“Compromise” is not a nasty word. In fact, compromise is the basis of a free society, yet far too many people fail to understand this.

A truly “free” society is one where one’s freedom to act is maximized within the law. In a free society, laws provide the guardrails so that someone else’s freedom doesn’t minimize or destroy yours.

The greatest problem facing any society is drawing the line between individual rights and maintaining the order necessary for society to function. As Alexander Hamilton pointed out, “without order, there is no liberty.”

Theodore Roosevelt had a similar view when he said, “Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.”

Because people have different views about how the order necessary for a working society should be structured and maintained and the degree of personal freedom optimal for that society, effective government requires compromise.

Yet today, both the far left and the far right seem to have forgotten this, each side wishing to impose through force of law its vision for society, even though some of those beliefs impose constraints on others that are not necessary to maintain order and public safety and legal imposition of some beliefs can result in physical harm to others.

A good example of such extremism are laws that prohibit abortion in all circumstances as well as any procedure that might conceivably result in abortion or miscarriage. As a result, both women and their unborn children are dying at record numbers in states like Texas.

Another is requiring Christian theology be taught and actively practiced in schools and other public, when roughly one-third of all Americans are not Christians. What’s ironic about this is that many of those insisting that Christian theology be more publicly imposed are violently opposed to the Islamic practice of Sharia, which would impose Muslim beliefs as law.

On the left, the attempt to require institutions mandate which pronouns are used by whom is nothing more than speech police. While I understand and respect people’s desires to maintain and announce their own gender preference, that should be a personal preference, not a government requirement. Requiring everyone to announce their gender identity by specific pronouns goes too far and attacks the right to personal privacy.

Unfortunately, the apparent simplicity of absolutism in government and religion can be so seductive that common sense – and compromise – are all too often swept away.

A while ago, I read an article that made a simple point about dogs – that they live in the present with all their attention focused on the moment. While this may be an overstatement, as someone who has lived with dogs for virtually my entire adult life, there’s a great deal of truth in that observation, although a dachshund hurrying to greet me with his squeaky pig in his mouth and his tail wagging is more likely thinking about the moment to come, rather than the present moment.

Even so, he’s obviously totally fixated on that moment to come, and once we’re playing with the squeaky pig, that’s definitely all that he’s concentrating on. But it’s a joyful concentration, with his tail wagging as he returns with the squeaky pig in his mouth. It’s not all rote concentration, either. Sometimes, he wants to play tug-of-war with me trying to pull the pig from his mouth (which won’t happen unless he lets me), and sometimes he throws his pig in the air as if daring me to catch it (that doesn’t happen, either, although he often manages to catch it unless he’s thrown it over and behind the computer and then begs me to recover it ). And if all that fails, he’ll drop the pig at my feet, with a whine that asks if I’m going to pick it up and throw it. I never know which he’ll do when he returns the pig.

One of our sons was dog-sitting several weeks ago. He was determined to see how long Buddy Mozart (don’t ask) would continue retrieving the pig. Our son gave up after two hours. Dachshunds are persistent and stubborn, even at play.

I obviously get great satisfaction out of writing, or I wouldn’t have worked so hard to get published and kept at it for so long, but I have to admit that I don’t often get the same unbridled joy from writing that Buddy Mozart does from chasing his squeaky pig or taking our morning walk.

That’s another reason why I love dachshunds.

In terms of presence in the F&SF field, in my view, authors roughly fall into five categories: wild and continuing bestsellers, such as Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, Sarah Maas, and, recently, Rebecca Yarros; solid bestsellers; those lauded by various media, often regardless of sales; and everyone else.

Like a number of moderately successful authors, it took me years to become a successful full-time writer, i.e., one with a writing income sufficient to support a family.

My first science fiction story was published in 1973, a few months shy of my thirtieth birthday. My first novel appeared in 1982, a month after my thirty-ninth birthday. Given those dates, I was never considered an up-and-coming young F&SF author. In fact, I was rarely mentioned in F&SF trade publications. My first New York Times bestseller, as I recall, was Princeps, the second book of the Imager Portfolio, and that didn’t occur until I was in my sixties, although I did have another Times bestseller and have had quite a few Recluce books on the USA Today bestseller list in my fifties and thereafter.

Part of my comparative lack of “presence” in the F&SF field in my early writing years was likely because I didn’t even attend any conventions until I was forty-five. In fact, I really didn’t even know what a convention was or what it entailed, and working as a political appointee in Washington, D.C., took an enormous amount of time.

Another part was, I suspect, that my work has never fit into any of the F&SF marketing genres. I’ve never been nominated for, let alone won, a national award in the F&SF field, but I have won a few regional awards as well as awards in the romance field, including a Romantic Times Pioneer award, despite never having written an explicit sex scene (except for one).

Another factor is that my books appeal to a wide variety of readers, rather than a specific market segment. Because of these factors, the tours I did for Tor from roughly 1996 (after I left Washington, D.C.) to 2015 consisted of an evening signing every day and visiting as many bookstores as I could before and sometimes after the signing. Unfortunately, given the demise of so many bookstores and the smaller inventories of most of the survivors (and the greater restrictions on what managers of chain bookstores can order), this kind of handselling/personal presence marketing is no longer as effective as it once was in gaining and/or maintaining an authorial presence.

Another factor hampering author recognition is the effective demise of the mass market paperback, combined with the fact that most of the remaining bookstores carry much smaller numbers of backlist titles. Since eBooks are the replacement for mass market paperbacks, these days authors need to maintain some form of internet presence, but the problem there is that maintaining a presence on Facebook, X(aka Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok can be a full-time chore in itself, leaving less time for actually writing (which is why I only maintain a website).

And then, there’s the “fan” factor. For various reasons, the way and what certain authors write results in a sort of charisma that creates a wide and self-sustaining fan base, not necessarily based on the technical expertise of the writer, but usually where vivid storytelling subsumes everything else.

Given all the changes in publishing and communications, I’m glad I started writing when I did, because I suspect that, were I starting today, it would be difficult if not impossible to get published traditionally (given that it wasn’t easy back then) and almost that hard to establish a presence in the field as an independent self-published writer.

But then, who knows? “What ifs” are speculative at best.

There are many ways to tell a story or write a novel, and some writers use the same “methodology” for every book, while others explore different ways, one of which is to
write in a different culture.

This isn’t as easy as it seems. All too often attempts to depict a differing culture do little more change the names, but different cultures have different mores and different structures of relationships.

More than once recently, readers have criticized how I’ve depicted relationships, because what I’ve written doesn’t reflect either what they’ve experienced or feel they want to experience. Such criticisms are accurate in that I’m not depicting what happens today, especially in the United States. For most of human history and in most cultures, relationships have been formalized into almost fixed patterns, at least involving interactions that are seen publicly or that can be inferred publicly.

Every viable society/culture has rules and patterns, and those rules and patterns extend into and influence the most personal and seemingly private aspects of life. For example, certain Polynesian cultures allowed far more sexual freedom, both for men and women, and, as a result, inheritances, etc., flowed through the female lineage.

Private property requires legalities and the backing of power. How those legalities are written and enforced influence culture and personal choices. Economics and technology (or the lack thereof) resulted in comparative past values far different from what we experience today. In Anglo-Saxon England, a mason might make five pence a day, a carpenter four pence, and while a cottage could be rented for sixty pence a year, a simple velvet cloak could cost over ten pounds (and at 240 pence to the pound, its cost represented over two years’ earnings for a skilled tradesman).

Clothes literally were worth their weight in silver or gold, and theft of them could result in harsh punishment, even death.

While people did “fall in love,” love was usually secondary to property and status. Contemporary readers often fail to understand just how strong those rules and customs could be, and how risky any relationship outside of marriage could be. When a young woman was “ruined,” the results could destroy her future, if not any hope of a decent life in the future, and might even cripple the position of her family.

In the current Recluce “sub-series,” Alyiakal and Seliora have a painstakingly long courtship, not because they’re reserved, but because any serious misstep could destroy all they’ve personally accomplished. They couldn’t be even as close as they are without greater repercussions if Seliora were trying to build a factorage in a larger town or a city. And of course, as Seliora becomes more well-off and powerful, she can quietly let her relationship with Alyiakal become known, but even that acceptance occurs within unspoken rules.

The movie The Age of Innocence shows accurately just how binding unspoken rules were in New York during the gilded age. And all societies and cultures have unspoken rules, perhaps better described as unwritten rules, often with high costs for breaking them. Most writers understand that. What is less often mentioned or understood is the cost to society of not having unspoken and binding rules.

Societies cannot long survive without order. How order is maintained determines the nature of a society. Greater reliance on uncodified rules often means that the laws are few and harsh, because smaller infractions are handled on a “personal” basis. It’s hardly a coincidence that laws have multiplied in the United States as unspoken rules and conventions have been ignored or willfully disregarded.

One of the problems in dealing with public finances in a democracy, and particularly in the United States, is that, when it comes to large numbers, a significant percentage of the population suffers from innumeracy, i.e., a lack of full understanding of numbers and/or mathematical concepts, and the ability to reason with them.

For example, the Senate just passed a $9 billion recission bill that will “claw back” funds already appropriated for foreign aid and public broadcasting, a cut that will primarily cripple if not eliminate broadcast stations in rural areas. While a $9 billion cut sounds significant, it only amounts to less than one tenth of one percent of the total federal budget, according to the Republican Senate Majority Leader. But just a week ago, Trump signed his “big, beautiful bill,” which will raise national defense spending by $156.2 billion. The cuts in non-defense federal programs aren’t enough to offset the massive increases in defense and homeland security, and few if any politicians are keeping track of the negative multiplier effect of federal job cuts.

Likewise, as I wrote previously, the “tax cut” won’t grant most taxpayers any lower taxes than they’ve paid over the last several years. It will keep their tax rates from returning to pre-2018 levels.

Because “big, beautiful bill” also increases health care and other costs, families may receive modest tax cuts, but face higher costs in health, education, and other areas. According to the Congressional Budget Office, on average, families earning less than $56,000 a year will bring home $300 less than before the bill was enacted as result of the increased cost of federal or federal supported services, while families earning less than $43,000 will bring home $750 less. On the other hand, families with earnings in the top ten percent will benefit by an average of $12,000.

According to the most conservative of economists, the deficit from the bill will add over $2 trillion to the national debt, and that debt will need to be financed, increasing the pressure on interest rates. The apparent consensus among federal policy makers is that an inflation rate of two percent a year is “feasible,” but that “feasible” rate means that today’s dollar will only be worth fifty-one cents in twenty years – or that you’ll have to increase the value of your savings by almost fifty percent to have the same purchasing power in twenty years. And two percent is far lower than what’s likely to occur.

Yet the majority of Trump’s supporters don’t seem to have the slightest idea that the “big, beautiful bill” will reduce real incomes of possibly as much as a fifth of American families (based on CBO figures) both now and in the future.

Despite all the rhetoric about violent illegal immigrants and immigrant illegal drug dealers, what are ICE and others assisting it actually doing?

From what I can tell, they’re targeting immigrants and anyone who even looks like they might be an immigrant, largely without probable cause, in and around schools, colleges and universities, markets, churches, and even around immigration offices where immigrants are trying to follow the law. They’re also targeting immigrants here legally whose only crime is to have the nerve to criticize ICE and/or Trump’s policies.

What they don’t seem to be doing, or aren’t doing all that successfully, is targeting, arresting, and prosecuting and/or deporting the comparatively tiny percentage of illegal immigrants who are criminals (beyond being undocumented) and who are behind the epidemic of fentanyl and other illegal drugs, human sex trafficking, and other violent crimes.

The federal/ICE attitude seems to be that, if they deport anyone and everyone who looks like an immigrant, that will solve the problem. It won’t, because the skilled and hardened immigrant criminals avoid all the locations where ICE is patrolling and seizing people to deport, at times almost randomly, and without any form of legal proceeding.

This near-blind snatch and grab campaign terrorizes communities, disrupts workplaces and schools, increases the costs for farms and businesses, and creates chaos. It also provokes violence and crimes. What it doesn’t do is reduce crime and illegal drugs.

Effective law enforcement works systematically and with the community, not against it, to target and find actual criminals, prove their guilt, and apply the proper punishment. But all that takes planning, time, and hard methodical work, none of which seem to be employed by ICE and Homeland Security.

Millions of Americans are looking forward to a federal income tax cut that won’t and cannot happen.

Both Donald Trump and the Republican Congress are touting a non-existent tax cut as part of Trump’s big beautiful (beautiful only in the eyes of certain beholders) bill, but to know or understand this, one has to know the full background of what happened more than seven years ago, which is an eternity in most people’s minds, particularly the minds of Trump supporters.

On January 1, 2018, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act took effect, reducing tax rates and increasing exemptions, with a whole host of other provisions. These lower rates have been in effect ever since then, but would have expired at the end of this year.

What the “big beautiful bill” does is to make those earlier tax cuts permanent and make a few additional temporary tax cuts (from 2025 through 2028) for some income from tips, as well as make some modest increases in allowable deductions and add a few targeted tax deductions, such as auto loan interest payments on U.S.- made cars. The “cost” of all this is higher taxes on green and renewable energy generation and reductions in health care programs for the poorest Americans.

The bottom line? Very few will get significant tax cuts from what they paid last year, except for people with a significant income from tips. And something like 10 million Americans will lose various health and SNAP benefits, while scores of rural hospitals will face cuts that may force their closure.

But Trump gets credit for a non-existent tax cut, or more charitably, for making his 2018 temporary tax cuts permanent. So he gets popular credit for doing the same thing twice.

Meanwhile, from what I can tell, the Democrats haven’t even been able to point this out in any effective fashion, which doesn’t bode well for their chances in upcoming elections.

The United States can survive most policies – good or bad – carried out by a president.

What we may not be able to survive is the polarization fueled by the fiery waves of hatred emanating from President Trump, the latest of target of which were Democrats, when he declared on nationwide television that he “hates Democrats.”

I hate as well, but I hate misguided policies and the stupidity and cupidity of most of Trump’s supporters in government. But hating all Republicans?

My wife and I have friends, neighbors, and relatives who are staunch Trump supporters and often Republicans. Most of them are good people who’d do almost anything to help. While I cannot understand why they support unwaveringly a President who spouts vileness and hatred for anyone who disagrees with him and who espouses policies that, in many cases, will have severe adverse consequences on the country, I do not hate them. I find it hard to believe that they accept his lies unthinkingly, but I don’t hate them.

I also hate quite a few policies espoused by extreme leftist Democrats, but I don’t hate them, either. I do think their extremism enabled Trump’s victory and supplied fuel for his hatred campaigns.

As I’ve written here before, one of the greatest problems with unthinking or violent hatred is that it consumes people and makes them stupid, and that is exactly what Trump is accomplishing with his continuing hate-fueled tirades. He’s using hatred to enact laws and establish policies that are detrimental to the best interests of the nation.

Yes, among other things, we need to get our fiscal house in order and expel immigrants who have committed crimes other than merely being here without proper documentation. But the legislation just passed by Congress primarily gives tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and actually takes more from most Americans in other ways. Unthinking spending cuts have already had to be rescinded in many cases because they targeted vital government functions, while not touching obsolete military bases even the Pentagon has wanted to close.

Trump’s immigration policies are expelling foreign students who entered the U.S. legally and who paid money to U.S. colleges and universities. Many of these students, as in the past, would like to stay and contribute to making America great. The vast majority of “illegal” immigrants swept up for deportation were not criminals beyond not having entered the country legally. Many others swept up entered legally, and ICE and even Trump have ignored the legality of their presence. Overall, the rate of criminal offenses among “illegal” immigrants is far lower than the rate of criminality among U.S. citizens.

And those are just a few of the stupidities created by Trump’s waves of hatred, and those stupidities will continue so long as unthinking hatred is widespread.

AI is coming, regardless. And while AI applications will have a strong impact on manufacturing and production, they’re also going to affect so-called white-collar clerical and lower-level data-management, as well as routine computer coding.

Authors and artists won’t be exempt, either. Artists who do illustrations for books and other publications are already complaining, and at least some publications are refusing to use artwork solely or partly AI-generated.

As for authors, a number of lawsuits have been brought in California and New York courts against various AI companies for copyright infringement because the companies employed unauthorized copying of authors’ works to train their generative AI models.

The discussions around this appear muddled, at least to me. Intelligence has to “learn” in some fashion. I’d read more than a thousand SF books and all the stories in ANALOG (including some from the Astounding Science-Fiction era) for fifteen years before I ever thought about writing a story, let alone a novel. So have a great many other authors.

The problem I have with the way the AI companies approached this was that while I had to pay (or occasionally borrow from the local library) to read and learn, these companies used pirated copies and paid no one. Some have attempted to claim “fair use,” which is absurd, given that “fair use” case law doesn’t allow use of extended prose in any form.

So why shouldn’t the AI companies pay royalties to authors whose works aren’t in the public domain? Shakespeare doesn’t need the royalties, but living, breathing, and working authors need and deserve them.

Since none of these legal suits have yet come to trial (so far as I can tell), we’ll see what the courts have to say.

Of course, those lawsuits don’t address the fact that dialogue from movies and TV shows has been used by companies such as Apple and Anthropic to train AI systems.

I could be underestimating the potential of generative AI, but I doubt that it will ever produce truly great prose or poetry, or even well-written mid-list fiction, but I have no doubt that, in time, it will be able to churn out serviceable methodical fiction with little uniqueness.

As in many fields, we’ll have to see, but in the meantime, the AI companies have no business pirating current authors’ works in an effort to eventually replace them.

Manufacturing in the U.S. isn’t declining. In fact, total manufacturing output has increased by thirty percent over the past twenty years.

Figures from the Federal Reserve in St. Louis show that, even in the so-called “Rust Belt” (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin), manufacturing output has increased by 14 percent over the last twenty years. In the south, output has increased 25 percent over the same period, while output has increased by 114 percent in Arizona, 78 percent in California, 70 percent in Oregon, and 39 percent in Colorado.

So why does everyone think the U.S. is manufacturing less?

The simple answer is that there are fewer jobs in manufacturing. Employment in manufacturing has dropped from roughly 16 million jobs in 2005 to 13 million at the end of 2024. At the same time, the hourly wage rate for manufacturing production workers has increased by 75%, but the cost of living has increased “officially” by 64% (I say “officially” because the official figures understate real inflation felt by most people).

At the same time, U.S. population rose from 296 million in 2005 to 347 million in 2025. So while the U.S. population increased by 51 million people, the number of manufacturing jobs dropped by 3 million. Put another way, one in eighteen Americans worked in manufacturing in 2005, but in 2025 only one in twenty-seven did.

All this translates into the facts that there are fewer manufacturing jobs, which on average pay in real terms about the same as they did twenty years ago. So those working in manufacturing, on average, haven’t seen significant improvement in real wages, and there are fewer jobs, largely because of greater technology and more automation. In addition, an increasing percentage of those jobs are requiring greater and greater skills.

This also suggests that increasing manufacturing in the United States won’t significantly increase the number of jobs being created, no matter what Trump and the Republicans claim.

In the world of golf, today begins the U.S. Open, one of the four major tournaments in professional golf. This year, it’s being held at the historic and extremely difficult Oakmont Country Club, in Oakmont, outside Pittsburg. A hundred and twenty-five golfers qualified to play in the Open, and after two rounds, the field will be cut to sixty (plus any others who tied for the last spot) for the last two rounds. The winner will take home $4.3 million, while even the 60th place finisher will pocket something like $43,000.

Apparently, some of the professionals who qualified to play in the tournament have been complaining about the length of the rough (the grass outside the comparatively manicured fairways).

My sympathy for those complaints is ambivalent. First, the rough is there to penalize golfers with less control of their game. Second, the rough is there for all players. Third, by design golf is a game/profession designed to test those who play it because there are so many variables that can affect a player, and they’re often capricious. The wind can pick up or die down at times. Rain between rounds can change how fast the green is or how heavy the sand in a bunker might be.

Every golfer faces those varying factors, and professional golfers work extremely hard to sharpen their game to minimize their impact. But when a single stroke can make a difference of anywhere from thousands of dollars to over a million dollars, it can be difficult to be philosophical.

One young and moderately successful (and single) young pro golfer actually posted what it cost him to play the pro tour, and his rough estimate was $6,000 a week, and that was with comparatively basic costs. Given that the PGA tour consists of something like 32 tournaments and seven other events, there is certainly a fair amount of mental strain as well.

All of which might also explain why I gave up golf young, especially since, despite all my efforts, I was a high handicap amateur.

Why do most human societies end up building houses, roads, and other structures?

The usual answer to that question is that people wish to provide shelter and protect themselves from the elements and other unpredictable threats, or some variation thereof.

I’ll submit that the physical growth of societies is an outgrowth of the human desire to reduce uncertainty. Human belief systems in lower-tech societies often reflect that desire as well, with prayers to the gods viewed as most capricious, which is why the native Hawaiians worshipped Pele as their most important deity.

Laws prescribe certain codes of behavior, with the goal of reducing the uncertainty caused by violence.

And that desire for certainty affects the political system as well. Older voters want to be able to count on Social Security. Most investors want comparatively predictable rates of return. Businesses worry about government policies that affect the cost of production unpredictably because they can’t plan for the future effectively.

People worry about large numbers of immigrants because they’re unknown quantities and therefore unpredictable and possibly dangerous.

Zoning laws have become increasingly stringent over the years because people fear, that without zoning, their property values could suddenly decline in an uncertain fashion.

One of the “downsides” of the “woke movement” is that its apparent goal or result to many people was to upset long-held beliefs about gender and ethnicities, creating social uncertainty. At the same time, modern technology is definitely increasing uncertainty in all areas in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

Whether they like it or will admit it, most people prefer certainty over uncertainty, and on all fronts, prior to the last election, and even now, the Democrats are perceived as creating uncertainty socially, economically, and politically.

Trump’s appeal to the majority of voters lay in the certainty he projected in a time of uncertainty. Out with immigrants! Build manufacturing jobs here in the U.S.! Decrease taxes!

For the Democrats to merely oppose Trump won’t create certainty, and right now the Democrats can’t unite on a positive program which radiates certainty, and while they might take back the House in mid-term elections, they won’t hold that without dealing with the certainty problem.

I don’t claim to be a great marketing guru, with reason. When I was younger, after a tour and a half in the Navy, largely as a helicopter search and rescue pilot, I spent a year as an industrial economist, technically a market research analyst for a company that manufactured compressed air valves, regulators, filters, and lubricators for heavy industry, largely automobile manufacturers. I wasn’t a good fit. The next year I got a real estate license, and in that year, I sold two houses, just two very modest dwellings.

Then I started writing science fiction stories, quickly discovering that the few stories I sold didn’t come close to paying the bills. But the writing and economic skills landed me in paid political positions for the next eighteen years, while I wrote and sold SF novels on the side. Those novels paid much better than stories, but not enough to leave the day job, not until I wrote my first fantasy novel – The Magic of Recluce.

When I started getting those first stories published, most of what was selling in the overall speculative fiction field was science fiction, particularly novels by Heinlein, Murray Leinster, Asimov, Simak, Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke. While Lord of the Rings was first published in 1955 in Great Britain, it didn’t appear in the United States until 1965. Despite the fact that Lord of the Rings sold something like 150 million copies, it took a while for overall fantasy book sales to surpass SF sales, but by the mid-1990s, total fantasy sales were definitely eclipsing SF sales.

This trend appears to be continuing. The editors I know say that it’s getting harder and harder for SF novels to be published, while the fastest-growing segment of speculative fiction is Romantasy – fantasy novels with sexual and romance content verging on the pornographic.

Part of the decline in the sales of SF novels is that the wish-fulfillment aspect of those novels gets harder and harder to pull off (if the author wants to stay close to the scientifically accurate), given scientific discoveries over the past few decades. Venus can’t be a tropical planet because it’s a hellhole in reality, and Barsoom can’t really exist, although several authors have gotten around those facts by setting their stories in alternate universes, but that makes those books science-fantasy, rather than SF.

There certainly are exceptions, such as Andy Weir’s The Martian, but they’re getting fewer and fewer. Part of that may be because SF has historically been dominated by male authors writing for male readers, and the reading rates for men have dropped dramatically since the advent of the internet. Whatever the other reasons may be, from what I can see, publishers overall are releasing and selling less hard SF, and even less fantasy that doesn’t have either sex-related romance and heavy action-adventure.

But what do I know?

Now that Memorial Day has passed, in roughly two weeks Donald Trump will preside over a military parade on Flag Day, which also marks the 250th “birthday” of the U.S. Army, and incidentally is also Trump’s birthday.

The parade, which is estimated to cost $45 million, will feature tanks and other military hardware, but what of those whose deaths, sacrifices, and all too often unseen gritty valor and lifelong suffering seem ignored – except in high-flown and soon forgotten rhetoric?

It all reminds me, sadly, of the Kipling poem “Tommy,” written more than a century ago, which illustrates how soldiers are momentarily praised when needed and later ignored and discarded.

Trump is all in favor of triumphant trappings of military success, of shiny aircraft and unblemished tanks – as most dictators or would-be dictators are. And of course, he wants a bright and shiny new – or newer—Air Force One to carry him around the world like Apollo in his light-encrusted chariot of divinity, for he is, in his own mind, a god of sorts, who’s already proclaimed that he runs the world.

At the same time, he’s cut the Veterans Administration, the only arm of government dedicated to the support and health of veterans, especially those disabled and without other support. He’s also called those who served “suckers” and “losers.” But he’ll publicly praise newly commissioned junior officers, while reducing the support and benefits of those who served in the past.

I can recall all the times I flew a vintage H-34 (helicopter) on its last legs, with patches on the fuselage where it had been hit in Vietnam and later repaired. I also haven’t forgotten searching in the darkness for one of many H-2s that went down over the ocean because there wasn’t enough funding to upgrade those helicopters properly, an H-2 that was never found, although the body of one of the two pilots was recovered. The other, whom I knew, was not.

Those aspects of military service haven’t changed that much, from what I can see, where funding goes to shiny new aircraft, without enough spare parts, and where there’s never enough funding to keep everything flying or to keep pilots in training. Just last week, the Navy announced that it’s revamping pilot training to eliminate the requirement for pilots to make carrier landings before they get their wings, which translates to less rigorous training. Both Navy and the Air Force don’t have enough jet trainers to train the pilots they need to the level they require, and the training jets they have are old and worn out. But the services and the Congress seem unable to decide on and fund new trainers, while keeping open scores of bases they don’t need because of Congressional pressure.

In, the meantime, Trump offers empty words to new junior officers, billionaires get tax cuts, Congress, for all its rhetoric, ignores too many of the pressing needs of the armed forces, and Trump will blow $45 million on a parade for his ego.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been insisting that the armed forces of the United States need to return to a “Warrior Ethos,” along with removing women from any number of positions and eliminating anyone who isn’t “straight.”

Personally, I have a real problem with that crusade, and the way he’s approaching reforming the armed services is, in fact, an unthinking crusade. He’s also assuming that males of a certain physical type are the only ones with the “correct” mindset.

War is no longer, if it ever really was, just a massive struggle of big-biceped males. Even the Bible makes that point in the story of David and Goliath, where the slight shepherd boy destroys the giant with his skill and his sling, and in fact, back then most armies had slingers. And, so far as being gay, Richard the Lion-Hearted was, and he was certainly a “warrior,” if not always wisely, which might also suggest certain drawbacks to the “warrior” mindset.

Modern warfare requires an enormous array of skills from its soldiers. Even in World War II, infantry soldiers, who took seventy percent of the casualties, only represented fourteen percent of overseas forces.

In the Vietnam era, when I flew H-34s, each hour of flight time required between five and ten hours of maintenance, and I wouldn’t be here today if those techs hadn’t done their job. Today, for every hour of flight time, an F18E/F Super Hornet requires twenty hours of maintenance. The F-14 required 40-60 hours, one of the reasons it was phased out. An aircraft carrier requires 5,000-6,000 personnel onboard to support the operations of between 64 and 80 aircraft of various sorts, with roughly 180-200 pilots and NFOs.

The armed forces don’t require or need macho-muscled males to fill every position, and in terms of flying, women and shorter men can actually handle gee forces better than tall brawny males. While there are certain specialty positions in the military that require great muscular strength and abilities, they represent a small fraction of the skills necessary in a modern military force.

At a time when the United States is relying on an all-volunteer military force, and when the military is often failing to meet recruiting goals, does arbitrary and unwise removal of soldiers, sailors, and others make sense, when their only “detriment” is that they don’t fit an outdated “warrior” image?

This past weekend, General Stanley McChrystal made the observation on “Face the Nation” that Trump’s lack of character wasn’t the problem with the United States, but a symptom of a much wider loss of character in America.

While General McCrystal was absolutely correct, in my opinion, I would agree, partly because of what I wrote in February of 2018 (more than seven years ago):

“Trump is not so much primarily either solution or problem, but a symptom of what’s gone wrong in American politics and society…”

In part, in that earlier blog, I was talking about intransigence and not listening to anyone “on the other side,” but General McChrystal made that observation as well, and the fact that he did suggests that American beliefs – and the unwillingness to compromise with or listen to the other side – haven’t changed much, if at all, over the last seven years, except possibly for the worse.

The current budget legislation in the House of Representatives is a reflection of that. The legislation that failed in committee was essentially a mirror image of every budget proposal passed in the past decade – more spending for defense, mostly maintaining social programs currently, but with severe/modest (depending on viewpoint) budget cuts/reforms promised for the future. The Republican hardliners want more defense spending, heavy cuts in social programs and large tax cuts, primarily for the wealthiest taxpayers, while the Democrats want to maintain and often expand social programs, increase taxes on the wealthy, and cut defense spending, except where it impacts their own districts and/or states.

Neither side is being realistic, but it’s hard to expect realism from a nation that gorges on social media and reality shows, a nation that has watered down education so that everyone can pass, even if they haven’t learned anything and can’t write a coherent paragraph, and where far too many young people idealize cultures that are brutal and oppressive, while trashing their own country, which is far more open and freer than the cultures they support in their protests.

While Trump is, in my opinion, a miserable excuse for a human being, the majority of those voting elected him… and that strongly suggests that General McChrystal and I not only share views, but also are correct in viewing Trump as a symptom and not a cause.

I dislike touchscreens, iPads, and the like. Part of that is that, while my muscular gross motor control is good to excellent, I don’t do as well with fine motor control, one of the reasons why I gave up trying to be an artist, although I actually won a scholastic art show in high school.

The other reason is that I have flat oblong fingertips, which means that it’s a bitch to compose anything on my iPhone. That’s why I use a mouse on my surface pro when I travel. For me, precision is far easier and quicker with a full-sized keyboard and a mouse. As for signing anything electronically, on those occasions, my barely legible signature turns into abstract art.

In a way, I could claim that iPads and touchscreens are discriminatory against people with large hands and broad or fat fingers, but then, if we really look at the physical world, every device and structure could be said to be discriminatory against someone. In fact, even the environment discriminates.

The sun blisters fair-skinned people in tropical climes and induces vitamin D deficiencies in dark-skinned people living in arctic areas (unless they take vitamins or watch their diet carefully).

Genetics discriminate, because some people are born more intelligent or stronger or faster or more coordinated than others.

Societies and governments usually discriminate in various ways, sometimes for the public good, as in locking up lawbreakers and forbidding children to drive some killing machines (i.e., automobiles) while often allowing young teenagers to drive smaller killing machines (i.e., ATVs). Often, societies discriminate on the basis of appearance, skin color, gender, and age, or religious faith or the lack thereof, and the culture/society into which one is born determines the degree of discrimination and challenges faced.

We all can cite blatant and obvious cases of discrimination such as slavery and lack of civil rights for African Americans in the U.S.; the holocaust in Germany; the Armenian Genocide in Turkey – and that list is long. But moving away from the blatant and obvious, “discrimination” isn’t always so easy to define or remedy.

Recent studies show that family backgrounds, especially their degree of prosperity, have a great impact on children’s futures. So does the physical environment. But to what degree should governments address the conditions that disadvantage children?

Both the right and the left have been debating and fighting over this question for generations, and while conditions have improved in the U.S., in many areas, obvious discrimination still exists. At the same time, some groups have filed lawsuits against governments and universities claiming that certain anti-discrimination measures discriminate against them.

But how much discrimination is structural? How much can be addressed by laws? And how much is chance?

I have no sense of pitch or rhythm, and I’m extremely fortunate to have been born into a culture that doesn’t require a high degree of linguistic inflection and pitch change, because I’m fairly certain that I’d be at a great disadvantage in China, Japan, or Vietnam. I couldn’t even hear the changes in inflection and pitch in Vietnamese when I was being prepared to be sent to Vietnam as a junior Navy officer.

All of which illustrates, in an odd way, why dealing with “discrimination” can be fraught with pitfalls. Even laws requiring perfect equality of opportunity wouldn’t make touchscreens any easier for me or allow me to sing professionally.

And while that seems far-fetched, how far can we take “anti-discrimination?”

Last Thursday, David H. Souter died at his home in New Hampshire. The former Supreme Court Justice is likely to be remembered, at least by Republicans, as a Republican in name only, because he voted so often with the “liberal” justices.

From what I’ve read and heard, Justice Suitor had only two passions in life – the law and the outdoors of his home state of New Hampshire.

What few of those Republicans who felt “betrayed” by Suitor’s Supreme Court votes and opinions understood, or wanted to, was that for Souter, the law and the Constitution were sacred. He had few illusions that the Constitution was perfect, but he said, if not in so many words, that laws should be interpreted in the spirit of the Constitution. He also understood that, as I’ve written before:

Never mistake law for justice. Justice is an ideal, and law is a tool.

Justice Souter also understood that the way that tool was used – or misused – made all the difference for society.

There are two fundamental approaches to making or applying laws. One is along the lines that Trump is currently pursuing, which is to make and apply laws and regulations to obtain a predetermined goal, regardless of the Constitution and/or other existing law and precedents, while disregarding the harmful direct and indirect consequences of such a course.

The other approach, the one seemingly followed by Justice Souter, as best I can determine, is to interpret and decide laws based on both the text and the spirit of the Constitution. This approach used to be more common, particularly among moderate Republicans, and even some rather conservative Republicans.

Justice Souter, and his example, will be missed, not that most current Republican officeholders will ever understand why.

During the 2024 Presidential campaign, Donald Trump came out strong for states’ rights, particularly when it came to the abortion issue.

Trump has also trumpeted his support for states’ primacy on other issues such as disaster aid, education standards, public lands, and other issues where conservatives have opposed federal laws and initiatives.

Yet, for all the talk about states’ rights, since Trump became President for the second time, he’s attacked states and state programs that don’t agree with his rhetoric and agenda.

Just one day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove wrote a memo to the Justice Department calling on U.S. attorneys to prosecute state and local officials who do not cooperate with the deportation efforts of the Trump administration.

On March 25th, Trump issued an executive order directing an independent bipartisan federal agency, the Election Assistance Commission, to impose voter registration mandates on all fifty states; place restrictions on the deadline for states to receive legitimately cast ballots; and threatened to withhold funding for election safety programs if states fail to comply.

Tom Homan – Trump’s “border czar” — has threatened to go after states and cities that refuse to comply with the president-elect’s deportation plans, including arresting mayors, despite the fact that past Supreme Court decisions have held that the federal government cannot force local authorities to carry out federal laws, nor to incarcerate local leaders for not adhering to an administration’s policy.

Just this past week, Trump issued an executive order week directing the Justice Department to stop states from enforcing their own climate laws. The order targets a broad sweep of state policies, from environmental justice reviews to decade-old carbon markets, as well as taking aim at states suing fossil fuel companies for damages related to climate impacts. He also issued an executive order pushing the building of coal power plants and ordering attacks on state laws that would prohibit or limit coal fired power plants.

The bottom line?

The only rights and principles Trump supports are those that get him what he wants. When states’ rights suit him, he’s for them, but when the states oppose him, they’re the enemy to be destroyed.