Trump has now called the ongoing impeachment process “a lynching.” Despite his self-pity and rhetorical protests, the impeachment process that the House of Representatives has begun is about as far from a lynching as possible.

A lynching takes place when a mob, almost always of white males, decides to hang someone, seldom ever anyone except an African-American male, without any process of law whatsoever.

Impeachment is a process set forth in the Constitution, requiring that the House develop articles of impeachment, which the House presents to the Senate. The Senate must hear that presentation and then vote by a two-thirds majority to vote to convict and remove the president from office. Given that the majority of the Senate is Republican, President Trump is in no danger of being removed from office unless a significant number of senators of his own party agree with the findings of the articles of impeachment. Even if they do, it’s certainly not a lynch mob, but a Constitutional process. Also, if convicted, Trump wouldn’t end up dead, unlike the more than four thousand minority victims lynched in the United States in the U.S. between 1882 and 1968. At worst, he might end up out of office and subject to criminal prosecution.

At the same time, I don’t notice anyone calling the impeachment process Republicans used on President Clinton a lynch mob, and the charges against him were essentially those of private moral turpitude, while the charges against Trump appear to be much more in the category of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” that affect the entire nation, something that Clinton’s supposed crimes had absolutely no impact upon, except to excite moral outrage. And interesting enough, Trump has done far more in the way of moral turpitude than Clinton ever even thought of. But the Republicans don’t want to consider that, either.

But maybe the American people should, and not fall for Trump’s “poor victim” act, especially since Trump seems to think it’s fine for him to be able to attack others, usually with great vituperation, but not for anyone to judge him. “L’ete, c’est Trump!”?

The United States has an election in little more than a year, a long, drawn-out process that’s already been in progress for months and months. There are still more than a dozen Democratic candidates seeking their party’s nomination. Based on what’s happened so far, it’s likely that that that nominee will not be finally determined until the convention, which is in mid-July in Milwaukee next year. At that point, the Democratic nominee will have just a little more than three months to mount a challenge to Donald Trump, and to unite the various interests that comprise a not-exactly-united party.

That’s a significant problem, and then add to that the Trump re-election effort, which is already pumping up his voting base with internet and media-based presentations, along with rallies presided over by the God Trump.

I use that term advisedly, because the Trump re-election campaign is based on the staples of old-time religion – a gospel (in this case, the gospel of Trump) with very little relation to the facts; fear of change (mixed with hatred of anyone who doesn’t share their views); ignorance (willful or conditioned) about who their god is and what his preachers will do in his name; and blind allegiance.

In the last election, even without the effect of Russian internet trolls, the Trump campaign mounted a technically and practically far more effective social media campaign than did the Democrats…and unless matters change dramatically in the next few months, the same will be true in the year ahead.

The key to the success of the Trump campaign is the special tie or glue that binds his followers and supporters together, and that tie is hatred expressed in exaggerated untruths that those followers want to be true and in the demonization of anyone who questions the Great God Trump. Anyone who opposes or questions is evil… and the Trump machine is already pouring out this message, and interestingly enough, Facebook is allowing verifiable lies and blatant untruths to be aired in those ads. In addition, any fact that does not agree with the Gospel of Trump is fake news.

The actual facts are totally ignored. The amount of financial damage that Trump’s trade wars have caused to farmers cannot be undone in less than decades, if ever. The fact that Trump has done nothing for the coal industry [and never could have] is ignored, as two of the nation’s largest coal producers have shut down, and done so without giving miners their last paychecks, while one of their owners was shifting funds into a personally-owned multimillion dollar resort, complete with a replica of the Roman Coliseum (rather ironically applicable for Trump and his supporters). That doesn’t include the betrayal of the Kurds, or the caging of immigrant children, either. Or trying to make deals with foreign leaders to attack Trump’s political rivals, or trying to direct foreign government leaders to his resorts.

None of that matters. All that matters is the Gospel of hate, particularly of the “liberal elites,” personified by distorted and exaggerated statements about “lying Hillary,” by claiming that Democrats are climate extremists who want to take your guns and tax you more, by labelling all immigrants as rapists and thieves who take American jobs (even when Americans won’t do the jobs that immigrants will), and by claiming that the poor are effectively worthless welfare rats who don’t deserve food, education, or healthcare, all of whom Trump blames erroneously for destroying your lives, while asserting that only he, the Great God Trump, can make America great again.

And, all the time that the Democratic candidates are squabbling over details about health plans, about immigration, about education (details that are largely meaningless because no proposed plan gets through Congress, if it even gets that far, without major changes), the Trump hate and fear machine is welding together his constituency while the Democrats are fragmenting theirs, because they’ve forgotten a basic lesson of politics that the Republicans and Trump haven’t.

You can’t do anything unless you first get elected.

Trump called the Mueller investigation a coup. The Trump campaign keeps talking about the Congressional impeachment investigation as a “coup” intended to put liberal Democrats in power.

Those claims are totally false. In the first place, a coup is an attempt to replace a lawful head of government illegally and by force. The impeachment process is an integral part of the U.S. Constitution, and therefore by law and definition cannot be illegal. It’s also a process carried out by law, and not by force. Second, even if Trump were to be impeached and convicted, the Democrats still wouldn’t be in control of the Executive Branch, because the extremely conservative Republican Mike Pence, as Vice President, would succeed Trump, and he could name another conservative as the new Vice President.

So why all the Trump ads and comments about a coup?

Clearly, it’s not about law. It’s not even about Conservatism. It’s about playing on the fears and ignorance of Americans who don’t understand the Constitution and don’t want to. Those who endorse Trump’s slogan of Make America Great Again aren’t interested in the law or the Constitution. What they want is the America of the 1950s, where white men controlled almost everything, where women were clearly secondary, where semi-skilled factory workers made as much as skilled professionals, and sometimes more, and where minorities “knew their place.’

Trump and his appointees are doing their best to tear down the rule of law, to circumvent and ignore legal requirements they don’t like, to use threats and force on foreign governments to get them to attack Trump’s opponents.

So… if anyone is staging a coup, it’s Trump, because he and his crowd are the ones using illegal means to stay in power. And charging the Democrats with trying to stage a “coup” is a brilliant diversion of attention from what Trump and his confederates are actually doing.

Donald Trump has made it more than clear that he believes he’s above the law and accountable to no one.

A ninety year old law says that Congress can look at anyone’s tax returns, but not the Donald’s. All the rest of us have to obey subpoenas to appear or produce documents, but not Donald, or anyone who works for him. The Constitution clearly states that Congress appropriates funds and determines where those funds are spent, but Donald is special, and he can move around funds as he wishes. If someone disagrees with the Donald, even if they’re citing the law, they’re history. If he wants to stiff contractors who worked for him, he gets away with it. He has held rallies in cities across the country, but he still owes them money and hasn’t repaid the cities for the costs his campaign agreed to pay.

If he wants to bribe women to keep them silent about his depravity, he does, and, outside of a bit of adverse publicity, he gets away with it. Despite swearing an oath to support and defend the Constitution, he clearly believes that its limitations don’t apply to him.

So where did all these behaviors come from? From corporate business, of course, because that’s where he’s spent his entire adult life before becoming president. He may be one of the worst examples of a business leader, but all the despicable traits he’s demonstrated are far from unheard in the corporate world. Just how many rich and powerful businessmen have abused women and used money and power to escape justice? How many others are there besides Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, or Roger Ailes? How many others have pulled stunts like Martin Shkreli of Turing Pharmaceuticals, who not only raised the price of the lifesaving drug Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill, but also was convicted of securities fraud and conspiracy in 2017 and sentenced to a seven-year sentence in federal prison. In typical arrogance, Shkreli also claimed that his excessive price fixing will result in the company, of which he owns 40%, being worth $3.7 billion by the time he gets out of prison.

Then there are the Golden Parachute scandals, excessive compensation packages for departing CEOs, payments despite underperformance leading up to CEO departures and certainly not justified given already high levels of executive pay and retirement benefits. As I noted earlier, one of the companies where this occurred was PG&E, whose incompetence and failure to properly install and maintain power lines required massive power shutdowns in California because the equipment and lines were judged not to safe in high winds. Funny thing is, we get winds like that all the time here in Utah, and our power company doesn’t have to create outages.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to rein in not only Trump, but the whole CEO culture of privilege and exceptionalism.

Corporations have a few advantages, and one of those advantages – limited liability – has slowly but inexorably also become the greatest flaw of the corporate culture. This means that shareholders may take part in the profits through dividends and stock appreciation but are not personally liable for the company’s debts… or for any crime or action taken in the interest of the shareholders. Generally, the law has also held that a corporate official cannot be held personally liable for an action taken in the best interests of the corporation.

In practice, that means that if a corporate official decides that a cheaper part is in the corporate interest because it will reduce costs and increase profits, so long as the part is not known to be defective, that official cannot be held personally liable if the part fails and causes multiple deaths. This is what happened in the Ford Pinto gas tank scandal or more recently in the 2009-11 Toyota “sticky” accelerator problems.

Over the years, as I noted in an earlier blog, California’s electric utility, PG&E, engaged in numerous unsafe and unethical practices which led to massive environmental problems and practices as a result of groundwater contamination with chromium six, and affected at least 2,000 residents with carcinogenic effects, effectively resulting in the almost total depopulation of Hinkley California, and costing PG&E over a billion dollars. In 2018, shoddy PG&E practices led to the Camp Fire, which destroyed 18,000 structures and killed 85 people, and required an $11 billion settlement with insurers. Yet in more than 20 years of environmental and technical problems, not a single official or executive has been held personally responsible, and now PG&E has filed for bankruptcy because it fears it cannot pay what it owes in damages. Even if it can, none of those executives will be held responsible, and the shareholders, not the executives, will pay.

Drug companies can raise prices to astronomical levels in the name of profits, effectively depriving uninsured or underinsured or poor patients of live-saving medications, and not even the corporation can be held responsible for the resulting deaths.

Financial firms can take incredible risks and nearly destroy the financial structure of the U.S., if not the world, cost tens of thousands of people their homes, and tens of thousands their jobs, and the government bails them out – and not a single executive was personally held responsible.

Talk about risk free! A poor man shoots someone over a few dollars and spends years, if not his life, in prison, while executives make decisions that kill scores of people, and they get rewarded.

Or am I the only one who thinks this is a bit unbalanced?

In his Gettysburg address, President Lincoln promised that “the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” It’s certainly a great promise about government, but exactly how true is it today?

Well… there’s certainly one aspect of government that tends to get overlooked, and that’s how much government does for corporations and wealthy individuals,from the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to HEW, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. Postal Service.

The USDA offers more than $20 billion annually in farm subsidies of various sorts. Three quarters of the richest farms receive federal farm subsidies, and one quarter of the 400 richest Americans [as defined by the Forbes 400 List] received federal farm subsidies, including at least four billionaires. Under Federal Crop Insurance programs, the top ten percent of farms receive payments 141% higher per acre than the national average for all farmers, and those in the top ten percent receive 70% of crop insurance payouts. Not only that, the Crop Insurance is issued by 16 insurance companies who also receive as a group on average an annual subsidy of $1.5 billion. And 99.5% of the $12 billion in payments from Trump’s program to cushion the impact of Chinese tariffs on U.S. farm goods went to rich white farmers.

Then there are agricultural import quotas and tariffs. Sugar import quotas and subsidies cost Americans over $4 billion annually, and that money goes largely to three companies through inflated U.S. sugar prices. The same problem exists with rice, which increases U.S. consumer rice prices by roughly 40%.

And while there’s been talk about the high cost of pharmaceuticals, until recently hard numbers have been hard to come by, but the House Ways and Means Committee released a new analysis of drug prices in the U.S. compared to 11 other developed nations, showing that the U.S. could save $49 billion annually on Medicare Part D alone by using average drug prices charged in those countries. That doesn’t even include comparable cost savings for Medicaid.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the U.S. Postal Service continues to subsidize bulk commercial and advertising mail, as well as undercharge Amazon for package delivery. Several news sources claim that it isn’t so about Amazon, but they don’t understand the fine print. Fixed costs are allocated on a model, and under that model roughly 5% of USPS fixed costs are allocated to package delivery when almost 25% of USPS volume is now in package delivery, and the USPS is running annual deficits of several billion annually, which have to be made up by the federal government.

Then, there’s what government does for the fossil fuel industry. According to a new report from the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. has spent more subsidizing fossil fuels in recent years than it has on defense spending, The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was $599 billion.

And how did that happen? The fossil fuel industry spends some $40 million dollars on campaign contributions to members of Congress every election and another $300 million in lobbying Congress.

And, of course, despite the new tax law, which was supposed to result in a better tax system, an in-depth analysis of Fortune 500 companies’ financial filings finds that at least 60 of the nation’s biggest corporations didn’t pay a dime in federal income taxes in 2018 on a collective $79 billion in profits, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Now…what was that about government of the people, by the people, and for the people?

The other day, I had a discussion, if one could call it that, with a friend who loves his guns, and who, while not a member of the NRA, worries about gun control just like the NRA does. His basic point was that responsible gun owners aren’t the problem. He’d be perfectly happy with background checks, and requiring a gun operating permit/license and an exam requirement, but he thinks that prohibiting “assault rifles” wouldn’t do that much because there are other “sporting rifles” that can do the same thing. They just don’t look as ominous and don’t carry the name of “assault rifle.” He feels the same way about limits on clip or magazine capacity. And that means, in his view, that one limitation or restriction on weapons and/or ammunition will lead to another and another, because those restrictions won’t be all that effective.

Leaving aside the obvious point that it would be difficult enough politically to enact more than one assault rifle or magazine/clip size restriction, let alone a series of such measures, this line of argument leads back to the NRA claim that guns don’t kill people, but people kill people. In a way, proponents of background checks are agreeing with that NRA claim, because they’re saying that a restriction on who can carry firearms will reduce deaths from guns. So… if that’s true, why don’t we just avoid the issue of which guns are more lethal and should be prohibited and go the other direction – require a state or federal gun operating permit, which includes gun instruction requirements and passing a federal use/safety exam, as well as firearms insurance? Perhaps it also, like a driver’s license, should have licensure levels.

After all, right now, one of the largest problems with guns is that people who shouldn’t have such weapons do in fact have and use them. There really are only two effective solutions – either remove all the guns or regulate the people using them.

In peacetime, at least, cars kill more people than guns do, and we haven’t banned cars… but we have put restrictions on drivers, and required automobile registration, insurance, and safety features. So why not do the same for guns? As my friend, the gun-lover, pointed out, a truly responsible firearms user shouldn’t have a problem with such an approach.

What’s all too often overlooked by both left and right in the political name-calling and ego-bashing that passes for political discussion by the far right and far left is the issue of equal opportunity, what it is, what people think it is, and what each side passionately declares it should be.

More than a few partisans on the left confuse opportunity with outcomes. They believe that if outcomes are not equal, opportunity is not equal. They don’t put it that bluntly, but they certainly give the impression that they believe unequal outcomes reflect unequal opportunity. Now, on a large scale, unequal opportunities will definitely result in unequal outcomes, but because individuals differ in vastly in innate abilities, genetics, environment, and upbringing, the reverse is not true. Unequal outcomes do not necessarily prove unequal opportunities, and that’s why a closer look at the situation is necessary.

That being said, today in the United States, our current culture has enshrined and neglected to remedy, and in a number of cases, made opportunity for people even more unequal.

When business and industry pollute, they worsen the environment, and they do so in a manner most detrimental to the disadvantaged, because higher levels of pollution weaken health and actually impair intelligence. So when a business fails to comply fully with health and safety standards, or when government does not insist on adequate standards, the salaries of executives and the profits of shareholders are literally subsidized by the negative impacts on the health and intelligence of those too poor to move away from polluted areas and often without options for a healthier workplace. And because executive offices and the homes of those executives are usually removed from the factory floor, workers face less healthy work environments than do executives.

Given the way school systems are funded, the children of more affluent parents have not only better health, but better education opportunities. The same holds true for health care. And because poorer people often cannot afford the best of diets, that lack of balanced nutrition hampers the development of their children.

In a real and absolute sense, the most basic of opportunities, simply to grow up healthy with an opportunity to learn and develop, is heavily biased toward the more affluent members of society. Yet too many initiatives to create more equal opportunities for those whose opportunities are blighted are decried as social engineering.

But isn’t allowing excessive pollution for the sake of profits and higher incomes for executives also social engineering? Isn’t gerrymandering school systems by income levels to keep out the less affluent social engineering? Isn’t rigging healthcare based on income social engineering? Today, it’s accepted practice, at least by Republicans and conservatives, that corporations and moneyed individuals can engage in such social engineering, but that government shouldn’t.

But, if government doesn’t… just how long will the increasing numbers of the disadvantaged, and their numbers are increasing as the middle class continues to vanish, how long before they decide not to accept the current charade of “equal” opportunity? How long before matters get even more violent?

Earlier this week, Trump threatened to withhold $19 billion over the next three years in highway trust funds for roads and highway infrastructure if California doesn’t drop its efforts to require higher car and truck mileage standards in order to reduce automotive emissions and pollution. Ever since the Nixon Administration, under federal law, the federal government has permitted California to require higher standards because of its greater auto emission and air quality problems.

The Trump Administration has claimed that it will withhold those funds because the state hasn’t fully implemented some 130 air quality state implementation plans (SIPs). Federal law requires states with dirty air to come up with plans on how to reduce pollution, but those plans must be approved by the EPA. EPA has a backlog of such plans awaiting approval, and California’s 130 SIPs account for about one-third of the total.

What’s totally ridiculous about this is that these plans have been submitted to EPA, where they have languished for years because EPA is supposed to review them, and then accept, reject, or propose modifications. EPA has not taken any of those actions, as required by law.

Now, EPA Administrator Wheeler has demanded that California withdraw all 130 and resubmit them because California isn’t meeting air quality standards, despite the fact that 85% of the population — 34 million people — breathe dirty air.

Wheeler’s letter to the California Air Resources Board totally baffled state regulators and even former EPA officials who say the backlog exists because the federal government has not approved the plans and that what EPA is now doing is basically punishing California for EPA’s own inaction.

On top of that, during the Trump administration, EPA has rolled back or is in the process of rolling back twenty-four air quality regulations that would reduce air pollution, including a rule limiting methane emissions on public lands, including intentional venting and flaring from drilling operations; a rule designed to limit toxic emissions from major industrial polluters; a rule requiring fewer emissions from new power plants and expansions; a rule requiring newly built coal power plants capture carbon dioxide emissions; a rule setting strict limits on carbon emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants. In addition, EPA has proposed rolling back all mileage standards for new cars and light trucks, which would significantly increase auto emissions and pollution nation-wide.

So after taking all these steps to increase air pollution, Trump now wants to make it harder for California to clean up its air… and wants to withhold federal funds because California isn’t complying fully with federal law because EPA hasn’t done its job.

Talk about incompetence and blaming others for it!

The latest news on President Trump is that he threatened Ukraine by withholding aid unless the country started investigating the Bidens, then when that threat became public, mysteriously the aid was released. Rather than acknowledge that, of course, now Trump is attacking former Vice President Biden, accusing Biden of the very tactics that news reports have revealed that Trump used when trying to force the Ukrainian President to investigate Biden’s son.

After respected news reporter Cokie Roberts died last week, President Trump’s comments were that he’d never met her and that she never treated him nicely – except she had interviewed him previously in Trump Tower on a nationwide television broadcast.

He doesn’t like California; so he’s decided to try to force the state to have more air pollution, despite the fact that all the major auto manufacturers prefer the higher fuel economy requirements, both for environmental and economic reasons.

He’s fired the highest number of senior staff and political appointees on record, generally because they disagree or tell him that they can’t or shouldn’t do things. He’s pushed the Department of Justice to prosecute career officials who spoken against his acts or contradicted what he said. Either he or the Secretary of Commerce threatened NOAA officials [even though this has subsequently been denied] who tried to point out that Trump erroneously changed NOAA broadcast weather maps with his sharpie.

He cozies up to dictators who praise him, and criticizes and bad-mouths leaders of other nations who don’t suck up to him. He’s even turned on Fox News when it aired factual news reports about him and his administration that he didn’t like.

He’s attacked the Federal Reserve Board for failing to lower interest rates the way he wanted, despite the fact that they’re not that far from all-time lows and unemployment is low, and that even lower rates risk real estate and stock market bubbles. He attacked the Prime Minister of Denmark when she told him that Greenland was not for sale. He attacked the Mayor of London, and various other officials.

He’s also attacked environmental protection regulations, not only on the global warming issue, but on a range of regulations where he’s attempted to roll back clean air and clean water regulations, among others and turned national monuments with fragile ecosystems and ancient archaeological ruins into open energy and mining areas, while attacking native Americans and others who wanted to preserve such areas.

And yet Trump’s supporters ignore it all, presumably because they hate liberals and Democrats so much that they’ll accept lying, bribery, corruption, and illegal acts rather than admit any fault in Trump.

The so-called “scandal” facing Justin Trudeau is a clear case of political correctness going totally and insanely out of control. When Trudeau was a 29 year old teacher he dressed up as Aladdin for a costume party and applied make-up to his face. Now the PC police are screaming for his head.

For what exactly? In the first place Aladdin never existed. He’s totally fictional. Aladdin’s story is said to be taken from The Thousand and One Nights (also called The Arabian Nights), reputedly told by Scherherazade. Yet the tale of Aladdin wasn’t even in the original version of the tales, but in a French translation of the Arabic version by French scholar Antoine Galland in 1712 to which Galland added several new stories told to him by a Syrian named Ḥanna Diyab from Aleppo. “Aladdin and the Magical Lamp” was one of them. In both Galland’s version and Richard Burton’s popular 1885 English translation, Aladdin lives “in a city of the cities in China.” Illustrations of the tales from the Victorian era depict the story and its characters as Chinese.

So how is Trudeau racist? He went to a costume party as a fictional character from a pseudo-Arabic land that a story teller adapted from a Chinese setting. He wasn’t making derogatory remarks, nor was he demeaning anyone’s culture.

Yet the PC police seem unable to distinguish harmless and non-demeaning costume partying from real racism. The reason why “blackface” is demeaning and racist is because it replicates the traveling minstrel shows in the U.S. in the period of roughly 1880 to 1920, where white entertainers put on “blackface” and sang supposedly black/Negro songs while usually depicting black Americans in a negative or culturally condescending manner.

Trudeau did none of that – and going after him for depicting a fictional character from a non-existent land and only vaguely an Arabic culture is taking matters totally out of context.

If what Trudeau did is racist, then so is the musical Hamilton, because in that wildly successful musical actors of color are portraying noted white Founding Fathers, not always in the best of light. I don’t find the musical Hamilton racist, but the PC police should… that is, if they’re going to be true to their own “principles.”

There’s always been a perception of politician as liars. As an example, Mark Twain declared, “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

Yet in my nearly twenty years in politics, on a percentage basis, I saw very little criminal behavior, and certainly less than one would see among a similar number of such individuals in the private sector. I knew a number of politicians who were scrupulously honest, and a few whose basic honesty I seriously doubted. I never saw the wholesale lying by all politicians that has always seemed to a wide-spread perception, although I definitely did see a few politicians who engaged in it, in both parties. I’ll admit that I also saw a great deal of “spin” and tailored speeches and presentations, and I suspect that spin and half-truths fuel the idea that politicians always lie.

But how many Americans spin the truth in ways large and small? Why should we expect politicians to be any different?

Yet today, when we have a President who engages in so many falsehoods that go well beyond spin and half-truths that it’s a full-time job to keep track of them, the reaction of a great many Americans, if not most Americans, is that all politicians lie.

But there’s a significant difference between shading the truth and out and the out-and-out bald-faced lies that are Trump’s stock in trade. And to top it off, Trump and his associates claim that comparatively minor misstatements on the part of those who oppose Trump and his policies are total lies? Why don’t people make a distinction?

Could it just be that they really believe he’s telling the truth, that mainstream media is fake news, that climate change is just a Chinese hoax, that more coal-fired power plants are good for us, that environmental laws have gone too far, despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary?

I’d submit that when people accept such statements as truth, their belief comes from basic perceptual conflicts. Recent research has shown that people have different outlooks and value sets [what a great surprise] that are formed on a highly emotional bases that often may have little or no foundation in observed facts.

For example, people with certain perceptions wanted to believe that Barrack Obama couldn’t be a “real” American, and so they accepted any idea that supported that belief, despite the fact that he had to be a citizen on two counts: his mother was definitely a white American citizen from Kansas, and he was born in Hawaii, which has been American territory for well over a century. Yet the “birthers” still insist on believing the contrary.

Politicians are faced with a basic conflict. Given the nature of the country and their job, even with gerrymandering, at least a third and sometimes more than half of their constituents don’t see the world in the way they do. Therefore, when that politician asserts something he believes to be true that conflicts with what people believe, those people would rather believe that he’s lying, even if what he says is confirmed by factual evidence.

Statistically and practically, it can be proven that immigrants don’t take away high paying jobs from Americans – except in the cases where the immigrants have more education and expertise, and those instances are comparatively few. Yet tens of millions of Americans believe that immigrants are the problem rather than the economics of the current American marketplace, and nothing is likely to convince them otherwise. So any politician who says immigrants aren’t the problem must be a liar to such believers.

We’ve all seen extreme cases of this – people who won’t believe the Nazi genocide or the moon landing, for example, or even that the earth is flat.

What it all boils down to is that, for most people, “emotional truth” trumps contrary observed and proven facts any day, and that means any politician who doesn’t agree with your emotional truths is at the least suspect and at worst lying – whether he is or not.

More than two hundred years ago, the French intellectual Madame de Stael made the observation that battles over words reflected a larger battle over things. And in two centuries that certainly hasn’t changed.

The battles over words such as “white privilege” or “racism” or “black lives matter” aren’t just about what those words themselves mean, but about who controls the economy, government, and policing powers of the United States, and whether that control remains in the hands of a white, largely male, elite or whether power will rest more equally in representatives of all the people.

The fight over “abortion” isn’t just about whether and/or when abortions should be legal, but about who should have control of women’s bodies, whether that control should remain in the hands of government, largely male, or whether individual women should make that decision, or whether there is some middle ground.

The battle in Britain over Brexit is another example where words don’t capture the scale of the conflict over literally the future of Great Britain and, coincidentally, of Ireland and the European Union.

Sometimes, seemingly innocuous phrases and words are anything but, and really should be battled over. Take “student evaluations.” Who could object to student evaluations? Except those evaluations have fueled an enormous pressure to dumb down curricula because college professors get evaluated on their basis and studies have repeatedly shown that professors who insist on academic rigor get bad evaluations and are less likely to be retained.

Or “Make America Great Again.” Who doesn’t want their nation to be great? But very few people are asking, “Great for who?” Is it so great for the millions of young adults with overwhelming student loan debt? Is it that great for the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, forced into poverty by massive medical bills? Or for the farmers losing income and possibly their farms as a result of a tariff/trade war created in an effort to Make America Great Again? Is it great for the tens of millions of people forced to continue breathing polluted air to boost the profit margins of polluting industries?

Slogans and catch phrases sweep people up, but all too often no one looks behind the words. They just accept or reject the words based on their superficial reaction.

But that hasn’t changed since Maximilien Robespierre shouted for LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ back in 1790, at the height of the French Revolution, which resulted in the French essentially losing all three.

Last Sunday, we received a package. It wasn’t a special package. It wasn’t sent special delivery or by upgraded UPS or Fedex. It was just a package of items ordered from Amazon – and it was delivered on a Sunday by a U.S. Postal Service carrier in a USPS truck.

I have a problem with this. I don’t get mail on Sunday. The local Post Office has its last collection every day at 3:30 p.m., meaning that anything collected by carriers or posted at the Post Office after 3:30 p.m. doesn’t go out until the next afternoon. Cedar City may not be a large city, but it serves 50,000-60,000 people and is located on a major interstate.

On top of that, as I’ve posted earlier, we get close to a hundred pounds of unordered and unwanted catalogues every month, not to mention the hundred plus charitable solicitations, also from charities to which neither of us has any indication to contribute, or the 20-30 political solicitations for candidates in whom we have no interest.

Yet the Postal Service keeps running deficits and has to keep raising the price of first class and priority mail. A one ounce first class letter costs 55 cents to mail, but non-profit mail rates range from 13cents to 18 cents, while commercial rates are roughly 18 cents. Why exactly should first class and priority mail users pay roughly three times as much for sending things by mail as business marketing mailers, particularly when the U.S. Postal Service is supposed to be operated like a business?

If various businesses can afford to send hundreds of catalogues a year to tens of thousands, if not millions, of people who never buy from them, it strikes me that catalogue mailing rates are far too low, and that a great deal more revenue could be raised by increasing bulk mailing rates, rather than cutting service hours and jacking up first class rates.

And, of course, there’s also the question as to why Amazon gets special service from the U.S. Postal Service… and how much they’re paying for it… although I’d bet, if an outside and impartial audit were conducted, one that compared the costs of providing each class of service and the revenue received from each, that audit would show that Amazon is getting a sweetheart deal.

But, as I also noted earlier, such an audit has never happened and never will, not when the direct mail industry has Congress in its pocket.

In the twitter community and elsewhere, there’s been a lot made of “white privilege.” While most of what’s said about what’s called white privilege is unfortunately true, I have a problem with the terminology. I don’t deny the fact that being white gives one an advantage in the U.S. over those with darker skins, or the fact that, as a society, we need to do something about it. What troubles me is that the term – “white privilege” – suggests, especially in the way it’s being currently used, that it’s a singular problem.

It’s not a singular problem; it’s one of several “privileges” or problems that have significant adverse economic, legal, and social impacts. Being white offers an advantage, ranging from considerable in some circumstances to minimal in others, but it’s a definite advantage. So is coming from a strong and supportive family background. So does having a good genetic background. So does having family wealth. So does living in a less polluted environment. All of these have significant impacts on children and how they grow up, and even into early adulthood, but no one speaks of “family privilege” or “genetic privilege” or “environmental privilege.”

Study after study has shown that growing up in a unified, supportive, and functional family has a huge beneficial impact, yet this is minimized, except, interesting enough, by religious conservatives, despite the fact that “family privilege” is an enormous factor in how successful children will be.

More and more studies have shown the significant adverse impacts created by various forms of pollution on children’s health and intelligence, and yet there’s very little society-wide outcry about the fact that, effectively, upper middle class and upper class children essentially have what amounts to geographical environmental privilege because pollution disproportionately impacts the poor and minorities. In reality, we actually practice pollution discrimination, both here in the U.S. and in our manufacturing outsourcing to third world nations.

What’s called white privilege is a definite and pervasive social (and still a legal) problem, but highlighting it obscures the other “privileges” that often have an even greater impact on society, especially on the poor and minorities.

In the last few years, apparently the younger generation has suddenly discovered history, and in discovering it, they’ve learned, and have been outraged in many cases to discover that historic personages not only had feet of clay, but often acted in ways currently unacceptable and even illegal, as well as holding views now regarded as unfashionable and sometimes despicable.

That one-time paragon of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, was not only a slave-holder, who hypocritically declaimed on freedom, but who also made his dead wife’s younger half-sister (and a slave) his mistress. It also turns out that the noble Robert E. Lee savagely beat at least one slave, if not more. In the fourth debate with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln stated bluntly, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races…there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Monuments and statues have been torn down, and buildings renamed because of the “discovery” and outrage about the dead men [and all of them have been men so far as I can determine] and their acts and beliefs. Two awards in the F&SF field have been altered or renamed as a result of protests about the earlier author and editor they honored because of the racist views each held.

There seems to be a view gaining credence, particularly among those of a more “liberal” persuasion, along the lines of that we as a society should not honor dead people who held views no longer accepted, no matter how important their contributions to literature, society, or history, because their contributions do not outweigh the harm of their views.

Those opposing such renaming and destruction make the point that many of these individuals held views that accurately represented public opinion at that time and that many [but far from all] were “honorable” by the standards of their times.

We tend to forget that those times were indeed very different. For example, slavery was an accepted practice in the majority of societies and cultures across the world until roughly two hundred years ago. So, for as far back as records go, some 6,000 years, if not farther, slavery was accepted for 5,800. Now, I’m not condoning slavery, but does that mean that every monument to past powerful slaveholders, including a plethora of rulers and military heroes, should be destroyed? If not, why destroy monuments to men who grew up in societies that accepted slavery, but found society changed around them?

Yet, as we know, some “historic” figures were rather awful individuals, and the question is how we balance past positive achievements against past beliefs and past actions that we now regard as despicable. Or should we just obliterate the memory of those with now-unacceptable social and political views?

Every time I look around, it seems like there’s a new massively funded, special-effects-loaded movie about some super hero or another, most of which I’ve never heard of , except as comic-book versions of Norse gods – even though I did read a few comics in my youth, but they ended with Superman or the Fantastic Four. I never bought comics because I could read them quickly off the racks, and then I discovered that F&SF books were so much better – and lasted a lot longer.

So why is it boom time for comic superheroes?

Because viewers want complex problems power-solved? Or because they feel powerless and want to experience power vicariously? Or because they want to escape a cheerlessly complex world? Or is it that fewer and fewer can actually read well and quickly? Or that they have trouble concentrating on non-video/cinematic entertainment?

I don’t have an answer, nor do I see any answers out there, most likely because no one else seems to see it as a particularly vexing societal problem. After all, superhero movies are “just” entertainment. But some forms of entertainment are indicative of culture, or lack thereof. The Romans packed the Colosseum to be entertained by some definitely bloody and often fatal gladiatorial contests, and public hangings or guillotining always drew crowds [and in some cases, hawkers even provided refreshments]. So, by comparison, aren’t superhero movies just cotton candy or gilded escapism?

Possibly… but I still have my doubts.

The fall semester is either about to begin or has already begun at colleges and universities across the United States… and one thing is already clear. The march toward turning colleges and universities, particularly state institutions, into glorified high schools is continuing.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, the administration at the local university has mandated a switch to a trimester system so that students can graduate in three years. To accomplish this, each semesters has been shortened by more than a week, with no increase in class length or number of classes. At the same time, there has been a push for “greater retention,” more electronic learning, and a more encouraging atmosphere [i.e., more cheerleading and less critical evaluation of actual student performance].

The latest edict from the administration is that faculty must not only take attendance, but report absences to administration, apparently because of financial aid requirements, in effect adding another reporting requirement that has teachers doing additional administrative chores for the finance industry. What happened to the idea of student responsibility? We’re talking about 18 year olds and older, not grade-school or high school students.

My wife the professor has taught a diction and literature class for students beginning the B.M. [performance] degree in voice. It’s a fairly standard, if slightly more intensive class which covers the basics of proper diction and introduces students to classical vocal literature. The course requires students to study the music and listen to a range of classical vocal recordings by composers. The listening requirement takes roughly six hours a week for 15 weeks. The goal of the course is to familiarize students with the work and styles of the more noted composers over the last century or so.

My wife has been teaching the course at this university for 15 years, and the basic requirements have remained the same, and students have evaluated the course for all of that time, yet in the last two years, for the first time, there have been complaints about the amount of work required, one student even saying that the workload had that student in tears.

This isn’t just my wife. The majority of professors in the department have noted the same development. One administrator responded by saying that perhaps the professors should just teach less.

Teach less? At a time when either more technical knowledge and/or more education are required to compete for the better paying jobs?

I’ve often been criticized for the “slow” pace of my books, especially by the “action junkies” who expect a fight, revelation, or surprise in every chapter, or at the least every other chapter. Now, I’d be the first to admit that even my books aren’t completely realistic, because there’s more action in them than in corresponding events in real life, but I try to give the feeling of real life and action by providing more lead-up events, and a certain amount of routine, than do many authors. Possibly that’s because I’ve experienced more “action” in life than I anticipated and because it wasn’t much like the way I’d visualized and imagined it, especially how much time and preparation for “action” takes.

I was a competitive swimmer in college, and even more than fifty years ago, to be competitive required at least 3-4 hours a day of practice six days a week. Yet we generally only competed once every week at most. Today, it’s more like twice that and a lot more work with weights and machines. All that for a few minutes of “action.”

But the same is true of any action in life. A one-hour military flight mission for one single aircraft will require from 10 to over 200 hours of maintenance, depending on the aircraft. So what does this have to do with writing and battle scenes? Simply that no society, especially a lower tech society, can support a lot of battles day after day right on top of each other. There’s no time for recovery, resupply, or even travel.

All right. Then why shouldn’t a writer skip over all that dull but necessary stuff in a few sentences or paragraphs and get on with the action?

In fact, a lot of writers do. Even the “slowest” writers condense the events and maintenance in between the exciting stuff. But there’s a balance. If it’s all action, the reader loses the “reality” of what’s occurring and a book becomes the unrealistic verbal equivalent of a video game. If it’s totally true to life, most readers won’t finish the book because they get overwhelmed by the details.

As an author, I give more details than most fiction authors, but that’s because I feel that those details are real to the characters and shape the way they see the battle and the action. The “boring” training, or the trade-offs between trying to make a living and also trying to prepare to fight an invader are real to those people. They’re choices they have to make, and they’re in many ways far more important than most people think because they’re what determines how the battle, the action, and the characters turn out.

There’s an old saying about war, to the effect that the competent officers concentrate on tactics, the brilliant ones on logistics. Or, put another way, WWII was won on logistics [while that’s an over-simplification, at its base, it’s true]. And for reasons like that and the fact that I don’t want my books to read like verbal video/computer games, that’s why “logistics” and “routine” are a vital part of what I write.

Since at least the time of Triumphs in Imperil Rome, the phrase “fame is fleeting” recurs, year after year, generation after generation… and yet today, at least the United States, we have more and more people striving not to be well-educated, or the most accomplished in a particular field, but just famous. What’s even more amazing is that there are more than a few famous people, at least in current popular culture who, from what I can determine, never excelled in anything and who are at best moderately attractive and who are not fabulously wealthy. And, almost without exception, that kind of fame comes and then departs relatively quickly.

So what is fame… that so many strive for it?

The dictionary definition that best fits this kind of “fame” is: “the state of being known or talked about by many people.”

Most famous people have acquired their fame and notice through their achievements, and usually it’s for singular achievement or a limited series of achievements. But sustained high level achievement doesn’t always get rewarded, and sometimes those not rewarded are more famous than those who were.

Actress Glenn Close has seven Academy Award nominations without an Oscar, and several noted directors have never won an Oscar – Federico Fellini (12 nominations), Ingmar Bergman (9 nominations), Alfred Hitchcock (5 nominations). On the other hand, Meryl Streep has an unprecedented 21 nomination and three Oscars. Yet who remembers Florence Lawrence, often considered “the first movie star”? Or Lillian Gish or Jean Harlow? Or Paul Muni, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, or Douglas Fairbanks?

I doubt many people, except scholars and literary types, even remember William Golding, whose novel Lord of the Flies sold well over 25 million copies and who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 or John Galsworthy, a 1932 Nobel Laureate, and noted playwright, and author of The Forsyte Saga. And very few likely remember Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, or Edith Wharton. Even in F&SF, how many readers know who Hugo Gernsback was?

And how many people will remember then-prominent political and business figures, such as Alexander Johnston Cassatt, Jay Gould, William Jennings Bryan, Darwin Kingsley, John F. Queeny, Eugene Debs, or even Millard Fillmore?

Yet, for all that, and despite Shelly’s Ozymandias, people still strive desperately for fame.