The state of Utah is currently under a gubernatorial “directive” – rather than a mandatory order – to stay at home, and all schools and universities have closed their physical facilities to students, while restaurants are limited to carry-out and drive-by food service, and non-essential businesses are supposed to be closed. But the mayors of Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County have issued mandatory stay-at-home orders, as has Summit County (essentially Park City).

In our part of the state, what’s an essential business seems rather loosely defined. Gun shops are open, as are dollar stores and at least one or two furniture emporiums, and a significant percentage of university faculty are still using their offices daily. I don’t see large groups in public places, but there’s a feeling that I can only call surreal, because it seems to me that, with the exception of the lack of toilet paper, flour, and pasta in the grocery stores, most people here are acting as if nothing really bad is going to happen.

Maybe, in a state with a great deal of open space, matters won’t get as bad as in New York and all the larger cities – except that the Wasatch Front, a hundred miles of suburban and urban sprawl sandwiched between two mountain ranges containing two million people, doesn’t exactly qualify as open space, as the two Salt Lake area mayors seem to realize, unlike the suburban municipalities surrounding Salt Lake. With a 1,000 known cases and only seven deaths in Utah at the moment, matters don’t seem that bad. Except, only 20,000 people have been tested.

Cedar City and its principal suburb contain roughly 45,000 people, plus whatever college students are remaining here out of 11,000, but St. George, 50 miles south, contains over 150,000 people, and I have my doubts that this part of Utah will remain unscathed, although at present there have only been less than 50 known cases and two covid-19 deaths in the two counties. The first testing locations became available in this area just today.

One aspect of this that I find troubling is that all too many people here have no idea how bad things are elsewhere, as evidenced by something like fifteen commissioners of rural counties here who wrote the governor demanding that he remove the directive and prohibitions because there was no danger of a pandemic here and those prohibitions were strangling the local economies. Or by the university student who couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t be able to attend a summer program in Berlin. Or some friends who continue to live “normal” lives.

And most people don’t seem to realize that, while we have a very new and modern small hospital, it only has 48 beds… and it’s 250 miles to Salt Lake or 50 miles to St. George, a small city with a population containing large numbers of retirees.

It could be that southwestern Utah will escape relatively unscathed, but I’m not betting on it… especially since too many people here seem to think it won’t happen.

The lack of adequate personal protective equipment for medical personnel dealing with the covid-19 pandemic, the lack of adequate numbers of respirators, and the lack of advance planning in the United States is an unfortunate and yet inevitable outgrowth of the “instant internet” and “just-in-time” mindset that has become prevalent in the United States, particularly in the last twenty years. Unhappily, major crises aren’t susceptible to “instant” solutions. Solutions require time and advance allocation of resources, and extreme capitalist societies like the U.S. don’t like setting aside resources that could be “better” used for making more money now.

Unfortunately, that mindset isn’t totally new. It’s just worse, aided by a society addicted to instant satisfaction. The United States has always had a habit of trying to avoid looking at and dealing with unpleasant truths… and not wanting to spend thought and resources on preparation and understanding. I won’t go into all of the examples, but World War II and the Vietnam War were two more recent examples, as was the financial melt-down of 2008. For six years before Germany actually invaded Poland, Hitler broke treaties, annexed other countries, demonized, persecuted and killed Jews and others the Nazis found “undesirable.” By the mid-thirties the Japanese were taking over large sections of China. The U.S. reaction? Zilch. The U.S. Army was at one of the lowest levels ever, and the isolationist America First movement was the predominant political view.

The Vietnam War was largely fought by the U.S., until the very end, on the WW II assumption that massive numbers of men, bombs, high tech and costly weapons, and defoliants could defeat a popular movement using asymmetrical warfare tactics, even though the Vietnamese had driven out the French. Over more than a thousand years, China had attempted to conquer the Vietnam area, but the Vietnamese never gave up and always pushed the Chinese out, and the Chinese always had more men and better weapons. Until the very end, the military and the Washington establishment never looked at that history, or, when they did, they disregarded it.

The 2008 financial meltdown came about the same way. Even though more than a few experts and analysts questioned the over-mortgaging of American and the securitization of subprime mortgages, few policymakers wanted to look at the underlying weaknesses of the system, and no one planned for the future, because everything was about making more money “now.”

Every reputable epidemiologist knows that pandemics happen. They’ve happened throughout history, always with high body counts, economic havoc, and political instability. So what did the Trump administration do? They eliminated the very office created to deal with pandemics, and the result was the loss of at least a month of time for preparation. There also weren’t enough back-up supplies, and it turns out – not to my surprise – that it takes time to retool factories to produce surgical masks and respirators… time, it turns out, that cities like New York don’t have. The just-in-time economy and instant internet aren’t very good at dealing with crises like covid-19. We will muddle through, but more people will die who didn’t have to, and many of them will be medical professionals in the front line… and, also, in the process, a great many workers and their families will suffer unnecessary financial hardship.

There are reasons to know history and to have enough equipment of the right kind ready on standby, even though it’s not “instantly” profitable… but somehow it seems every generation has to learn that truth the hard way… and some politicians and people never do.

According to the CDC, the fatality rate for influenza has historically run roughly at a rate of 1/10th of one percent, that is to say, that for every thousand people infected, one person died. The highest known fatality rate for a form of influenza was the 1918 Spanish Flu, estimated to have had a fatality rate around two percent. Presently, it appears that the fatality rate for Covid-19 runs from 1.4% to as high as 3.0%

Seasonal flu has averaged a contagion rate of roughly 1.3, meaning each infected flu victim infects on average 1.3 others. The contagion rate for the 1918 Flu is estimated to have been around 2.5, but that was before more modern treatments were available. Currently, it appears that Covid-19 – without measures such as social distancing – has a contagion rate of 2.3, very close to that of the 1918 flu.

So far this “flu year,” there have been at least 34 million cases of flu in the United States, 350,000 hospitalizations and 20,000 flu deaths, according to the C.D.C. By comparison, if 34 million Americans were exposed to Covid-19, even at the lowest fatality rate, there would be close to half a million deaths, and over five million people requiring hospitalization.

And remember, 34 million people amount to only about ten percent of the U.S. population.

There are novels that wear well over time, but not all that many, because too often authors are locked into their “present,” whether through social conventions, marketing requirements, or reader expectations.

Jane Austen has enjoyed a revival because women, in particular, have enjoyed her accurate, trenchant, and well-written observations of social maneuvering in a particular time period, an analysis which is transferable in ways to current society, which illustrates how, at times, the “simple” approach of good writing can, in itself, be timeless – but only if it also somehow speaks to readers. And in a strange way, Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, also has a sense of timelessness, at least in the original French.

Strangely, it seems to me, timelessness is harder to come by in science fiction. A number of once-popular SF novels of the 1950s and early 1960s are also hopelessly dated by technology. Venus the green planet has been supplanted by Venus the lead-melting hellhole. We now know that the Barsoom of John Carter never could have existed on Mars … and there’s also less enthusiasm for honorable but clearly patriarchal heroes of that mold. That, of course, doesn’t stop intrepid “SF” authors, for whom the latest authorial trick has been to invent an alternative universe or history conducive to the pulp-style tales they want to tell.

I obviously have no problem with inventing alternative universes, but I do wonder why such authors would want to create a pseudo-pulp solar system based on concepts popular in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Then, again, I suppose that’s a form of timelessness, where modern science has been excluded. At the same time, calling the stories in such universes “science fiction” is a bit of a stretch, but SF has seen survived such stretches and will continue to do so, especially since the limits of hard science are increasingly inimical to space-operatic swashbuckling.

Still, despite the limits of hard science… some science fiction novels, such as LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, or Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness, have a certain timelessness, but such books are comparatively rare. Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, while dated in the sense that we still can’t do what he theorized, has its own sense of timelessness.

Fantasy is much more suited to timelessness, especially with such works as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, but it’s a bit early to tell how time will treat The Wheel of Time or any of my fantasy series or those of other best-selling or acclaimed authors. We may turn out to be timeless… but it’s more likely we’ll merely be authors forgotten in time, which is the fate of the majority of authors.

“So we worshipped the Gods of the Market who promised us these beautiful things…

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew…”

Kipling – “The Gods of the Copy Book Headings”

So… in less than two weeks, countries, corporations, small businesses, and huge numbers of individuals are facing economic ruin, not to mention the fact that virtually everyone’s retirement and portfolio have been trashed… and potentially a great deal more.

Why?

Covid-19 didn’t cause this. What caused this mess was the leveraging of greed at every possible level in human society.

Leverage is a great idea, in perspective. Who doesn’t want to get more for less effort, less investment, fewer employees?

Take just-in-time supply chains. They cut inventory costs because a firm doesn’t pay for components almost until needed [and the way some companies handle payment probably until after the components are already in a product on its way to be sold, if not already sold]. The company doesn’t maintain inventory for the government to tax [taxing inventory may prove to be one of the worst a decisions ever made in modern economic history]. There’s no cost for additional warehousing space. Ideally, that means a cheaper product [practically, it means higher profits and executive compensation].

Automation is another form of leverage. Improvements in technology mean that AI-guided systems replace human guided systems. That results in greater precision at lower cost and a smaller human workforce. Computerization is drastically reducing administrative jobs, which also has resulted in increasingly high workloads on reduced numbers of lower-level “executive” employees.

Outsourcing and off-shoring are other forms of leveraging capital, often essentially human capital, although they’re seldom described that way.

And, of course, raising money in the stock-market so that others pay for much of the capital in a company is also leverage. Again, I’ve never seen it described that way, but that’s what it is.

Then, add in specialization, where a few firms, perhaps only one or two, produce just one component vital to a number of firms…and spread this across not only the U.S. economy, but the world economy, and have an economic system the like of which the world has never seen. The only problem is that while all this specialization and leverage has enormous benefits, it also has enormous fragility, something that “the smooth-tongued wizards” of the Gods of the Market have ignored and downplayed. That’s a failure that the smooth-tongued wizards never pay for.

Unfortunately, we, as a society, will pay mightily for being seduced by the siren song of pure and over-leveraged capitalism, and for failing to recognize that we needed to master and restrain capitalism, rather than allowing ourselves to be mastered by it.

Every writer has his or her own personal requirements to be successful, and that’s often why workshops and courses sometimes don’t work, and why writing gurus often think, I’ve spelled it out step by step. Why doesn’t the idiot get it?

I was once one of those idiots.

The first time that I tried to write a story, I was around fourteen. I didn’t want to write it. I knew I wasn’t a fiction writer [which really meant I hadn’t learned and found the process too daunting. I didn’t have a choice. It was a school assignment. I wrote it. It was grammatically excellent. As a work of fiction, it was far beneath God-awful. As I recall, my English teacher’s comments were something like, “Grammatically fine. Not much there.”

And some readers, for whom action is the only mark of story, might well say, “Not that much has changed.”

It wasn’t that I disliked writing. I had no problems with writing lengthy history papers, but I tended to underestimate the time required to do a really excellent job, a trait not uncommon among teenaged males. I enjoyed going against the grain when I wrote “critical” English papers, and usually got brought up short, but every once in a long while… I actually surprised a teacher, favorably, that is. And I liked writing stories for the tiny mimeographed school newspaper.

But my true love was poetry – traditional poetry. About as far as I’ve gone in enjoying [but not in reading] “modern” poetry are poets such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas. That’s probably because I love words and the way they sound and how rhythms, rhymes, and meanings forge something stronger than the evanescent mist of most modern poetry. The other aspect of why I liked poetry didn’t dawn on me until later – I could work on something until it was right… or as right as I could make it.

Of course, by the time I graduated from college, where I had two outstanding professors [William J. Smith, who later became U.S. Poet Laureate, and Clay Hunt, a truly brilliant scholar and literary analyst who tragically died far too young of cancer], traditional poetry was largely passé or relegated to chapbooks or the smallest of literary magazines. This hasn’t changed. Even today, rhymed or even semi-traditional poetry is almost verboten at The New Yorker and other “literary” magazines. While I was in the Navy and for a few years after, I submitted to various magazines…and very occasionally got accepted, but only by small magazines and only for work in the “Eliot” vein.

My problem in developing as a fiction writer was fairly basic. At that point in my life, all the explanations about how to construct a story simply did make sense to me. Oh, I understood the terms, the concepts, and I could see exactly why they were all necessary, but assembling a story that way just didn’t work for me.

It wasn’t until I put together “dreary and involved” economics with a beleaguered Coke-swilling junior economist like I’d recently been with money-shifting here and there and no one seemingly caring that the basics clicked. Simply put… I had to feel the story… really feel it.

Now… turning that understanding into reliable professional success, that took almost another twenty years.

The other day I came across a term new to me (“loreporn”), or at least new in the context in which it was used, that being the idea of excessive background information in novels as analogous to the excesses of pornography. I’ve occasionally run across “porn” used as a suffix before, negatively denoting excesses of various sorts, but I have to admit that I’d never seen it used as a derogatory term for excessive literary or fictional background.

The problem with this sort of labelling is that writers, being writers, have different styles. Some like more background, some almost none. Also, readers of different genres have differing expectations. Readers who favor fast-moving action tend to favor less historical background and find legends that take more than a sentence to explain distracting. Some fantasy readers find more lore and background intriguing and fascinating, others less so. And that’s fine.

It’s one thing to point out that a writer’s “lore” doesn’t work as supposedly designed, or that it was borrowed from feudalism or Shinto, or other cultures, and really isn’t applicable to the society described by the writer. It’s also fair to point out when there’s more background than story, or where the background has more character than the protagonist.

But to brand anything that doesn’t fit into one’s own perceptions of what is proper as “loreporn” is more often than not a cheap shot and misleading. One could thoughtlessly apply the term to much of Tolkien, but all of that lore is an enormous part of what makes The Lord of the Rings what it is.

What I find disturbing about such a term is the almost moralistic condemnation it implies to a style that a reader finds not to his or her taste. There are societal and practical reasons to derogate, or at least be skeptical of excessive depictions of sexual acts, but to equate expansive descriptions of history, myth, or legend to out and out pornography seems more than a little excessive to me. And using a single derogatory word to describe any author’s lore, legends, and myth is carelessly and cruelly excessive.

But then, we live in an age of excess.

Over the years, fantasy has explored the power of names, and the degree to which knowing someone’s “true name” can give a wizard or witch or someone else the power over that individual. Even if that’s a dubious proposition in the real world, studies and practical experience suggest that names do have certain impact.

Studies show that, in general, voters prefer politicians with simpler names, and that, even in the legal profession, supposedly devoted to legal impartiality, attorneys with easier to pronounce names were more likely to make partner, regardless of the ethnicity of the name. Again, in an overall sense, stocks of start-up companies with easy to pronounce names do better initially than those with names harder to pronounce (later on financial performance tends to take over).

Just calling someone by name can get their immediate attention.

But how much do names tell you about someone? Does what someone was named affect who they are and who they become?

I have to admit that, if someone had asked me those questions thirty or forty years ago, I would have said that names tell some things about a person, or at least their background, but I would have been dubious about names affecting personal behavior. Now… I’m not so sure. But is that just what we want to see? Or do names shape how people develop?

Just because every “Summer” either my wife or I have ever met has been bright, but ditzy, does that reflect just the coincidence of our meeting ditzy “Summers” or does the name do that to them? Likewise, why is every “April” we’ve met flighty and lacking even a semblance of a work ethic?

Then there’s the name/nickname trade-off. I’ve encountered a number of men with the birth name of “Richard.” All of the ones who went by the nickname “Dick” (despite current connotations to the contrary) were solid, bright, individuals. Those who went by “Richard”… not so much so.

On the other hand, I haven’t had much luck with guys named “Bob,” and neither did the composer Menotti, whose weak-willed drifter in his opera The Old Maid and the Thief was also named Bob.

As for “Donald”… the “Dons,” so far anyway, have been good people. As for the “Donalds…” you can probably guess my thoughts about them.

And I have to admit that I’m not consistent. I address all of my children by their full names, although most all of them have names that can be and often are shortened – except the eldest, who’s named after me… and I call him by the same nickname that my father had and that I have. That just might be the reason why he didn’t name either of his sons after me. And, as you all know, I don’t write under either my full name or my nickname.

Everyone will have some sort of take on the Democratic Presidential campaign after Super Tuesday… and the apparent political resurrection of Joe Biden from the “political dead.” I’m no exception, but my thoughts/points don’t fall into grand conspiracies, possibly because most theorized conspiracies don’t exist… and never have. Human greed, stupidity, and incompetence, along with blind and unthinking belief, usually do a better job of explaining events than conspiracies.

So… my observations…

First, no matter how smart and competent she is, Americans as a whole, even supposedly progressive Democrats, shy away from nominating or electing a woman. All this is disguised and rationalized by various “explanations.” “I’m for women, but not [that woman].” “I worry that a woman can’t stand up to Trump.” “I’m for women, but most people aren’t, and we need to win.” And those are just the beginning.

Second, most people – except those who feel they have nothing to lose – are leery of revolutionaries, because they want to keep what they have and are looking for improvement in their situation, not a total restructuring of their life by government. Trump’s appeal in 2016 was not that he was going to change things, but that he was going to “restore” things. Make American Great Again was code for putting minorities back in their place, restoring higher paying semi-skilled jobs [which couldn’t and didn’t happen], keeping out immigrants, and continuing to prop up the stock market and financial sector with cheap money.

The vote for Biden on Super Tuesday was a vote for incremental improvement. Support for Sanders in California and Nevada reflected how expensive life there is and how the young people and minorities there don’t see how mere incremental improvement will help with the problems they face.

Third, Americans are wary of detailed plans and programs. The results, at least to me, were a rejection of detail and of thoughtfulness. Almost meaningless rhetoric and generalities once again triumphed.

Fourth, young people talk and tweet a lot, but it’s the older people and a dedicated core of voters who show up and vote in higher percentages. Black voter numbers were up, as were suburban white voters, from the reports I’ve seen, but not numbers of young or Latino voters. Most black voters, particularly older black voters, studies and numbers show, are actually wary of radical political propositions and those who push them.

How all of this will play out in the months ahead is another question, especially if Elizabeth Warren stays in the race.

One of the topics I’ve discussed over the last several years is how both the media and the internet have in essence fragmented U.S. society. There’s a news channel for everyone, and if that’s not enough for the far right and far left, there’s the “twitterverse.”

For whatever reason, the remaining Republicans, that is, the hard-core Republicans who believe that either Trump can do no wrong or that even Trump is better than any Democrat, seem less fragmented than the Democrats, as is clearly demonstrated by the increasingly bitter Democratic presidential primary.

On the far left is Elizabeth Warren, with plans for everything, but, as an economist who’s worked in government and the private sector, I can’t make the numbers work, despite her insistence that those plans are financially doable. Ditto for Bernie. Combined, they seem to have the most support.

Then you’ve got the moderates, with Joe Biden still having the most support, although that support seems squishy to me, despite his victory in South Carolina. Those moderates are at least trying to push changes that might be marginally financially feasible, but, guess what, not that many Democrats seem that thrilled with “moderation” (although Republicans, and even some Democrats, would find their proposals as unpalatable as those of Warren and Sanders). The fact that Mayor Pete and Amy Klobuchar have dropped out strongly suggests that there aren’t that many moderates among the younger Democrats.

Then there are the billionaires, and somehow, I don’t see either of them igniting a wave of warm support, as witness the fact that Steyer has ended his campaign.

But that’s not the biggest problem. The greatest difficulty is that the far left is trashing those with more “moderate” policies as being uncaring and ignoring the “needs” of the people, while the “moderates” keep asking how the country can pay for the proposed extravagance of the ultra-liberal policies. And even Warren and Sanders are bickering.

Yet this increasingly bitter fight over the nomination ignores basic reality. The next Congress won’t pass any ultra-liberal financially costly legislation, because even if the Democrats flip the Senate and hold the house, they’ll only have a one or two vote margin in the Senate.

In the meantime, the bloodbath is providing Trump with all the talking points and tweets he’ll need for whoever the Democrats nominate, especially since, given the past success in Republican gerrymandering and vote suppression, the Democrats will likely need close to a five percent advantage in the popular vote in order to get a very tenuous control over both the presidency and the legislative branch.

And they’re going to get it through ideological “purity” tests and trashing each other?

But then… let’s see what tomorrow’s “Super Tuesday” brings.

MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews equated the victory of Bernie Sanders and his supporters in the Nevada Democratic presidential primary to the Nazi victory over France in 1940. Although Matthews later apologized to Sanders, the initial claim was not only reprehensible, but shows that Matthews doesn’t really know or understand history.

In the early 1930s, the Nazis were a minority party. In fear of a takeover of the parliament by the communists, German President Paul von Hindenburg offered the chancellorship to Hitler, who represented himself as an ally of the more moderate business-oriented political parties. Hindenburg thought his group had “captured” Hitler, when it turned out the other way around, and Hitler consolidated his power by blaming all of Germany’s problems, including the burning of the Reichstag [parliament] building in 1933, first on the communists and then on the Jews… and foreign powers.

In historical terms, it’s Trump who’s analogous to Hitler and the Nazis, not Sanders. In both Germany and Italy, Hitler and Mussolini were supported by the business and industrial community, not by the left-wing radicals such as the communists. Even a number of large U.S. companies financially supported German industrial concerns long after WWII started.

The same pattern also existed in Spain and in Portugal, where right-wing, big-businesses supported the dictators Franco and Salazar. Yet, particularly in Germany and Italy, these dictators presented themselves as populists who were rescuing the middle class from the dangers of the left and from foreign domination and untoward influence. Might this sound just a little bit familiar?

So how could Chris Matthews be so incorrect? Was it merely a desire to see Bernie Sanders as Hitler…or was it something more sinister? I suspect the latter, because the Matthews quote refers to an accurate event in a totally inaccurate context and with an incorrect backstory, which is the staple of self-identified “populist” dictators and their followers.

There is a reason why the oath sworn before courts uses the phrase, “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Too bad that certain news commentators and Trump don’t believe in the “whole truth.”

Every human being I’ve ever met has lied, and certainly more than once. Now it might have been a white lie, or a lie to save someone’s feelings. It might have been calling in sick to work when they weren’t. It might have been worse than that. But all human beings lie… and if you insist that you’ve never lied, that’s a lie as well.

Why am I making this obvious point? First, because the fact that people lie doesn’t just apply to politicians; it applies to everyone. Second, what’s most important about lies isn’t that people lie; it’s the extent of the lie and the context in which they lie. Your lying and telling a friend that they look good or that a thoughtless word didn’t hurt isn’t the same as a president telling thousands of lies, hundreds of which are out and out falsehoods that can be easily disproved by verified facts.

By the same token, while almost all politicians occasionally shade the truth or don’t tell all of it, there’s a huge difference between the politician who utters an occasional lie, exaggeration, or misstatement and one who almost can’t utter an extended statement without lies or gross exaggerations.

Part of the reason that Trump gets away with all his lies, misstatements, and exaggerations is because he’s adept at exploiting a universal human weakness – human beings are mentally limited in the number of objects or thoughts that they can visualize or hold as discrete thoughts in their minds at any one time. After an individual reaches his or her limit, the brain defaults to “many.” So, in most people’s minds, there’s no difference between a politician who makes six or seven misstatements, exaggerations, or lies and one who makes thousands. Unless a person makes an effort to see each lie in context – and most people don’t – their unconscious feeling is that both politicians are “equal” liars… which clearly isn’t the case.

Then add in the fact that people don’t like to think unfavorable thoughts about someone they want to like… and it’s so easy to dismiss an opponent to the habitual liar as just another politician.

But, in the end, anyone who can’t or won’t tell the difference between the occasional liar and the habitual liar, or who thinks that there’s no difference, is lying to themselves… again.

On Thursday, the Utah State Legislature sent a letter to President Trump, commending him for his actions, citing reducing in size [drastically] two national monuments, repealing “onerous” federal regulations [including one that required oil and gas wells to control methane emissions], and appointing conservative judges. The commendation was sent after the legislature failed to pass two measures aimed at Senator Mitt Romney for his vote to convict Trump. The first bill would have recalled Romney as Senator, despite the fact that state restrictions calling for removal of a Senator have been found unconstitutional, and the second would have censured Romney.

Obviously, the very Republican [more than two/thirds] legislature fears Trump’s possible reprisal against the state of Utah and is trying to defuse Trump’s anger… or at least redirect it only to Romney.

And just what messages does this “commendation” send?

First, the legislature fears what Trump might do, which is a real fear, since Trump, especially this past week, has been venting his wrath on all sorts of people for simply telling what they saw or heard. But to commend a President, especially when he’s punishing people essentially for not lying under oath to protect him, is hardly a principled stand.

Second, the Republican-dominated legislature wants to punish one of its own party for voting his conscience and not following the party line. In short, ethics be damned.

But I’m not surprised. For the nearly thirty years that we’ve lived here, the Utah Legislature has invariably followed a simple unspoken Utah philosophy – Our Way or the Highway. And this was just another example, following several other recent examples, such as trying to more than triple the sales tax on food to fund a decrease in the income taxes of the wealthy [against the wishes of the vast majority of the state] and trying to gut the Medicaid expansion required by a state referendum.

Eleven hundred former employees – Republican, Democrat, and unaffiliated – who served at the Department of Justice under both Republican and Democratic presidents have signed a petition demanding that Attorney General William Barr resign because he “openly and repeatedly flouted” the principle of equal justice under law. The petition follows the withdrawal of four federal prosecutors (one of whom also resigned from DOJ in protest) from the DOJ case against Roger Stone when Barr overruled their sentencing recommendation, after a series of tweets by Trump claiming that the sentence and even the conviction of Stone was “ridiculous.”

Stone was found guilty of lying to the House Intelligence Committee, obstructing its investigation of Russian meddling in U.S. elections, and of threatening witnesses.

Barr also directed the top federal prosecutor in St. Louis to “review” the case against Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, who had already pled guilty to lying to the FBI.

Now… let’s see. The President who attempted to extort Ukraine to start an investigation of the son of a potential political rival has now pressured his attorney general to lighten sentences of people convicted of meddling in the election in which the President denies there was anything wrong. These events don’t even take into account the other four (if I’ve counted right) Trump campaign associates who were also charged and indicted.

Trump has also refused to commit to not pardoning Stone. So…regardless of Stone’s final sentence, it’s likely Stone will pardoned.

And the saddest part of all this is that most Americans seemingly could care less.

Very few seem to realize that this is the most wide-spread corruption in the federal government in at least the past century, and it’s largely disregarded under the idea that all politicians are crooks anyway.

They’re not… but even if they were, just ignoring it is only going to make it worse.

So maybe everyone really ought to listen to the 1100… if only for self-interest, because one only has to look at Mexico and much of Latin America to see what happens when corruption takes over the legal system, the police, and the courts.

Why are so many people hooked on screens, whether it’s Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, instant sports streaming, or something else? Instant gratification, of course. Entertainment, news, weather, or even quick short research inquiries. Convenience as well, of course, with driving directions dictated to you by Siri or some other compliant [usually, anyway] electronic voice.

I’ve already offered comments, mostly negative, on Google, and the fact that algorithm-based short popular answers amount to “Top 40” knowledge, and that Google provides knowledge with less depth than a wading pool while giving its users the illusion that they know a great deal when what they know is usually little more than a superficial gloss that they won’t retain because true knowledge is rooted in deeper study and actually knowing the underlying structure and principles.

Unfortunately, there’s another, and darker side, and that’s the impact on education. Over the past few years, I’ve talked to educators across the United States, and almost all of them are having problems with the ability of younger Americans to concentrate and to stay focused on anything not involved with a screen, preferably an interactive screen. They’re also easily “bored” and want to be “entertained” by their instructors, and the highest ratings on student surveys almost invariably go to the most entertaining professors.

This isn’t exactly new, but it’s gotten steadily worse. If memory serves me correctly, back in 1960 Fred Pohl wrote about this problem in a book called Drunkard’s Walk, although that wasn’t the main theme of the book. Pohl accurately predicted the growth of what I’d call “edutainment” where college professors can only keep the attention of students so long as they’re entertaining.

At the same time, as social media has allowed college students to withdraw more and more from day-to-day personal face-to-face interactions, they have become more and more emotionally fragile, less able to take even constructive criticism, and more and more needing constant praise and encouragement. The number needing counseling has skyrocketed.

On top of that, far too many of today’s students have trouble remembering information discussed in class or information that they’ve read, even from a screen. Again, this isn’t totally new. Cram and forget as a technique for passing classes was certainly around when I was a student, but back then some of that information was actually retained.

But this all fits in nicely with the new order, where a President can say something, and then deny it a day or two later… and no one remembers except the purveyors of “fake news,” who aren’t believed by anyone who disagrees with them.

So maybe it’s better this way, where no one remembers history, or unpleasant contradictory facts, so long as they’re entertained and everyone praises them.

The more I see in “social media” and in the news media, the more obvious it is to me that, not only do most people really not understand how politics, government, and the legal system work – or fail to work – most of them really don’t want to understand… and the media, in large part, abets that lack of understanding.

Trump, or any other President, proposes an annual budget… and immediately there are headlines about what the President is going to do…. and all sorts of reactions. No… that’s not necessarily what is going to happen. That’s what the President says he wants to happen, but it’s going to take authorizing legislation and then appropriations to change the existing way things are done. I’ve never seen a President’s budget proposal adopted without significant changes, and many Presidents have had their budgets totally ignored by Congress.

If Congress gets hung up, and it usually does, then a continuing appropriations bill will let matters proceed as they did in the previous year. But any change – positive or negative – requires authorizing and appropriations legislation by both the Senate and the House.

Likewise… for all the rhetoric… no one is going to take all guns away from the American people. The most Congress will ever do – even the most left-wing Congress possible – is to prohibit specific weapons, as it already has with machine guns and fully automatic weapons, and the number of bullets in a magazine. Anything more would require the repeal of the Second Amendment, and that isn’t going to happen. Yet a huge number of gun advocates are deeply convinced that a ban on assault weapons will lead to a ban on all weapons… or that limiting magazine sizes is tantamount to “taking their guns.”

Three years have passed since Trump promised to revitalize the coal industry. Despite relaxation of some environmental standards, there are fewer coal jobs now than then. Why? Because alternative power sources and natural gas are cheaper than coal. Net result – more pollution and fewer jobs. But there’s scarcely a word about that in the coal producing states… or anywhere else.

During the long Presidential campaign, at least two candidates have been questioned on their performance as public prosecutors… and the possibility that they prosecuted minorities too vigorously, especially in cases where later evidence showed that some of those prosecuted were unfairly convicted. That’s tragic… but the blame shouldn’t immediately fall on the prosecuting attorney. If a prosecutor ignores existing evidence, that’s a real problem, but if the prosecutor prosecutes based on the evidence presented, then they’re doing their job, and the blame for evidentiary failure should fall on the law enforcement system that provided the evidence. Prosecuting attorneys are overworked as it is, and to expect them to add detailed evidence-gathering and checking to their duties is not only unrealistic, but impractical. It’s not their job, but apparently the media and some political reporters aren’t interested in either accuracy or practicality.

Then there’s the right-wing claim that convicting Trump of the impeachment charges would overturn the election results and change government. Exactly how? As I’ve noted before, Mike Pence who is a Republican even more conservative than Trump would have been President. That fact didn’t ever seem to get raised or noticed.

I could go on and on… but…maybe… just maybe… I have trouble getting my head around how so many seemingly intelligent people don’t know or don’t want to know anything contrary to what they want to believe… even when it’s laid out in law and the Constitution… or in dollars and cents.

After breaking pretty much every convention, and certainly the expectations of the Founding Fathers, Donald Trump has essentially declared he is Emperor, or at least as much of an emperor as is currently possible. But, I have to give him credit, he’s done things that I didn’t think were possible.

With the exception of Mitt Romney, who’s now facing potential censure by the Utah state legislature for his vote to convict Trump, Trump has turned the Republican Senate into slobbering and apologetic lap-dogs. He’s continuing to gut environmental protection, and the people who suffer the most are, paradoxically, those who support Trump. His tariffs and trade wars are hurting the farm sector, and he’s kept the support of out-of-work or underemployed and undereducated white males, as well as the evangelicals, despite having given them nothing but enormous quantities of the rhetoric they want to hear.

His supporters cite the great economy, but the vast majority of economic benefits have gone to the top 5-10% of the population. Serious and well-researched studies show that real inflation is running at 6% annually, while the “official” rate is 1.8%, or thereabout. Who cares? The stock market is at an all-time high – except all the Trump cheerleaders don’t seem to understand that the stock market is so high and the Fed can still push T-bills because there’s no other place to get any return on savings… and, again, those capital gains and dividends [now approaching an all-time low, by the way] aren’t generally going to Trump supporters, who are lucky to get 1-2% on their savings accounts, if they even have enough money to save.

Is Mitt Romney the closest we can come to a Brutus? Well, the original Brutus ended up committing suicide after Antony and Octavian defeated him in battle. While I don’t expect Mitt Romney to do that, he’s definitely committed political suicide, particularly with the Republicans.

What’s overlooked in comparing the United States republic to the Roman Republic is that the root cause of the disaster that destroyed the Roman Republic and threatens ours wasn’t a bullying strongman like Caesar or Trump, but the underlying corruption of the Senate… and just like Brutus’s assassination of Caesar, which simply resulted in one strongman replacing another, the figurative or literal assassination of Trump, or even his defeat in the next election [which is appearing highly unlikely] will not address the underlying problems of corruption, especially a Senate that’s up for sale to the highest bidder.

One of the “interesting” aspects of the Trump presidency is the amount of misstatements, false statements, and contradictory statements that issue from the man’s mouth and tweets. One of the more intriguing aspects of this is the polarized reaction of Americans. From what I’ve observed, the President’s supporters either endorse those statements, in many cases finding them true, or admit that many aren’t… and that they don’t care. His opponents reject pretty much anything he says either unheard or with outrage.

Obviously, people have very different ideas about “truth.” I did some research and discovered that philosophers have about as many definitions of truth as there are philosophers, and that there are quite a number of theories that attempt to define truth… or not.

I was clearly misguided; I thought the degree of truth of a statement rested on how close it came to objective verified facts.

In a way Immanuel Kant addresses this, by saying that truth “consists in the agreement of cognition with its object,” which I’d interpret as meaning that if what I see seems to agree with what the object is and does, that is truth. But that means truth is defined by my belief, not necessarily by factual objectivity.

Some philosophers at least deal with the possibility of objectivity.

According to Søren Kierkegaard, at least as I understand what he wrote, there are two kinds of “truth” – objective and subjective. Objective truths are based on facts, while subjective truths are concerned with a person’s way of being and what they believe.

These days, however, especially in the United States, there’s little distinction between these two kinds of truth, which isn’t totally surprising in a nation that all too often equates popularity with excellence and where many believe in promoting self-esteem based on words alone, and not upon achievement.

Martin Heidegger pointed out that the essence of truth in ancient Greece was lack of concealment or bringing into the open that which was previously hidden. That’s definitely not the sort of truth favored by politicians.

And then there’s Friedrich Nietzsche, who essentially rejected any objectivity in truth and claimed that the arbitrariness of human nature meant that humans defined truth as an assemblage of fixed conventions for the practical purposes of repose, security, and consistency… and possibly of gaining power, although I didn’t find that spelled out directly. But it seems to me that Trump could just claim that he was following Nietzsche.

Personally, I tend to favor Alfred North Whitehead’s observation that “There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.”

And Trump is exceedingly good at treating partial truths, or even tiny shreds of truth, as whole truths that his supporters swallow whole… or, as the old saying goes, “hook, line, and sinker.”

When I submitted my first stories to F&SF magazines in the dark ages before computers, or even word processors, manuscripts had to be typed, double-spaced, and be largely error-free. Back then, I was a decent typist, but not a great one, and even with Wite-Out [a liquid paper correcting fluid], I had to retype more pages than I ever wanted to count. But that need not to make mistakes made me much more careful.

Even so, with a typewriter I was much more fortunate than the novelists of the late eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth, who had to handwrite their manuscripts – and to do so in clear enough penmanship so that their words could be understood by the editor and the typesetter. The limits of technology required people to be much more painstaking, because the costs and the time required for redoing were much higher.

This example applies to all technology. I’ve run across clerks who can’t see at a glance that what they punched into the computerized terminal came out wrong, because no one “needs” to know addition, subtraction, and multiplication tables – or numerical estimation. Several years ago, when my publisher went to a new system, it took over two took years to get certain royalty statements unscrambled, even though I spelled out what was wrong and how to fix it out in detail within days of discovering the errors.

When my publisher went to convert older novels into ebooks, they used optical scanners and were sloppy about the proofreading. I still get emails complaining about the typos in those conversions… and some of those messages are anything but complimentary.

The university where my wife the professor teaches shortened the semester by two weeks. It was all programmed out – except that no one clearly looked into the implications because there’s no time in the schedule to conduct juries [applied musical skill performance tests]. Nor are there any performance spaces available. At present, the powers that be haven’t come up with a solution, but when they do I can guarantee that it will cause a fair amount of disruption… and likely take more time and effort than doing it right in the first place would have.

As I’ve said before, technology doesn’t automatically make anything better. What it does do is multiply what people do. If they’re good and conscientious, it allows them to do more good work. If they’re careless and sloppy… well, it multiplies the sloppiness as well… often to the point that even technology can’t easily remedy the mess… which is something that all too many technophiles want to ignore or overlook.

In our increasingly complex and technological world, politicians, executives, and voters are confronted more and more with problems that have multiple causes and complicated interactions. Most of these problems didn’t just occur overnight, nor will solutions be quick or simple.

Unfortunately, because of that reality, a great majority of people, including all too many Americans, are grasping for quick, simple “magic answers” and embracing simplistic slogans.

Build a wall! Deport ‘em! Tax the Wealthy! Free College for Everyone! Medicare for Everyone! Black Lives Matter! All Lives Matter! The Three Steps to Success! Three Strikes and You’re Out! Freedom Dividend! Pro-Life! Pro-Choice!

And those are just the some of the “magic answers” flying around, largely courtesy of the internet, and the politicians, charlatans, and unrealistic idealists who employ it to get their messages across, a welter of simplistic slogans purveying everything from impractical idealism, commercial hucksterism, political bullshit, pure deception, to malevolent hatred.

The problem is compounded by three factors. First, there’s no effective way to remove inaccuracies, untruths, and patently false assertions and claims, and, even if there were, such a mechanism would soon be abused. Second, there’s no cost to those who purvey them. Third, too many people believe things that are not in fact so because, with the huge access to information, a smaller and smaller percentage of people actually are capable of analyzing that information, and the human “default” is to judge by feelings.

But when the medium is the message and can influence feelings, feelings become less and less accurate in making judgements, particularly when they become overwhelmed by the complexity of modern problems.

That’s when people fall back on magic answers… but magic answers don’t solve problems. What they do accomplish, however, is to empower the demagogues, politicians, and dictators most adept at employing such simplistic slogans.

The simpler and more appealing the slogan, the more likely it’s either totally unworkable or impractical, if not both… or outright wrong… yet very few people seem to understand that… or want to.