The other day I came across an old review [August 2012] of my novel Flash, in which the reviewer wrote:

“Jonat finds himself on the wrong end of an enormous corporate conspiracy. This is the point where most protagonists would find some way to expose the malfeasance and cleverly put their enemies into a position of harmlessness. Jonat, on the other hand, embarks on a bizarre rampage of assassination and murder when confronted…”

In reading this review, I realized that in 2012 many Americans had, and some still do, the naïve assumption that merely exposing corporate or government wrong-doing is sufficient to right the situation. In the past, this may have been at least partly true. Given what’s occurred in the last four years, it’s clear [at least to me] that this is no longer a valid assumption. And given that Flash takes place more than a hundred years in the future, I’d submit that my assumption – that mere “exposure” wasn’t going to solve the problems Jonat faces – is far more accurate than the reviewer’s opinion.

I don’t cite this as an “I told you so” theme, but as a reminder that both authors and reviewers often carry unconscious assumptions about how society operates and project those assumptions into the future, without considering how technological change, either forward or backward, and social change may change basic personal assumptions about society.

Too often, reviewers make that mistake, even when an author, as I believe I did, depicts a society with different social and cultural mores, and, in this case, where mere “exposure” is meaningless, because no one knows whether that “exposure” is accurate or fabricated… as seems to be the case more and more today… a mere eight years after the review I cited… and not one hundred.

Writers work hard to depict future societies, or fantasy worlds, and the impact technology or magic can have on society, but it’s also a good idea to show how those changes impact individual behavior and personal assumptions, to predict all of the future, if you will, but that can be a challenge when the changes an author projects go against current deeply-held and almost unconscious assumptions of readers… and even reviewers.

For most people in the world, “freedom” is very limited, if not a total illusion, at least if they don’t want to pay an inordinate price.

Take “freedom of speech.” Even in the supposedly liberal or protected sphere of higher education, it doesn’t exist in all too many institutions. I personally know of three tenured faculty members who no longer have academic jobs because they spoke out against a university president. It turns out that revealing unflattering “confidential” information, especially if reveals administration acts against university rules and policy, is apparently cause for dismissal. In another case, a university brought assault charges against a professor because he fought an unfair dismissal, even after all the review boards exonerated him, most likely because he’d earlier protested university policies. The court dismissed the assault charge as totally unfounded. But he still doesn’t have his job back, after more than three years, because this public university keeps dragging out the matter legally.

Then there was the tenured choral director at prestigious private university. He upset people so much that the university abolished the entire choral program to order to fire him, because he hadn’t done anything remotely wrong, except for what he said – and then reinstated the program several years later. Or the dean of a university library who was removed from his position because he told the university provost that the library couldn’t provide all the services demanded without more resources and people… something about the fact that longer hours require more staff or overtime.

Or the recent revelations about Placido Domingo, who made unwanted advances toward young female singers for decades… and because of his power, those women, if they wanted a career, couldn’t say anything and had to avoid him as best they could and endure it when they couldn’t.

It’s been revealed that some of the hedge fund and banking middle managers who protested against overleveraged, securitized bad loans were told either to approve them or leave. And if they left, who was going to hire them?

Now, I’d be the first to admit that not all universities or opera companies or businesses are that restrictive, but I’d wager that most are, if only in places. I also could come up with more examples, as I suspect almost anyone who’s spent time in academia, professions, government, or business could as well.

Outside of the professional fields, it can be even worse, as recently documented work practices at Amazon have shown. Yes, you can quit, but that assumes there are other jobs… and that someone will hire you.

What’s even more insidious is that it’s often more dangerous for one’s career to speak out the higher up you are… and correspondingly more difficult to find another comparable position once one is past the age of fifty, especially for women. And yet, as the new saying goes, this is a “first world problem,” and sadly doesn’t even compare to the lack of freedoms people face in developing or underdeveloped nations.

Or, as Janis Joplin sang in Me and Bobby McGee, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose…”

The other day I read an interview with yet another hot new [comparatively, at least] writer, in which the writer made a comment about being “frustrated with the way fantasy worlds have this stasis… a medieval stasis for ten thousand years.” Then the writer’s subsequent comment dealt with that writer’s latest work that included inventors and social change, which, while not groundbreaking, were new to the writer.

Needless to say, my first instinct was to seek out and strangle the younger [and well-selling] hot writer, given that for thirty years I’ve been writing best-selling fantasy with settings that have been anything but static, and which include technology well beyond the medieval, multiple government systems, and diverse cultures.

My second thought was to do a little research. Even a brief stint of researching suggested that, while there was a period lasting into the mid-1990s where there were some number of medieval-stasis-type cultures in fantasy, it seemed to me that fantasy writers, for the most part, tended to focus on periods in specific historical eras and riff off them, sometimes medieval, sometime Byzantine, sometimes Renaissance, sometimes Regency, as well as, in more recent years, riffs on non-European history and cultures, etc., and that very few of those writers created endless static societies(although there has been a notable and excellent recent SF novel about an apparently endless and static empire).

Very few writers (and I will claim to be one of them) create their worlds from whole(r) cloth. I use the qualifier “wholer” because what we know comes from our own background, education, and experience, and there’s likely no way to create a new world from totally “whole” cloth, so to speak, but I do know of other writers who do the same, and none of those worlds are “medieval” or “static.”

Yet this hot writer is either dismissive or unaware of a fair number of books already out there which have already accomplished what this writer has so recently completed. I have not met this writer, but my first impression is less than auspicious.

For those of you aspiring to be the next new hot writer, I suggest that a bit more humility and little more knowledge of the field would be most useful. But then, I’m just a curmudgeonly old writer who broke in using that obsolete word-setter called a typewriter and who has the equally old fashioned idea that it’s helpful to know the past of one’s field and what other writers have done and are doing.

Senator Cory Booker has just dropped out of the Democratic Presidential campaign, following the departure of Julian Castro and Camilla Harris. Except for Andrew Yang, the remaining men and women are all white.

According to various polls, none of the black candidates succeeded in gaining more than a few percent of the support of Democratic voters, despite the fact that there are more than forty million Americans classified as black. Even with nearly sixty million Latinos in the United States, Julian Castro couldn’t raise enough funds and support to stay in the race.

In short, with over a third of the U.S. population comprised of minorities, not a single minority candidate garnered more than a few percent of Democratic voters, even though over 80% of black voters have historically voted Democrat. Although less than ten percent of black voters have voted for Republican presidential candidates in the past, and the higher levels of the Republican Party effectively remain a white male preserve of privilege, polls show that Trump has higher levels of black support than any previous Republican candidate.

Since 1980, a higher percentage and a greater number of U.S. women than men have voted in every election, and in 2016, ten million more women than men voted, and that likely accounted for the all-time high in female U.S. Representatives and Senators in Congress, but women still only account for roughly a quarter of the Senate and of the House of Representatives.

As I have noted before, gerrymandering certainly accounts for the diversity discrepancy in national offices, but I have trouble understanding it being the cause of the diversity discrepancy in Democratic Party politics. Poll after poll shows that roughly half of black Democrat voters favor Joe Biden, and more black Democrats favor Bernie Sanders than any of the black candidates. If Bernie and Joe aren’t old white males, no one is.

All of this suggests to me, old white male that I am, that diversity isn’t what black Democrats, or indeed the vast majority of Democrats, are looking for, and the fact that Biden, the most “centrist” of the remaining candidates, has the greatest support among black voters also suggests that an ultra-liberal Democrat nominee, particularly a female ultra-liberal, may well spell disaster for the Democratic Party in the Presidential election.

In the latest issue of Science, there’s an article about Trikafta (elexacaftor/ivacaftor/ tezacaftor), the first triple combination therapy available to treat patients with the most common cystic fibrosis mutation, which was approved by the FDA this past October.

In the U.S. alone, there are more than 30,000 people with cystic fibrosis, an inherited condition characterized by the buildup of thick, sticky mucus that results in progressive damage to the respiratory system and chronic digestive system problems, and that can have other complications as well. A generation ago, children with CF seldom lived to adulthood, and even today CF sufferers seldom live to age forty. Currently, there are more than 30,000 people in the U.S. with the disease.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have a personal interest in cystic fibrosis, because almost forty years ago one of my daughters was given a preliminary diagnosis of CF, which was indeed terrifying. Fortunately, additional tests determined that she didn’t have CF, but a combination of other factors mimicking it, which were treatable, and she recovered without lasting ill-effects. But that experience definitely made me aware of the devastating effects of cystic fibrosis.

So, the development of Trikafta struck me as a godsend for cystic fibrosis sufferers… until I saw the price tag, $311,000 a year [the “list” price], every year. That’s what it will cost to provide CF sufferers with the chance to live a close to normal and productive life.

Since Trikafta is designed to deal with the most common form of cystic fibrosis, it won’t work for all CF sufferers, but even if it only works for 60%, the annual cost to those people, or their insurors, would total nearly $6 billion.

Needless to say, some medical insurance companies have already turned down patients.

Somehow, I doubt that developing Trikafta cost anywhere near $6 billion, and it strikes me that, at least from everything I’ve seen published (and I hope I’m wrong), this is just another form of medical extortion.

There are many “double standards,” and I’ve written about some of them, many involving gender, such as the fact that the behavior that men – and even some women – describe as tough and strong when performed by a man is regarded as “bitchy” and controlling when a woman’s the one who does it. Blunt and honest comments by a child are charming candor, but unacceptable when uttered by adults, particularly subordinate adults. When crooks kidnap someone and demand a huge ransom for that life, it’s criminal extortion, sometimes punishable by death, but when pharmaceutical companies essentially do the same thing, it’s justified as “the cost of doing business.”

In an oldish movie – The Big Chill – when one character rationalizes a decision he made, another calls him on it, and the first character objects, to which the second character replies with words to the effect that, “Have you ever been able to get through a day without a rationalization? Have any of us?”

We all rationalize, some far more than others, and, like it or not, most people throw in a few lies along the way, lies like “it won’t make any difference” or “who really will know?” All that’s human nature.

At the same time, none of us like being lied to… but we also want to hear what we want to hear, and we tune out, or disagree with people who tell us what we don’t want to hear.

Politicians are people, too. In this country, we elect them, and we don’t want to elect people who don’t think the way we do. But one of the problems with human nature is that we feel more strongly about negatives. So… if a politician disagrees with us on a few issues, even if we agree with him or her on most issues, we tend to oppose that politician. And there are scores of issues about which some groups feel strongly, which means that no politician can please anyone on everything, and negatives impact voters much more than positives.

Politicians know this. That’s why they waffle on hot-button issues, or try to word their stance in ways that don’t rile people.

Then people really get upset. “He [or she] led us on… lied to us…”

Voters don’t want honesty; they want agreement… on everything they think is important.

But there’s never enough money for everything everyone wants, and no way to satisfy a majority on all the issues people feel strongly about. But politicians want to keep their jobs. So what do they do? They behave exactly the way their constituents do; they rationalize, with occasional lies.

Under those circumstances, exactly what else should we expect? Except we expect the politicians we elect because we identify with them to be so much better than we are, and we get angry when they aren’t.

A few nights ago my wife and I were at a small dinner party held by a friend. One of the other guests was a retired sales executive, who’d spent most of his working life with a reputable and well-known company. Somehow, the talk drifted from small town politics to the national scene, and I made the mistake – and it is a mistake in the state in which I live – of disparaging the probity of the present occupant of the White House, and noting that he’d set an all-time record for falsehoods. My second mistake was to assume that someone who had spent his entire professional life counting numbers and basing his decisions on them would show equal rationality with political numbers.

His immediate response was. “He’s no different from the others. What about ‘I never had sex with an intern?’ or “You can keep your own doctor?’ They’re all liars.”

No… they’re not. As I’ve said here before, based on my personal experience of eighteen years in various staff capacities in national politics – all as a card-carrying Republican – while there are a significant number of politicians who waffle, who bend the truth, or who employ accurate facts in an inaccurate context, the number who deal in bald-faced and blatant falsehoods is comparatively few, and almost none of those come close to Trump in the extent and blatant untruthfulness of prevarication.

Both Clinton and Obama – who are so often cited as lying Democrats by rationalizing Republicans, have essentially each been attacked for one “lie.” Clinton’s lie was about a semi-consensual sex act, which, while it revealed his sexual amorality, was essentially irrelevant to his performance in office… and, frankly, was little different from a whole line of previous Presidents, a number of who have been called “great.” And, as for Obama’s ‘keeping your own doctor” remark, that statement was what Obama thought the act would do, and, in fact, the majority of people did get to keep their own doctor. Obama’s biggest problem was his inability to understand that almost no executives in big medicine, big medical insurance, or big pharma have anything even faintly resembling integrity… or care for anything except bigger profits.

Just like that former executive, who rejected what I pointed out, Trump’s base and most remaining Republicans have little or no interest in evaluating events in context. One or two “lies” by a Democrat that they don’t like is the same as thousands by Trump. Trump’s falsehoods are indeed in the thousands, and they also involve dubious, if not illegal, acts affecting government, the integrity of our elections, and trying to keep his “people” from being held accountable.

While there may be lies, damned lies, and statistics… there are great differences in lies, and calling them all equal is the coward’s way.

Unless Donald Trump actually shoots someone, or does something equally stupid or horrible, the Senate won’t even come close to convicting him on the articles passed by the House of Representatives. The reason most analysts give for this conclusion is the polarization and tribalization of American politics.

At the same time, I don’t see anyone going into the basic reason behind the polarization of government. There are plenty of commentaries and articles offering reasons why the electorate is polarized, but in our history there have been many times where there’s been significant civic polarization, but only one other time, at least as I see it, where the legislative branch has been so polarized.

And the reason for those two instances is the triumph of short-term greed over ideals and long-term economics.

Most people don’t quite understand the basics behind the Civil War. That conflict is often presented in a form of good versus evil. Sometimes, it’s presented as a struggle between two different economic systems. In fact, it really wasn’t either. It was a struggle between two different visions of capitalism. The economic elites of both North and South were capitalists, but their forms of capitalism differed. The North invested much of its capital in equipment, and paid near-starvation wages to those who worked in the factories. The South’s “capital” was largely invested in slaves; they were the equivalent of machines, and they were also often poorly fed.

Because the South’s “capital” was largely in slaves, and in land worked by those slaves, any form of abolition would have immediately bankrupted or at least severely impoverished most Southern landholders… which was largely what later occurred as a result of the Union victory. Yet the southern elite could see no way out of the problem, simply because so much wealth was in the slaves they held. That meant that Southern politicians could not compromise, not when any compromise would have meant economic disaster in the Old South. Those politicians felt they could not make hard choices, and they refused to look to the North or to the rest of the world, where most industrialized nations were outlawing slavery and the slave trade.

The result of failing to make hard choices in the years leading up to the Civil War led to an even greater disaster in the long run, just as today’s failure to deal with economic and environmental problems will make the eventual reckoning even more costly and disastrous.

We face a situation similar to the 1840s and 1850s today, if in a more fragmented way. For example, coal is viewed as cheap energy, just as slaves were cheap labor. But what those whose economic well-being has been based on cheap coal don’t want to see is that coal is anything but cheap if all its costs are considered. Over 80,000 miners are known to have died from black lung. The costs of black lung disability benefits now exceed $100 billion. According to a report published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences back in 2011, the external costs of coal-fired power are twice the direct costs. In other words, it costs twice as much to deal with health, waste, and environmental costs of a coal-fired power plant as it does to generate the power.

There have been more than a few documentaries on Amazon’s brutal workplace practices, which are the 21st century equivalent of the wage-slaves of early industrialization. At the same time, the real wages of the majority of Americans are declining. Life expectancy of certain economic and age-groups has actually declined in the last decade, for the first time in a century.

But the Legislative Branch of our government is polarized, and in considering some issues, paralyzed, largely because any realistic solutions are seen as politically unacceptable. The right wing feels the industries supporting its senators and representatives cannot or will not change because the costs are too high. The left wing won’t compromise from idealistic standards that cannot possibly be funded [regardless of what Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders claim]. Members of either side refuse to make the hard choices because they fear that, if they do, they won’t be re-elected… and re-election is far more important than the future of the country… or the planet.

So no one will make hard choices… and, if they don’t…

Earlier this week when I sent the manuscript of Isolate to my editor, we encountered a number of technical glitches because various “improvements” in Word created difficulties we’ve never encountered before.

This isn’t a new problem for me; it’s a recurring one. Even though I’m using Word 2010 on my writing computer because it had features that don’t work on later versions, the “updates” often limit or cripple those functions. For example, in Word 2010, I used to be able to do a global word search for a particular word in all the files in a given directory. Now, that’s become spotty and unreliable, and it’s impossible [at least I haven’t found any way to do that] on later versions of Word. This is particularly useful function for me, and losing it for all the “improvements” that I don’t use is irritating. Likewise, the three-keystroke speed keys that shift me out of what I’m working on because I made a typo [and sometimes lose some of what I’ve just written] are also annoying. And my editor has other problems that she never has had before in terms of compiling what authors send her.

This so-called improvement isn’t limited to Word or Microsoft; it seems to be everywhere. I don’t do MP3 music downloads, but I discovered that, in the interests of getting a lot of music into MP3 format, something like 90% of the actual music/”tone” is eliminated in order to obtain the necessary file compression…and the majority of listeners apparently don’t notice or don’t care.

My wife the music professor has discovered that, with every new version of certain technical vocal pedagogy software programs, the newer versions are both simplified [leaving out important technical details] AND also more expensive… and that the older and better software doesn’t work on newer operating systems.

How many of these “improvements” are just so the manufacturers can force upgrades to yet more glitch-ridden software and systems that provide “features” that only a minuscule number of users will ever utilize while compromising and eliminating more utilitarian features employed by a far wider range of users?

I’d be among the first to admit that the U.S. higher education system is flaw-ridden and too expensive. The cost of higher education is, in a practical sense, financially impossible for more than eighty percent of the population, at least without either financial aid or going heavily into debt, but making it “free” to all U.S. high school graduates won’t improve the situation. In fact, it’s likely to make it worse.

No one wants to look realistically at the situation. Today, every year, roughly twice as many students graduate from college as there are jobs requiring a college education. In addition, the real wages of the bottom 60% of those graduates are declining and have been for a decade. Third, twenty-five percent of all Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 cannot pass the basic reading literacy test required by the U.S. armed forces, and unhappily that includes a percentage of college students.

At the same time, there are literally millions of jobs going unfilled in the United States because job-seekers lack the skills to perform those jobs. Part of this is simply because, more and more, businesses don’t want to train new employees because the training time is unprofitable and lower level skilled employees tend to change jobs quickly, and colleges don’t want to get into what they consider “vocational” training… and they’re not staffed or equipped to do so.

All too many college bachelor degrees have become test-passing “credentials” and little more. The ranks of public university faculties are increasingly filled with adjunct teachers, the vast majority of whom are underpaid and overworked, often working part-time at two or more colleges or universities to cobble together enough income to barely make ends meet. Yet universities, especially state universities, are hiring fewer and fewer full-time faculty, and even those faculty members are burdened with all sorts of non-teaching requirements.

The result of these and other factors is that the majority of graduates of public universities, except for a few handfuls of elite public universities, are at a distinct disadvantage in the quality of the education they receive. Oh, there are still outstanding professors in every state university, but they’re far and few between, and all too many of them are leaving teaching, either through retirement or dissatisfaction. That means that the graduates of elite private universities and the few handfuls of elite first tier public universities have a tremendous advantage in getting jobs or into the best graduate schools.

Pumping billions of dollars into “free tuition” isn’t going to solve any of those problems, and it also ignores the fact that living expenses for college students are anything but insignificant.

In short, the well-educated and well-off are going to continue to prosper, while the poorer students… and the taxpayers… suffer.

This past weekend, I watched a conservative legal scholar [who supported the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court] list the legal reasons why Trump should be impeached and convicted. At present, more than five hundred legal scholars from all across the nation have also signed documents in support of impeachment on detailed legal grounds.

So why does something like at least 40% of the American population oppose impeachment when there’s a considerable legal consensus that the President’s acts and behavior meet the legal tests of impeachment.

Many of those people, including the President, claim that the Democrats are trying to “undo” the election and take power. That’s not only untrue, but nonsense. Even if Trump were to be impeached, his successor is Vice President Pence, who is a right-wing, evangelical Christian far more conservative than Trump. Making him President will actually make things worse and harder for the Democrats and liberals.

No… I’d submit that the reason many people don’t want Trump impeached is because at heart they don’t believe in either actual government by the people or the rule of law.

They want what they want and think Trump will either give it to them or keep the Democrats from enforcing the laws. They believe, despite the progress we’ve made in cleaning up the environment over the past forty years, that environmental laws don’t do that much good and hurt them. They would rather have tens of millions of people breathing air that literally kills them over time so that these non-believers in law and science can make more money or get paid in industries that destroy the environment and the health of the poorest of Americans.

They believe that equal rights for all people under all circumstances go too far. And if you think that’s far-fetched, just consider what happened in the South after Reconstruction was abandoned – the rights granted to former slaves by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment were essentially abrogated by the southern states for a century. And in terms of redlining and financial discrimination, the North wasn’t that much better.

We’re still seeing police discrimination against minorities, despite laws that require equality. All Americans are either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, but the majority of Trump Republicans want to cut off the opportunities that our ancestors had, and the Trump administration is accommodating them, often violating the law in doing so.

Trump’s even said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. And if that’s not disrespect for the law, I don’t know what is… well, except for saying that the President is above the law, which is exactly the way in which Trump has behaved.

We’re supposed to be a nation of laws. That was what was supposed to make us better. But Trump and his supporters are claiming that the laws don’t apply to them.

And what happens if everyone decides to follow that example? Is political tribalism important enough to tear the country apart? We’re still paying for the last time a chunk of the union decided that economic gain outweighed rights, rights for everyone, not just rights for white males.

Back in the middle of the previous century [and writing that makes me feel even older than I am] my parents were firm, possibly tyrannical if compared to the relaxed (and sometimes non-existent) parenting of families today. Television viewing [the only screen time then available] was essentially non-existent, and, outside of school hours, time spent on homework or athletics, and family events, during daylight hours and even twilight we were to be outside. By the time we were teenagers, the rules were somewhat modified to allow one other exemption from the “outside” requirement – work, either unpaid or paid.

Today, I seldom see children outside, even on weekends, and we live in an area that gets neither excessive heat nor cold. We had a foot of snow this past weekend, and the only one in the entire neighborhood who was sledding was our visiting granddaughter. I didn’t even see sled tracks or snowmen. I know there are children here. I see them every school day at the school bus stops, but playing outside? Almost never.

The new “indoor” life isn’t good for children, especially for their vision. A recent study showed that by junior high school, today 40% of U.S. children are near-sighted and need corrective lenses, up from 20% fifty years ago. That’s a doubling of nearsightedness in two generations. This isn’t a world-wide trend. It’s a U.S. trend.

According to 2017 Pentagon data, 71% of Americans in the 17-24 age group are not qualified to join the military primarily because of one of three reasons: (1) poor health [mainly obesity]; (2) lack of physical fitness; (3) lack of reading skills.

Kids don’t play outside as much anymore, and according to the researchers behind the study, that lack of outdoor activity, combined with excessive screen time, is the major cause of the increase in near-sightedness.

Certainly, one reason why many parents don’t let their children play outside is fear, fear of violence, kidnapping, and other mayhem, but the U.S. is actually far safer now for children[except possibly in inner city areas] than it was in the middle of the last century.

No matter what anyone claims, most screen time doesn’t teach reading and comprehension skills, and it reduces physical fitness… and excessive screen time certainly degrades vision.

All of which are a major reason why today’s children are looking at shorter and unhealthier lives.

The way the impeachment hearings are going, it appears likely that the House of Representatives will impeach Trump on a largely party-line vote, and the Senate will refuse to convict him of the charges, and 35-40% of the electorate will declare their boy vindicated. As Trump himself declared years ago, he could kill someone and get away with it, and his supporters are so angry with the “elite establishment” that they will excuse any and all abuses of power on his part.

Trump’s latest abuse, however, is another, and different, example of the unraveling of law, order, and the structure of government. Navy Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher was acquitted of murder in the stabbing death of an Islamic State militant captive but convicted of posing with the corpse while in Iraq. As a result of the court martial, Gallagher was demoted from chief petty officer to a first class petty officer. Trump unilaterally overruled the judicial proceeding and restored Gallagher’s rank this month.

Gallagher also faced a Naval SEAL review board to determine whether he should remain in the elite force. Trump then tweeted that he would not allow the Navy to strip Gallagher of his SEAL status. In response, the Secretary of the Navy declared that a tweet was not an order. Abruptly, the Secretary of Defense requested the resignation of the Navy Secretary and stated that Gallagher would be allowed to retire almost immediately as a chief petty officer and as a SEAL, exactly what Trump wanted.

Speaking as a former Naval officer, I’m quite confident that Gallagher was guilty as charged, and quite possibly in fact did some of what he was charged with and acquitted of. Senior military officers are incredibly reluctant to bring charges against service members, especially members of elite units, unless the evidence is overwhelmingly convincing.

But not only did Trump interfere in the Gallagher case, but he also pardoned Army First Lieutenant Clint Lorance, convicted of second degree murder in the death of three Afghans and Army Major Mathew Golsteyn, who faced murder charges for a similar crime.

Former Marine Corps Commandant, retired General Charles Krulak, stated that Trump’s actions amounted to circumventing the military legal system and that the president’s intervention “relinquishes the United States’ moral high ground. Disregard for the law undermines our national security by reducing combat effectiveness, increasing the risks to our troops, hindering cooperation with allies, alienating populations whose support the United States needs in the struggle against terrorism, and providing a propaganda tool for extremists who wish to do us harm.” [Military Times, 11/21/2019]

Trump’s interference in the military justice system for a political end is just another example of how Trump will trash anything, including the law, that interferes with his desires and political ambitions. Interfering in the workings of the law, whether military or civilian, is definitely a high crime, but I doubt that Republicans will see it that way, although I am certain that, had Barrack Obama done something like that, he would have been impeached in a Republican minute.

What ever happened to that Republican emphasis on law and order? Or does it only apply to women and minorities?

What almost no political figure will say publicly is something that should be as self-evident as the “inalienable rights” so beloved by the Founding Fathers: Not all freedoms are the same.

There are, in theory, two general categories of freedoms. The first category holds those freedoms or rights whose expression physically and economically harms no others, provided one doesn’t carry them to extremes. The second category includes those rights whose exercise can and often does harm others.

The problem is that, as with anything, human beings are good at carrying things to extremes.

Your belief and worship of a different god, or no god, harms no one [if you use belief to justify harm to others, it’s a different story]. What gender or sexual or non-sexual self-identity you express harms no one. What clothes you wear harms no one [provided those clothes are not designed to physically harm others]. What opinions you express harm no one [but using those opinions to put others out of business, incite riots, or public uprisings goes beyond the freedom of speech and self-expression].

Your freedom to fire a gun can in fact harm others. So can dumping sewage into the stream that runs through your property. Your freedom to smoke in enclosed spaces definitely harms others. Your right to drive or fly aircraft or use heavy equipment is limited because you can definitely harm or kill others.

In more lands than not throughout history, freedom of religion or freedom from religion did not exist. All too often, there was, in effect, a mandate of what religion was or was not allowed. More than a few countries, until recently, effectively had sumptuary customs or laws that limited who could wear what garb. And censorship in some form exists in all too many lands.

Part of the freedom problem is, as noted above, that all too many human beings carry their freedoms to extremes. They not only want to worship as they please, but also want to force others to worship in the same way, “for their own good,” as well as to enshrine their religious values in law. They tell lies and partial truths for their own benefit, claiming that they should be able to do so because they have freedom of speech. Men have historically generally claimed that their rights superseded those of women, and that women did not have the right to sexual and reproductive freedom – and men used, and often still do, the law to restrict that freedom, while effectively granting themselves rights women did and do not have.

The other part of the freedom problem is that to function societies need sets of rules that people will abide by, because without accepted laws, societies disintegrate into anarchy. Those in power in society always structure those laws in a way that reflects their beliefs, usually maximizes their freedoms, and restricts the freedoms of others – even those freedoms that seldom harm others.

Representative governments were designed to come up with laws acceptable to all, but that structure is fraying across the world as people use technology to associate with just those who share the same values. The more they do so, the more each group rejects the others, and demonizes not only “the other,” but also the diminishing number of moderates, and the more they struggle to impose their values on others.

And that may well be how our vaunted technology destroys us… and our freedoms.

Why is he keeping everyone he can from testifying? Why is he threatening and denigrating lifetime federal employees and decorated military officers with impeccable and honorable records? Why is he trying to keep his tax records out of the hands of public prosecutors?

The Republicans are trying to claim that Democrats don’t have testimony from enough people with “first-hand” contact with Trump, but at the same time, Trump is doing everything possible to keep as many of those individuals as possible from testifying before Congress.

What’s occurring on the Republican side doesn’t look like honorable individuals trying to get the truth out. It looks like a Mafia gangster using every stratagem possible in the law book, and some that are anything but legal [threatening witnesses, directly or indirectly, is a crime], to keep the truth from coming out.

Supposedly, if one is innocent, truth is the best defense, yet while Trump complains and calls the impeachment hearings a hoax and claims he’s innocent, he’s doing everything possible to keep whatever happened from coming out or being investigated.

What amazes me is how many people, particularly his supporters, don’t see this, and don’t want to. Their attitude is similar to an old sculpture my grandmother had with three monkeys in a row. Under the monkeys was the inscription: Hear No Evil; See No Evil; Speak No Evil. The first monkey has his hands over his eyes; the second over his eyes, the third over his mouth.

And, in a perverse way, that seems to fit Trump and the Republicans at this point. They don’t want to hear, see, or speak of Trump’s evil.

In the latest issue of Time, the attorney Robert Ray argues that President Trump should not be impeached and convicted on the grounds that Trump committed no crime. This is already the basis of some Republicans’ defense of Trump. Ray’s argument rests on two bases. First, that the “quid pro quo” offered by various Trump appointees and subordinates was not a “corrupt arrangement” under the law because the law requires a specific benefit and because an investigation of the Bidens by Ukraine would have provided only a “nebulous” benefit. Second, that because the Office of Management and Budget had no authority to permanently withhold the aid appropriated and authorized for Ukraine and because the aid was finally released [after newspaper reports of withholding surfaced] no harm was done. Therefore, there was no crime.

The first contention is an incredibly ingenuous argument, and one that a great number of convicted criminals would like to be able to use. “Because I didn’t know what I might get, it wasn’t a crime.” And law, in fact, recognizes this problem because we have penalties for attempted crimes that were never completed. In addition, even Trump’s attempt to ask for such a favor has damaged the future credibility of the United States as well as pointed out that Trump will do anything for his personal gain, regardless of the impact on the U.S. national interest, and suborning the national interest to personal interest is in fact a form of treason.

The second base ignores the fact that the White House did in fact freeze the aid. The fact that it didn’t have the authority to do so is immaterial to the fact that the freeze was ordered. Also, there’s no basis to assert that no harm was done… or could have been done. Ukraine may well have been able to use that aid against the Russians, for which that aid was intended. Even the slowing of that aid harmed Ukraine and benefited Russia, which, again, is an act against the national interest.

Then Ray goes on to argue that, in any case, it was only a case of bad judgment. In the case of most criminals, it usually is. Trump’s no different, but because he’s a white Republican [for the moment] male, the white male Republican Senate may well use a different [and far more lenient] standard for him.

Think about it.

The other day, my wife, the professor of voice and opera at the local university, took her students to a collegiate state-level voice competition. When she returned, I asked her how it went. She said that it had gone close to what she expected, although she was initially surprised that one of her very best students hadn’t placed. I asked why, and her response was that, as sometimes happens, the judges in that division hadn’t seemed to judge the contestants so much on technique, diction, and musicality as on the size of their voices. For whatever reason, some judges highly reward the size of the voice, the sheer volume and projection, even if it results in impaired diction and a lesser degree of musicality than presented by other singers. In short, some supposed professionals reward volume over everything else.

I got to thinking, but only for a few instants, before it struck me that a certain segment of our electorate reacts in the same way. They like big-voiced and strident politicians, so much so that they ignore facts, context, unpleasant character traits, and outright lying. These people seem to think that volume equates to truth, that shouting makes something true, even when it’s not.

But it doesn’t stop with politicians. It’s why so often television commercials run at louder volume than the programs that they’re interrupting. It’s why men so often talk over and shout down women, especially those with whom they disagree… and why women often have difficulties in getting heard in political debates. It’s why companies place large advertisements in magazines or online.

The fact that so many human beings react favorably to volume, even in the world of classical vocal music, suggests the trait is at least partly hard-wired, at least in Caucasians, but I have to say that this response troubles me, especially at a time when we need to pay more attention to facts and quiet reason and not to loud appeals to emotional prejudice.

Last week was the World Fantasy Convention, which I attended, as I usually do, and I couldn’t help but reflect on book awards. No matter what anyone says, book awards are essentially popularity contests. The award may reflect the popularity of books among a large number of readers, as in the case of Goodreads awards, or the popularity among a small number of judges, as with the Pulitzer Prize, or by some combination, as in the case of the World Fantasy Awards. Now… judges of more prestigious awards may protest mightily, and cite various criteria, but the bottom line is whether they like it… and that’s popularity.

Sometimes a book wins awards, and after all the furor, it vanishes, like Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer. And sometimes a book that’s ignored by every critic and award giver hangs on… and is eventually recognized… like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was seen as mere light reading and critically panned for almost a century.

And sometimes, the controversies aren’t about the books, but the awards.

For the last two years, the Nobel Prize for Literature has also been plagued with scandal. In 2018, a series of sexual assault charges against the author husband of one of the Literature Committee members resulted in such disruption that no prize was awarded in 2018. Then, this year the 2019 Prize was awarded to Peter Handke, an Austrian writer and firebrand “infamous for his Serbian nationalist sympathies.” In 1996 Handke published two essays that blamed the media for presenting Serbs as the “evil” party in the Yugoslav Wars and Muslims “as the usual good guy,” despite the fact that Serb forces killed an estimated 100,000 Croatian civilians and Bosnian Muslims. Handke even spoke at the funeral of Serbia’s President Slobodan Milošević (Nickname: “Butcher of the Balkans”), who had died before his trial for genocide and war crimes was completed.

F&SF has had its own “award” dramas. The World Fantasy Convention had for years presented its annual awards in the form of a bust of H.P. Lovecraft, a noted U.S. fantasy author who died in 1937. With the rise of a more diverse community of fantasy writers who became increasingly vocal about an award depicting a writer known not only for horrifying fantasy, but for stridently racist and xenophobic views, in 2015, the WFC announced it would replace the “Lovecraft” award statuette with another trophy, and in 2017 a “fantasy tree” award was adopted. Now, there’s a controversy about the John W. Campbell Award (for best new writer) given at the World Science Fiction because of Campbell’s anti-Semitic and misogynistic views.

In the meantime, the awards go on, and sometimes great books are often ignored, and sometimes fair but wildly popular books win awards… and, in the end, the fact that a book won an award, or didn’t, is lost, and the book has to stand or fall on its own.

Every so often I get a comment, either from a reviewer or a reader, about how my seemingly “nice” or honest protagonist is either really ruthless or kills too many people… or words to that effect. I understand that such readers want the “ideal” protagonist to accomplish his goals, or even just effect his survival, neatly, and with a minimum of bodies lying around. But real life and realistic fantasy and SF are often messy. Even so, I have to admit that, in some of my SF books, if one looks closely, my protagonists have left body counts that dwarf Game of Thrones. Some have wiped out whole planets, and in one case, essentially sterilized an entire solar system.

Human history has been replete with arguments about ends and means and to what degree the particular means to an end effectively negates the end, including the idea that waging massively lethal wars as a method to ensure subsequent peace never seems to work out that way. And there’s a great appeal to that argument.

The problem in real life and in realistic novels, however, is that each individual and each culture has a different idea about what the “right” way of doing things happens to be, and this makes life difficult for whoever doesn’t fit the mold. Add to this the fact that there are always zealots, who really do believe that they’d rather be dead than change or allow any compromise… and when such zealots have great power, someone who has a different view usually only has three choices: (1) agree/surrender; (2) flee; or (3) fight. Given the mindset of zealots, often agreement is impossible, particularly if the zealot believes, for example, that blue-eyed redheads are the tools of evil and must be exterminated… and you happen to be a blue-eyed redhead. As with the mass migrations we’re seeing now, flight is sometimes possible… at least until the countries to which one can flee close their borders. Which means that, more often than we’d like, the only choice left is to fight.

And if one fights, it’s because one wants to stay alive and hopefully to protect one’s family and community… and in such cases, the individual either breaks a great number of laws and rules or fights, if not both, and whether the individual or protagonist wins or loses, there’s going to be a body count.

After that, should the individual [or character] feel great remorse? My feeling is that some regret is necessary that people were killed, but that great self-flagellation is not required. If the survivor isn’t all that good a person, he or she won’t feel great regret anyway, and if the character or person is otherwise [besides having to kill to survive] a decent being, in most cases, regret is wasted on those who set out to exterminate or conquer others.

Life, of course, is never quite that clear-cut, but when an individual or character or a people is chased and persecuted to the point of death, largely for merely existing, or for being an impediment to the ambitions or beliefs of others. I have to question the need for regret or great hand-wringing over the deaths of the chasers and persecutors.

But then, there’s always the question of why someone is chased or “persecuted” and whether such claims are valid… but that’s another story, perhaps similar to one on the front pages.

The other day I read an editorial/article talking about the good old days of the early 1960s, where the author reminisced about how the middle class family could make it easily on wages of $10 an hour. At that point, I lost all patience, because no one in what I’d call the middle class was making $10 an hour back then.

In 1962, the minimum wage was $1.15/hour, equivalent to roughly $10/hour today, but a $10 an hour wage back then meant an annual income of $20,000 – equivalent to an annual income of $168,000 today. That summer, after my first year of college, I’d managed to get a job as a lifeguard at a commercial pool that paid $1.75 an hour, equivalent to $15.00 an hour in today’s dollars, in order to earn money for the next year of college expenses, and I knew I had a great summer job. I also worked every extra hour I could get, because there were no benefits, and no limits on overtime and no additional pay for overtime. Federal overtime regulations were phased in during the mid-1960s

In 1962, the average factory worker made around $2.50 an hour ($22 in 2019 dollars) or about $5,000 annually, equivalent to $42,000 today, not including any benefits. Auto workers made more, on average somewhere over $3.00 an hour for an annual wage of $6,000 – $51,000 or more in today’s dollars. And they had generous benefits in addition.

By 1965, I was an ensign in the U.S. Navy, married and making about $5,800 a year with quarters and subsistence allowances on top of basic pay. We lived in a rented one bedroom apartment in Chula Vista, California, and had one car. We didn’t go into debt, but we certainly didn’t save anything, nor did we splurge on luxuries, and we certainly didn’t eat out much. Now… today, to get the purchasing power of that $5,800, you’d have to make $46,000, and a great many costs of living have gone up more than the inflation rate. We paid $110 a month in rent, equivalent to $900 now, but the cost of renting a one bedroom apartment in the San Diego area now averages just under $2,000 a month.

The reason why I’m “reminiscing” isn’t because the good old days were good or bad. As is the case now, times were good for some people and not so good for an even larger number. But I also wanted to point out to those who haven’t really thought about it that a dollar doesn’t go near as far as it used to, and my calculations understate that inflation, because the CPI has been tweaked so that it doesn’t reflect the full costs of inflation, particularly in the costs of housing, medicine, and higher education… and too many older people who point out how little they made tend to forget just how much more one of those old-time dollars bought.