In any society, some individuals will succeed… and some will fail… and some, for various reasons, will only make a minimal effort, if that. In the so-called natural state, which never completely existed, the results would be obvious. Those who failed or could not or would not work hard enough to survive would die.

For all of human history, such a totally natural state has never existed. Fossil and other remains show that all societies have assisted people, at least at some stage of their life, who would have died much sooner otherwise. So every society has faced the question of who gets help and under what circumstances. Because humans are incapable of surviving without assistance for years after birth, all societies help the majority of infants, but not always all of them.

Only in the last century or so, however, have societies embarked on large-scale, societally-wide programs of assistance. Some programs, such as many of those involved in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, were designed as much as economic stabilization efforts as assistance efforts, but the creation of the Social Security system was definitely a program of assistance for the elderly.

Over the seventy or so years since then, U.S. federal government assistance and support programs have grown enormously, to the point that so-called assistance “entitlement programs” comprise roughly 42% percent of total federal spending and are projected to increase yearly, yet last year almost 30% of federal spending had to be borrowed, i.e., deficit spending. Over any length of time, that much of a deficit can’t be financed without catastrophic economic impacts

The largest assistance programs are Social Security and Medicare. Without an SSA tax increase of some sort, the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted in 15 years, and under current law, benefits would have to be reduced by roughly 20% because incoming SSA taxes would only cover 80% of benefits. The situation with Medicare is worse, given the skyrocketing costs of healthcare.

While many people like the idea of wealth taxes and higher income taxes on wealthy individuals, such taxes, even if they were enacted in a fashion that disallowed subsidies and selective taxable income exemptions and cuts, which is not at all certain, couldn’t make up the current deficits, let alone future ones, without effectively confiscating the majority of income from the upper middle class and upper classes, and I seriously doubt that most of them would stay around for such taxes to take effect.

So any realistic reform is going to have to include significant but not confiscatory tax increases, especially on the wealthier members of society, coupled with spending cuts and reforms in a vast array of programs. The political problem is that no one wants his or her benefits/programs cut, and everyone, including the rich, wants someone else to pay for it.

All the rhetoric – on both sides – won’t change this reality. But people and politicians, being what they are, will insist that their one-sided approach will solve the problem.

Welcome to the 2020 political misrepresentation season.

Over the past two years, there’s been an incredible furor over income and wealth inequality, which has been compounded by the fact that the U.S. government has been running huge deficits, because Congress doesn’t want to tax people enough to pay for what Congress wants the federal government to do. Then add to this the fact that the incomes of most American families, i.e., those in at least the bottom sixty percent of all families, have on average stagnated or declined. Add to that the fact that government inflation measures don’t include all costs of living.

As a result, liberal politicians are pushing for programs to benefit those hurt most by stagnant or declining incomes, pressing for increasing taxes on the rich and especially the “super rich.” Those proposals include higher tax rates on those with incomes over, say, $10 million annually, or even annual wealth taxes.

Conservatives, in response, cite figures that show that the top ten percent of all earners pay 70% of all income taxes and that the top one percent of earners pay more total taxes than the bottom ninety percent combined.

And both sides are wrong, in a number of different ways. First, both sides are either not understanding the tax system or misrepresenting it, if not both. Second, concentrating on taxable income ignores the fact that the rich have ways of legally under-reporting their actual income, ways that are not open to taxpayers less well-off, as well as the effect of vast wealth. Even without taking into account that under-reporting, the top one percent, on average, only pay effective federal income tax rates of about 23%.

The 70% marginal tax rate on incomes over ten million dollars means just that. After you’ve made ten million, you would only get to keep $300,000 out of every subsequent million. It doesn’t mean that the government gets 70% of your first ten million, although a lot of people on both left and right, from what I’ve read, seem to think that’s what it means.

More important, a lot of that purported revenue won’t get collected. Why not? Because if the income arrives through capital gains or qualified dividend checks, the tax rate is still only a maximum of 20%. Or if the income qualifies as “carried interest,” or… [a good tax accountant can fill in all the other exceptions, but that’s the idea].

Right now, the tax code is riddled with so many exceptions, variable rates for different sources of income, and credits for various types of investments [often justified under the dubious rationale that such investments create jobs that wouldn’t otherwise exist] that changing rates will do very little to affect the income taxes paid by the top one percent. They will have an effect on well-paid professionals in the top five percent who are moderately well-off, but not well-off enough to benefit much from the tax avoidance available to the super rich.

What tends to get overlooked in concentrating on income and tax rates is the impact of wealth. In the last thirty years the share of wealth held by the lower 90% of the population has dropped by ten percent, so that now the top ten percent hold almost eighty percent of the nation’s wealth, while the top one percent hold half of that, forty percent. That stock of wealth is held in various means, but it all produces, over time, income that is taxed at a far lower rate than income earned by working. This is one of the principal [pun intended] reasons behind the old saying that the rich get richer. If you make more money than anyone else and you’re taxed at a lower effective rate than the hard-working professionals in your company… of course, you’re going to get richer.

But the bottom line is simple. Under the current tax structure, fiddling with rates won’t raise that much more money, and that includes lowering them, Laffer Curve enthusiasts to the contrary. The only thing that will increase tax revenue is eliminating all the subsidies and loopholes, and varied rates for the same amount of income (based on its source)… and then see what happens. Right now, no one really knows just how much tax revenues have been bled off through those devices, but it’s definitely substantial.

But until Congress actually works on the tax structure by eliminating all the special treatments of various types of income and by eliminating all of the exemptions and tax credits, merely changing marginal tax rates won’t address the real problems or the deficits, no matter what the rhetoric is.

Recently, I came across an article in New Scientist dealing with genetics and race, which pointed out that there is no single gene or even a group of genes that could define “race.” Then someone called my attention to white supremacist propaganda ranting about how certain groups are trying to destroy “the white race” by supporting unlimited immigration to the United States.

While human beings come in a range of skin, hair, and eye colors, regardless of those traits, they’re all biologically compatible and can have offspring together, and in a few generations it’s often difficult, if not impossible, to tell their origins. The descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings range in color and complexion from apparently “pure Caucasian” to “pure African” [not that either genetically pure Caucasians or pure Africans exist, because everyone is mix of genes whose origins go back at least hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions, albeit with occasional mutations, e.g., blue eyes and red hair, cropping up along the way].

Test after test has shown that, while there are ranges of physical and mental characteristics among any set or group of people, all groups of all colors, given adequate nutrition and nurture, have the same general ranges of abilities and intelligences, with minor variations. History shows that there have been great empires built by people of every color and that there have been great geniuses of every color.

So why the hell do so many people get upset about “race”?

Because most people are most comfortable with others like themselves, and they’re wary, if not fearful, of people of a different color or a different culture. And when times are troubled, or people have a hard time making ends meet, it’s far easier to blame those who are different.

Right now, there’s a whole group of former middle-class workers in the United States who feel disenfranchised, and who have certainly been hurt economically, by off-shoring, by automation, and the global economy… and most of the white supremacists come from this group.

Yet the problems these people face weren’t created by minorities of color or by migrants; they were created by, if you will, money-grubbing white Caucasian males looking to maximize their profits in a capitalistic society that currently permits all manner of economic excesses.

So why aren’t the white supremacists blaming those who really caused their problems? Why are they fervently supporting a blond, blue-eyed white male who personifies all those who’ve created their problems?

Many, many years ago, I wrote occasional reviews for a semi-noted SF&SF magazine… until I got into an argument with one of the editors about some details in a book. Two of those details stand out in my memory. In one case, the protagonist was using dental mirrors to look around corners, except dental mirrors aren’t that good for looking any distance. Bicycle mirrors would have been much better. The second detail was an address. The author placed a stylish town house in Georgetown on a street in the middle of an area that has been exclusively commercial since at least the 1950s [and the novel was set in the 1980s], and where such stylish dwellings have not existed for decades. And the book wasn’t alternate history, but supposedly set contemporaneously.

Now, I didn’t trash the book in my proposed review, but I gave those two examples and several others and said that the author’s lack of attention to detail detracted from the overall quality and that while it was a good book, it wasn’t a great book. The editor said that he couldn’t publish the review unless I removed the specifics. He didn’t dispute the accuracy of my observations; he just didn’t want them in the review, and I got the feeling that he really wanted me to be more enthusiastic about the book.

That was the last review I ever wrote.

Obviously, as my readers know, I like details. And I try like hell to make them realistic and relevant to the story. Some readers suggest I go overboard with details, but to me, at least the main streets in books should have names, unless the town is as small as Haven and only has one main street. Bricks come in a range of colors, but those colors are determined by the local clays, which means that bricks in a given town, especially a small town, are likely to be of the same color and shade. The kind of roofs a town has should reflect the economy and the climate.

Likewise, music in lower-tech cultures tends to be based on percussion or rhythm and rhyme because non-rhymed, non-rhythmic lyrics are difficult to remember. That’s why I get irritated when writers put down what are supposedly ballads or folk tune lyrics that seem to have neither rhyme, meter, nor rhythm.

And then there’s money. EVERY culture has a medium of exchange, and even in this day and age, it’s amazing how many books never even mention what that medium might be.

Not every street needs a name, nor does every dwelling need to be described, nor every transaction counted out… but lack of detail makes a book a generic throw-away- after-reading, and too much detail makes it a throw-away-before-finishing. And, of course, each reader has his or her threshold of what is too much or too little detail.

But…as the old saying goes, the devil’s in the details.

The Clinton Presidential Campaign of 1992 [yes, that one] was highlighted by various iterations and permutations of the phrase, “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” And from then until sometime during the Obama Presidency, the popularity of the President in office seemed to be linked to the state of the economy.

Last week The Economist published a story that purported to show that “the true state of the economy is nearly irrelevant to voters.” After reading the piece, I came away with a different interpretation of the polling numbers. The Economist poll showed that Republicans were “four times as optimistic as Democrats about the state of the stock market” while “Liberals complained about high housing costs and low wage growth.”

Duh… might this “shift” just have something to do with who has what assets and what sources of income and who lives where? Although wages are rising faster now than during the last years of the Obama administration, real inflation-adjusted wages for people who are mid-middle-class and lower on the income scale are lower than they were a generation ago and housing costs are far higher. And most people in that income category live in urban metropolitan areas and also face higher housing costs, while housing costs in rural areas are far more affordable. Likewise, the cost of post-secondary education is crippling for students coming out of any income group but the upper class or upper middle class.

Under these conditions, certain aspects of the economy matter more to these people, not because of their political orientation but because of their socio-economic position. And as Republicans continue to ignore these economic problems, these individuals are more likely to vote Democratic, but their partisanship is driven by economic factors, rather than their partisanship driving their view of economics.

In addition, the stock-market means absolutely nothing to such voters. While some may have pensions or retirement programs invested in the market, on a day-to-day basis, the stock market isn’t a perceptual factor to them because very few of them have discretionary cash assets to invest.

As is often the case, the poll numbers may indeed be accurate, but what they mean isn’t necessarily what they used to mean – or what even renowned sources postulate.

Originally, and still to linguists and historians, the word “demotic” referred to the day-to-day, or common, script used by ancient Egyptians for business transactions, records, and, most likely, what might have passed for correspondence. Hieroglyphics were usually reserved for the sacred and monumental uses, and employed by the priesthood.

In more recent times, authors have been classified as to whether their writing is “demotic” or “literary,” although sometimes instead of “literary,” the term “hieratic” (meaning priestly writing) is used. In other words, does a writer put down words like the common folk speak them, or is he or she highfalutin and esoteric in word choice and sentence structure?

What brought all this terminology to mind is that recently I ran across a commentary that, if I read and understood it correctly, seemed to suggest that Robert A. Heinlein had begun as a demotic writer and moved more to a “literary” style in his later works. The same commentary suggested that while demotic writers tend to be more popular in their lifetimes, the work of writers with a more literary style outlasts the demotic stylists, with the notable exception being Mark Twain.

To me, all this misses several points. Is the way the author writes true to the author? And does it matter so far as the reader is concerned? And could it be, perhaps, that “literary” prose outlasts demotic prose because the beauty of the words and the presentation of the ideas and/or story outlast a style that becomes dated as society changes, linguistically, socially, and technologically?

In truth, I have no idea if any of those hypotheses are correct. All I know is that, for the most part, I write in the manner in which I speak – except the sentences I put in the books are much, much shorter, because, as my family knows, I can speak sentences that are far too long.

All across the United States, especially in cities and suburbs, and in business, everyone’s in a hurry. The mad rush is everywhere. Seemingly everything has to be done faster.

Amazon Prime is “encouraging” employees to become private contractors so it can cut delivery times to one day.

The local university is adopting a trimester program and cutting semester lengths from 15 weeks to 13 weeks so that students can graduate in three years instead of four, despite the fact that there are already more college graduates than there are jobs that require a college education and that the speeded up education will cost just as much and will have less content. Yet for all this hurry, fewer and fewer students are emotionally ready for college, let alone the workforce or a professional career.

Parents are in such a rush that they register children for select preschools as soon as they’re born, and some even game the college admission system. The kiddy-porn-clothes industry is doing its best to accelerate sexual awareness in pre-teens.

Highway speed limits keep climbing, and despite speed limits of 80 mph on the interstate here, if you travel at 80, eighty percent of the other travelers will pass you, including more than a few semis. I see mothers in minivans doing 40 mph in 25 mph residential areas, and more than half of them are on cell phones at the same time.

Television shows are electronically compressed so that things happen faster, and Amazon Prime and Netflix release new series all at once so that viewers and speed-binge-watch them faster and faster. Video games move faster and faster. Basketball has shot clocks to keep the action moving fast.

Bosses and superiors get impatient if emails or texts aren’t answered in minutes.

Politicians are hurrying to start their next campaigns earlier and earlier, while fewer and fewer of government problems are getting addressed. The members of Congress were sworn in less than six months ago, and re-election campaigns are already in full swing. That’s clear from the solicitations I’ve already gotten. And certainly all the hurrying by politicians to start the next new campaign hasn’t done much for getting the old problems fixed.

But what’s the point of all this speed? When children are forced into growing up earlier, is that good for them? When they’re hurried from planned activity to planned activity, with little free play time, is that in their best interest? And is fast-tracking them into colleges and insisting that colleges give them high-level vocational training, and little else, to speed them into the work force in anyone’s interest, except that of business?

When employees keep having to hurry to answer electronic status requests, does that help them get their real work done well and on time? Or is that why U.S. work hours keep getting longer and longer?

And, as for taking any time to stop and smell the roses, since no one has the time to cultivate roses, the only roses most people ever see are South American hothouse roses with no scent at all.

Once, many long years ago, I was the legislative assistant for a U.S. Congressman. Like many young and idealistic professionals, I wanted to make the United States a better place [and I still do]. I implemented an early form of a computerized constituent response system so that my boss could get his ideas for reform and improvement across. I came up with plans for tax reform and quite a few others. A few of those my boss introduced, partly to humor me, I suspect, and partly because they were actually good ideas, but none of them ever even got a hearing. I also came up with a way to allow the U.S. Postal Service to run at a profit without continually jacking up first class letter rates [the general approach would still work today].

None of these proposals went anywhere, although they were certainly technically and practically feasible and could have been implemented. I won’t even come close to claiming I was a voice in the wilderness. There have always been idealists trying to make things better, and there still are.

But what my congressman told me, patiently at first, and then not so patiently, was that it didn’t matter how good something was, or how it would improve things, or how technical and practically feasible it was, if there wasn’t political support for the proposition. My proposals for improving the Postal Service were a perfect example. To this day, the USPS regards mass mailings as a marginal cost, even though the bulk of what’s carried are mass mailings and parcels. This means that the first class mail revenues have to support the bulk of core USPS costs. I’d simply proposed that mass mailers be charged the actual full cost of providing that service.

Needless to say, as the mass of junk mail even today continues to proliferate, that proposal was a total anathema to the highly subsidized mail industry – which is why at my house we recycle some 20-30 pounds of unwanted and unread catalogues every week, each sent for as little as twenty-one cents per pound. So, as a result, first class letter writers – and occasionally federal payments when the USPS runs a deficit – are subsidizing commercial for-profit advertising mailers, because it’s never been politically possible to enact what would seem like practical improvements.

There are many possible reforms, whether they’re in healthcare, taxes, or postal rates, which are technically and economically practical – but, without political support at all levels from the grassroots through the entire political structure, they’re effectively impractical.

To claim that the U.S. or any other country should be able to enact “practical” measures put in place elsewhere ignores the fact that any reform proposal is impractical unless political support either exists and can be mobilized or unless such political support can be developed.

And right now, in the United States, there’s just not enough political support in elected government itself for the reforms various Democrats are proposing, and very few of them are working to develop grassroots support. On the other hand, conservative Republicans have spent almost a generation developing an evangelical/conservative grassroots political network… and that effort is bearing its bitter fruit today… and this will continue until Democrats or others build broad-based political support willing not only to talk about but to work to get out votes and voters for their ideas.

Every thinking person should have ideals, but ideals need to be tempered with practicality.

There’s a saying that’s been attributed variously to George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Disraeli, Otto von Bismarck, Winston Churchill, and others that goes like this: If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain. According to research by a number of individuals, the original version of this was first uttered by French historian and statesman François Guizot when he observed, “Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.”

I’d put it another way. To trumpet high-sounding ideas without any practical, workable, and politically acceptable plan for implementing them is well-intentioned idiocy, but, equally, to turn one’s back on want, discrimination, and the abuse of privilege on the grounds that attempting to remedy or ameliorate those ills is impractical is not only arrogant and uncaring, but stupid, and, in the long run, often fatal to a society that ignores those needs.

And, frankly, that’s the political divide I’ve seen emerge out of the unrest in the United States today. I look at all the rhetoric on the Democratic side, addressing valid concerns and real ills… with almost no practicality in sight. You cannot raise the money to deal with those problems by merely increasing tax rates on the wealthy; under the current structure, they’re already avoiding taxes. What’s needed is a tax structure that cannot be avoided, that is seen as fair, and that is not confiscatory. I could make the same sort of case about most Democratic proposals. Of course, that’s why almost all of them talk in glittering generalities.

On the Republican side, almost all the rhetoric is about principles…or fear… principles that aren’t working well for most Americans, except for the well-off and well-educated, and fear of change, fear of anyone who is different, and fear that people won’t live as well as their parents did.

There’s another old saying, about death and taxes, but that’s not quite right. The only two things that are certain in life are that things do change… and that, sooner or later, everyone dies. We try to prolong life, but death remains. And if we don’t adapt to change, things will get worse… and we’ll die sooner.

Neither impractical ideals nor unyielding rejection of change serves anyone well, but that’s the shape of the current political divide.

This past weekend I listened to two career politicians waffle and essentially refuse to answer questions about Trump and his administration. Both were Republicans, and it was clear that they didn’t agree with what Trump had done [in one case, selling military weapons systems to the Saudis without Congressional authorization and in the other sending more troops to the Middle East], but neither wanted to disagree publicly. In my own state of Utah, Senator Mitt Romney bounces back and forth on Trump, but so far still votes for whatever Trump wants.

Congressional Republicans, for the most part, have no plans for leading, and they haven’t for years. What few initiatives they do have are based on spending more money on defense and pork barrel in their own districts, while effectively reducing programs that benefit working Americans and decreasing the taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans. They’ve given up the idea of a balanced budget, or even reducing the deficit, although they occasionally give lip service to it, because they know and won’t admit that, at the present time, there’s no realistic way to reduce the deficit in any meaningful way without increasing taxes on wealthier Americans.

In the meantime, across the board, Trump tries to minimize Congress and its responsibilities under the first section of the Constitution. While the Democrat-led House tries to stop this Presidential overreach, the Republican Senate does nothing. Pretty much, the Senate Republican leadership’s reaction is either “no” or a refusal to address anything but a minimal effort to keep government running. They all know that Trump’s trade war with China is a disaster for American farmers and some industries, but they refuse to admit it. While they’ll admit, if quietly, that Russian interference in our elections is a real problem, they won’t even look at the fact that Trump openly invited the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, or that Trump denies that he benefitted from Russian interference.

Nor will Republicans address the thousands of outright lies and falsehoods made by Trump… or his “re-tweeting” of false and falsified material, such as the distorted video of Speaker Pelosi.

Now, Trump has proposed to issue pardons for several Americans on trial for war crimes, including one who brutally murdered a helpless Middle Eastern teenager. The U.S. military strongly opposes such pardons. These wouldn’t be Trump’s first totally unwarranted pardons. In 2017 he pardoned Joe Arpaio, a former Arizona sheriff convicted for refusing to end his racial profiling of the state’s Latino residents and noted for his long-standing, brutal, and dehumanizing treatment of prisoners.

Once again, most Republicans are mute, and that makes all but a very few truly gutless wonders. What’s worse is that a few Republican lawmakers even support such pardons, something I find incredibly appalling, and unfortunately reminiscent of all too many repressive regimes and dictatorships. The other appalling aspect of all of this is that over 40% of the country presently supports such a President.

Contrary to popular opinion, we do not live in a totally free society. Behavior in our society is in fact restricted by laws, laws theoretically made up by the people for the people, laws designed by the Founding Fathers to reflect a secular, i.e., non-religious, set of principles for acceptable conduct. Those Founding Fathers were so concerned about the adverse impact of religion on law that they insisted on the separation of religion from government.

What they either could not, would not, or did not foresee was that religion is merely one face of “belief.”

My seemingly ancient Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedic dictionary defines “belief” as “mental conviction of truth or actuality of anything without certain proof.” And certainly religion fits under “belief,” because it is based on the conviction, utterly without any form of physical proof, as Isaac Asimov once pointed out in detail, that there is a deity.

Unhappily, there are also other forms of belief, also without proof, that infect society today, and yet all too many “true believers” wish to restrict the acts and behaviors of others or to behave in a way that jeopardizes others on the basis of their beliefs. I certainly hold that people should be free to believe what they wish, just so long as (1) they do not force or attempt to use government to force those beliefs on others and (2) they or their beliefs do not do me, or others, harm.

The idea that there is a soul in two cells that one day may become a fetus and then a human being is not a fact, but a belief. To use that belief to deny a woman who has been raped, or who may die from a pregnancy, the right to determine her own future places a belief without proof above present and demonstrated harm to the mother. If that mother believes that, of course, and chooses not to abort those cells, that is her choice and right. But no woman should ever be denied a choice to preserve her life and her own control over it because of an unfounded belief. Likewise, once a fetus is viable outside the womb, there is absolute proof that another human life must be considered.

Some may insist that life is “priceless” or sacred. There’s absolutely no proof of that. There are far more miscarriages and spontaneous abortions than medically induced ones. In addition, every single day we calculate the value of human lives, whether through insurance, regulatory findings, lawsuits or wrongful death findings. All those are absolute proof that, for human beings, life is anything but priceless. As for the deity, at least deities in the Judeo-Christian mode, life also obviously isn’t sacred, not when various peoples have been supposedly instructed by the deity to kill others.

Anti-vaxxers believe that vaccinations are more dangerous to them and their children than the actual diseases. This is another deadly – and incorrect – belief, and there are scores of studies, as well as documented evidence, to the contrary. The problem here is that, because of this belief, those unvaccinated, particularly with regard to rubella [German Measles] and whopping cough, can infect children too young to be vaccinated, subjecting them to risk of death, or hearing and eyesight loss. The fact that, just this year, over 1,000 children in Madagascar died from measles obviously has no impact on such believers.

Scientific evidence continues to mount in support of the fact that the acceleration of global warming is human caused, yet global warming deniers choose to believe the opposite, and oppose measures to reduce, if not halt that warming. There’s massive evidence to support human caused warming… and virtually none to the contrary… and that warming trend is already causing significant deaths and massive destruction.

The problem, of course, goes beyond beliefs, because “true believers” almost always want others to share their beliefs, whether others want to or not… and whether there’s any real proof to support their beliefs.

Liberals, unfortunately, have the same problem. Faculties and students across the country protest when ultra-conservatives are scheduled to talk at their universities. While hate speech does indeed exist, having contrary views, so long as one doesn’t propose violence to others, is not hate speech. Telling students facts that they don’t want to hear, or giving them poor grades for poor performance, is not persecution, or creating a toxic environment, yet university faculty are being charged with just that because more and more students don’t want to hear facts contrary to their beliefs.

People react badly when their beliefs are challenged, even beliefs totally without proof.

That’s why the Spanish Inquisition tortured heretics to death. That’s why ISIS killed non-believers and destroyed historical antiquities that didn’t match their beliefs. It’s also why white supremists minimize and kill people of color, despite evidence that there’s absolutely no genetic link between “race” and intelligence.

That’s also why Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri legislators want women who’ve been raped to have to bear unwanted children, while sending doctors who perform abortions to jail. And, oh, yes, these are the same folks who oppose welfare, health care, and food for poor children, but they don’t seem to consider that “saving the [unwanted] unborn” results in more unwanted poor children that they don’t want to support. And that’s just one of the problems with beliefs that ignore facts.

Barbara Howes and Anne McCaffrey had very little in common, except both were writers, one a quiet but excellent poet and the other a commanding, dominating force in the development and history of science fiction. The other commonality is that I met each of them once, the first briefly… and the second, not quite so briefly.

In 1964, I studied poetry under William Jay Smith, who three years later went on to become the nineteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Upon one occasion he had several students to his house in North Pownal, Vermont. There he briefly introduced us to his wife Barbara Howes, by saying she was also a poet.

At that time, I had no idea that I stood before two of the more talented poets of the time, both of whom later had books of poetry that were finalists for the National Book Award. To me, one was my professor, and the other was his wife. While I’d like to think that I made the most of the time I studied with William Jay Smith, the truth is that, while I certainly didn’t blow off the opportunities, I also didn’t take full advantage of them, like all too many students. And I certainly didn’t realize that Barbara Howes was far more than just another poet until years later.

My only personal meeting with Anne McCaffrey was, thankfully, more than a brief encounter, that took place at the World Fantasy Convention in London in 1997. That convention was one of the few where my wife accompanied me, and her presence made all the difference. We had barely arrived at the convention when we were summoned (and Anne did summon) to join Anne. She was seated on a raised long hotel settee and insisted that I sit on one side and that Carol Ann sit on the other. Then she asked me to sign a copy of The Soprano Sorceress, which she had blurbed most favorably. After that, we talked for perhaps ten minutes at most, before she turned to Carol Ann, and the two of them – both sopranos – talked singing for a good half-hour, to the chagrin of my publisher, who waited all that time to get a few minutes to talk to Anne.

Although Anne did offer public fulsome praise for the next Spellsong Cycle book, that time in London was the only time we actually met… and I was very glad for the opportunity.

In retrospect, I only wish I’d had enough sense to spend at least a few minutes talking to Barbara Howes.

I’m not a computer designer, coder, or programmer, but I have been using computer applications for more than thirty-five years, and I continue to be amazed at how many applications whose use is said to be “intuitive,” and then discovered that I had no “intuition.”

For example, getting to use the flashlight ap on my IPhone. The instructions seem simple enough. Swipe up from the bottom of the main screen. Except that didn’t seem to work, except occasionally, and I almost gave up on trying to use it. Eventually, I figured out why it didn’t usually work for me. For that “swipe” to work reliably, it has to be done holding the phone in one’s right hand. I’m left-handed, and to make that swipe work means either shifting the phone to my right hand, or using two hands in a most awkward and unnatural way. Yes, it’s intuitive… if you’re right-handed.

After more than fifteen years of using Word, I have yet to figure out what combination of keystrokes suddenly resets the page from a single page, centered on the screen, into multiple pages… or separated half-pages. Nor is it clear why if I type too fast and hit three keys, I’ve closed the document I’ve been working on without saving it, despite the fact that I’ve programmed Word to autosave anything I exit. I know it’s a speed key function, and I’m certain there are instructions somewhere, but I’ve never been able to find them.

Nor are improvements always better. In older versions of Word, I can do a keyword search of every file in a directory. Not so in later versions… or at least not so in any way I can discern. For the most part, I’ve had to learn, by experimentation and trial and error, a great many of the capabilities and functions of a great number of programs because very few of those functions can be accessed intuitively – unless you’re a programmer.

So don’t tell me it’s intuitive. Just label it as “requires previous familiarity with precursor or similar systems and considerable trial and error because instructions are either opaque or non-existent.”

The other day, I came across a reader comment that suggested that I’d bowed to the “PC censors” and made the protagonist of a recent book into a “beta male,” because he actually listened to women, rather than a “real hero.” The reader then went on to suggest I should go back to writing “real heroes” as in the old days and “shock the sour PC fantasy killers.”

Outside of the fact that no one gets a look at my books before they go to my editors, let alone a P.C. or any other censor, or the fact that I don’t write to please either the politically correct or the politically incorrect, the comment raises a number of preconceptions that readers have, such as the fact that there’s some small cadre of PC types who decree what books get published or that a hero or a protagonist has to fit a specific mold. While there are certainly readers, reviewers, and even some editors who push the extremes of the PC mindset, what still determines what gets published is what readers will buy. And that is why Larry Correia, Brandon Sanderson, George R.R. Martin, Patricia Briggs, N.K Jemison, Ann Leckie, Charlie Jane Anders, and I all sell a significant number of books – and we all write very differently.

There are all kinds of readers in the F&SF field, and while there’s still a large contingent of readers, mostly white males, from what I can tell, who prefer the traditional, “take-no-prisoners” male hero who loves weapons and gadgets more than women, and who expects women to know their place, I think it’s fair to say, although most of my main protagonists are male, that very few, if any, of them fall in lockstep into that stereotype. And, of course, there’s also the fact that, at last count, I’ve written something like 11 books where the main protagonist is female.

That reader comment raises the question, of course, about what a “real hero” should be in fiction. Obviously, there’s quite a range of qualities in fictional heroes in F&SF books being written and published today, and some of the ones I’ve liked the best in recent years have been heroines. For every reader, however, the “real” hero or heroine is the one with whom they can identify, or at least appreciate and come to understand.

Personally, as should be obvious from my books, I’ve always had trouble (and more as I’ve grown older) with the “take-no-prisoners” protagonist, even as I’ve written about people who’ve had to do just that, because, from what I know of history and personally witnessed and experienced, those kinds of “heroes” invariably wind up creating a massive body count, and either end up as dead or tormented for the rest of their lives. To my way of thinking, anyone who piles up bodies like that and remains unmoved and untouched isn’t so much a hero or heroine as a sociopath or psychopath.

That’s why, again in my opinion, Charyn in Endgames is more of a “real” hero, because he makes hard choices with a high personal cost and avoids the massive body count to forge a working consensus among warring classes… but that’s my view, and readers who prefer something else can certainly find it, because, despite that reader comment, there aren’t any PC censors out there. The growth of more diverse heroes and heroines with different thoughts and viewpoints just reflects a widening of those who read F&SF as well as a change in the views held by many readers.

There’s an old saying along the lines of “if it quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck, and swims like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” There’s also the one about “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

President Trump has not only now uttered something like 10,000 statements that are false, misleading or outright lies, but gone far beyond that. Following the duck analogy, it strikes me that it’s more than fair to call him a brazen liar. As for smoke, there’s smoke everywhere. Even from what’s been made public from the Mueller report, and from all the indictments and guilty pleas from Trump associates, it’s pretty clear that there are a number of fires, some of which, such as Russian inference in our elections, are still burning.

And the fact that Trump doesn’t want anyone to see the full Mueller report, or his taxes, or even have Mueller, or Donald, Jr., testify before Congress look like the acts of a guilty man trying to hide his crimes. He’s even saying that he’ll fight any possible impeachment all the way to the Supreme Court. Why would he even need to do that when Republicans control the Senate – unless he really is so guilty that he fears his own party will disavow him if all the facts come out?

Trump isn’t acting like an innocent man wronged by the opposing political party. He’s acting like a very guilty man, who’s using every possible stratagem to keep all the facts from becoming public.

Like I said above… if it quacks like a duck… or in this case, behaves like a guilty man…

There is often a significant difference between an ethical action and a legal action. Under current U.S. law, it’s obviously not illegal to raise the price of a drug that a child needs to stay alive from $40 to nearly $40,000, but is it ethical? I’d say it’s not, especially given the record level of profits reaped by the pharmaceutical industry. I’d even claim it’s a form of medical/health blackmail.

Is it legal for police to be stricter in enforcing the law on minorities than on Caucasians? So far, in most cases, it’s been held to be legal, but is it ethical?

Is it legal for a professional basketball team with a losing record not to play as hard near the end of the season… and possibly gain a higher draft pick? Again… so far it appears to be.

Is it legal for members of a given faith to prefer hiring those of the same faith? Or giving preference in promotions or bonuses? While discriminating by race is illegal, discrimination by faith appears to be alive and well, at least in certain parts of the U.S.

The list of such instances in the United States is long, and from what I can see, it’s getting longer. So why do I care?

Because ethics are the foundation of a healthy society. All one has to do is look around to see that. One of the reasons why tens of thousands of immigrants struggle out of certain central and Latin American countries is because of corruption and violence, and that corruption and violence are the result of totally unchecked greed on the part of governments, so-called law enforcement agencies, and even of large corporations and wealthy individuals.

One cannot instill law-abiding behavior through law enforcement. The police should represent and personify ethics through their actions, and I believe the majority do – but far from all of them. Even so, with a few exceptions, the best that law enforcement can do as an institution is to catch and remove law-breakers.

When legality is the rule, rather than ethics, more and more people do what they can, rather than what they should, and this leads to more and more corruption because no code of law can cover everything.

As a side note, this is a particular problem with corporations, because law has essentially held that a corporation’s greatest obligation is to maximize profits for the shareholders, within the confines of the law, regardless of the impact on people, on society, or on the environment. And when corporations use their revenues in support of political actions to whittle away legal protections on health and environment, in order to increase profits that are already at historical all-time highs, isn’t this greed a form of corruption?

When people see that the wealthy and the powerful can get away with anything, why should they be ethical and obey the law? And when the wealthy and powerful get more wealthy and more powerful, and it gets harder and harder for the poorer segments of society to make a living, there’s an ever-growing temptation for the non-wealthy to follow the example of the wealthy. And in countries like Honduras or Guatemala and a score of others, there’s too much violence for underpaid law enforcement to handle, partly if not largely, because the poor don’t have enough money to pay taxes, and the wealthy control the system and ensure that they’re not taxed enough to pay for public services.

Aren’t we already seeing those sorts of trends here?

Equally important… if your standard for ethical behavior is what the law allows you to get away with, you may consider yourself a law-abiding citizen, but are you really an ethical individual?

Some readers may recall that in 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the major U.S. publishers because, as a group, they refused to discount ebooks to Amazon, and that practice was considered a restraint of trade [it was far more complicated than that but since that’s not the point of this blog, that summary will do], and all of them eventually capitulated, even Apple, and paid fines of various amounts, none of which were insubstantial.

At that time, I wrote a letter to DOJ protesting the Department’s action because I felt that DOJ was in fact enabling not only a monopsony but a monopolistic practice where, in the end, after Amazon drove out or weakened a great number of brick and mortar bookstores and bookstore chains, Amazon would essentially replace them and prices would rise.

And what happened? The entire Borders chain went out of business; Barnes and Noble has been closing stores and cutting back on books in stock in the remaining stores; and a great number of independent bookstores closed, far more than have opened in a recent small resurgence of smaller bookstores. In addition, in effect, Amazon is also now effectively dictating some terms of sale to the publishers, which it is able to do because it’s the single largest sales outlet in the book business, and that, in effect, illustrates that Amazon is in point of fact the textbook case of a monopsony.

Even more interestingly, Amazon now has brick and mortar stores and is planning more, although the Amazon experiment with “pop-up kiosks” just ended with the closure of all 87 kiosks and an Amazon statement to the effect that Amazon would be concentrating on the more permanent Amazon bookstores.

As a result of all this, publishing margins dropped, and when those margins fell, publishers stopped publishing, or published less frequently mid-list authors or authors who had something new or different to offer but who did not sell as well. Even the incomes of many best-selling authors dropped, particularly those without an “outside” media presence.

Through its marketplace, Amazon is also doing much of the same thing to retailers across the entire United States, using lure of lower prices in the present to obtain a market position that enables it to eventually control the market and raise prices.

But that’s what Americans get for always focusing on price… even when it’s clear they’ll pay more in the long run, both in consumer prices and in jobs.

The latest edition of Scientific American printed a table from the Silencing Science Tracker, created and maintained by the Columbia University Law School, which listed almost 200 actions by the federal government to cut off scientific research and muzzle the reporting of scientific findings.

The federal agencies most involved in muzzling science were the U.S. EPA, the Department of Interior, the Department of Energy, HHS, and the Department of Agriculture. The forms such actions took include distorting or destroying data, restricting government scientists from attending conferences, closing down science advisory groups, removing scientists from such boards, and replacing scientists on science boards.

The vast majority of these actions appear to have been taken to suppress scientific information or expertise contrary to the political agenda of the White House, such as air pollution health data, occupational health exposures, climate change data, and pesticide exposure data. Apparently, when the White House cannot find studies or data to support its political agenda, it just restricts the dissemination of data, muzzles government scientists, or replaces scientists with industry lobbyists… and then ignores any scientist – or anyone else — who suggests that the administration’s actions were motivated for business or political ends.

Those who agree with the administration’s actions seem to believe that scientific findings can be changed by wishing otherwise, or ignored with no impact. In addition to that, it seems as though almost no one outside the science community seems to care about the need for impartial scientific findings, or that science is being muzzled or distorted… and that public health, education, and the environment are being sacrificed to political expediency on the largest scale in U.S. history.