not freedom, mutual trust, or cooperation, but power to compel others to obey, a mindset all too prevalent in the states of the old south.

What I see at present, both nationally and internationally, is growing distrust of those seen as “different,” combined with the absence of a desire to unite around a set of fundamental ethical/moral beliefs that the majority of people share or could share, and a growing desire to force those who are different to comply with the beliefs of those in power, while groups not in power compete to obtain power to use the government to enforce their beliefs.

And, as history so clearly shows, “forced trust” requires ever greater power and oppression to maintain itself.