A recent edition of The Economist featured an article on a series of studies conducted by Roland Fryer, a tenured African American economics professor at Harvard. Fryer was concerned that his own encounters with police as a teenager might color his views on the use of force by police officers in dealing with blacks and other minorities. His first study reviewed and analyzed five million cases from New York City from 2003 to 2013. The raw data indicated that blacks and Hispanics were 50% more likely to encounter non-lethal uses of force than were whites. Even after analyzing the data to account for factors such as attempted assault on an officer or flight to avoid arrest, blacks were still some 17% more likely to incur the use of force than were whites, and even in the case of blacks reported to be perfectly compliant by police, such blacks were 21% more likely to have some force used against them than were whites.

Another study, by Ted Miller of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, reached a similar conclusion about the disproportionate stopping and harassing of minorities.

But the most shocking figures to Fryer were those uncovered when the two separate research teams he supervised looked into the over 1300 shootings by police in ten police departments from 2000 to 2015, including the cities of Houston and Los Angeles. The raw data found that blacks weren’t any more likely to be shot by an officer than non-blacks. Fryer then dug deeper, looking through 6000 incident reports from Houston, looking at all incidents involving shooting, Tasers, or other situations where lethal force could have been justifiably used, but was not. The result remained the same. Black suspects were actually less likely to have been shot than non-black subjects, and similar results appeared in the other police districts studied.

In effect, racial bias appeared in all kinds of situations – except in the case of shootings or where police used or might have used guns or Tasers. Why was there this difference?

Fryer suggests that the reason is that incidents involving guns and Tasers all require higher-level review and that all police officers are well aware of that, and therefore take more care in dealing with such incidents, whereas less violent situations seldom see that kind of review. If that is the case, then the growing use of body cameras by police may also lead to a more equal treatment of blacks and other minorities.

But the problem of violence between police and those detained or arrested isn’t exactly one-sided. Miller pointed out that on average, every day, three people die and 150 people are treated at a hospital because they are injured by police, for total number of 55,000 annually. At the same time, Miller’s study showed that in 2012, an estimated 67,000 law enforcement personnel were assaulted, with 18,600 medically treated for injury and 48 killed. All of this shows, at least to me, that, yes, there’s a definite problem, and remedying it will be anything but quick or simple.

Like millions of Americans last Thursday night, I watched and listened to Donald Trump’s acceptance speech. The speech was about what I expected, but the reaction of the crowd was frightening, for more than a few reasons.

The speech ticked off and highlighted every concern and fear of the right-wingers, evangelicals, and “disenfranchised” white middle class males, and Trump’s answer to each concern was that he was going to fix it fast on January 20th, and that’s the equivalent of Peter Pan’s Neverland being transported to American politics.

Why? Because, first, Trump offered no specifics, and, second, that the vast majority of the problems that he highlighted (and I will admit that most are problem areas, if not always of the severity he claims) either cannot be “solved” by the President without action by the Congress as well, and Congress NEVER acts that fast, if it acts at all, or are problems that cannot be effectively addressed by the federal government at all. For example, except for the Capitol Police, under the jurisdiction of the Congress, police forces are under the jurisdiction of state and local governments. The various trade agreements that he deplores require Congressional action to be changed. So do most federal regulations, because they’re required by law.

Then there is the rather significant point that virtually every proposal he made requires more funding and more resources, and yet he proposed a massive income tax cut at a time when the federal deficit is already far too large.

The crowd, good Republicans all, was oblivious to all of this, and their chants, and Trump’s cheerleading, reminded me all too much of movie footage of Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s. What too many people either forget or never knew was that the German people felt the same way about the German parliament as many Americans do about Congress, and most either agreed or looked the other way when Hitler effectively abolished parliament, placing the blame on the communists.

At the same time, as I noted close to a year ago, Trump is raising issues that affect and worry possibly as much as half the U.S. population, if not more, although at this point a majority doesn’t appear to agree with his proposals for dealing with them. But if people perceive that these problem areas are getting worse and that Clinton doesn’t care or won’t address them effectively, Trump has a good shot at being elected President.

Add to that Trump’s total disregard for facts, his apparent failure to understand the Constitutional structure of our government (or his blatant demagoguery ignoring its limitations), and his supreme egotism, and combine those with the simplistic views of the current Republican party, and, if Trump is elected, the scene is set for some form of governmental/political catastrophe.

Are the Democrats much better? Their platform certainly promises more than Congress will ever deliver, but what Clinton proposes is at least technically doable, if not necessarily desirable, but Clinton’s less flamboyant approach isn’t likely to win over middle class males feeling disenfranchised, and those Americans with immigration and terrorists at the top of their worry lists.

In the end, the question is whether a woman promising the costly and largely possible, at the expense of the wealthiest Americans, can top a man promising to do the impossible in a campaign based on fear and nostalgia for a past that never was.

In terms of fatal risks, the most dangerous occupations in the United States are those of loggers, fishers, pilots, roofers, garbage collectors, and ranchers. Police rank fifteenth on the list, a fact pointed out by some of my readers.

The problem with that listing, though, is that it’s a single factor listing.

Compare that list to another list, that of the most stressful jobs. According to a study by CareerCast, the most stressful jobs of 2016 are, in order: enlisted military personnel, firefighters, pilots, and police, followed by 24 other positions. Other sources add to the high stress jobs such professions as surgeons, teachers, and nurses, but almost all the various high stress job ranking lists include military personnel, firefighters, pilots, and police officers in some order at the top of the list.

One of the highest factors leading to stress for most people is uncertainty, of not knowing what to expect or when. In fact, almost any job can be high stress, especially if high expectations are placed on the worker without giving that worker either sufficient resources, time, or enough control of the situation, but what’s interesting about the “top four” high stress jobs is that all of them have high levels of uncertainty, ranging from all the time to part of the time, and that three of the four, all except pilots, almost always have to operate with insufficient resources, time, and control, while pilots have to deal with a different set of stresses, such as the responsibility of hundreds of lives in their hands, often terrible and unpredictable weather, and an unrelenting schedule.

Although all of the “top four” jobs involve uncertainty, only police and pilots face it largely unremittingly, and speaking as a former military pilot, except in combat, pilots don’t generally have to worry about the possibility that at any moment someone could be shooting at them. This knowledge can’t help but trigger anticipatory stress for police as well as for deployed military personnel.

Those who hire personnel for those jobs also recognize that fact by allowing people in those fields to retire early, a tacit and real acknowledgement of just how great a toll those occupations, with their combination of stress and risk, can take on people, not only mentally, but physically, and interestingly enough, recruiting enough qualified police and pilots is becoming more and more difficult.

Recently, a reader who is also a writer trying to get published wrote me lamenting the fact that her writing is similar to much of mine, in that it doesn’t begin with an immediate crisis, killing, or an action forcing everything into a literary hundred yard dash. Or, put another way, she doesn’t write slam-bang action openings, and it appears to her – and to me – that there’s more and more emphasis in F&SF for just such openings.

Now, I have nothing against openings with action. Fall of Angels begins with a violent battle scene, followed by a failing ship, and an emergency abandon-ship scene. Of Tangible Ghosts opens with a murder. An assassination by explosives sets the stage in Imager’s Intrigue. But frankly, most of my books open more prosaically with the killings, battles, explosions, treason, wars, etc., coming a bit later. And that’s usually the way real life is.

The problem with beginning with lots of action is that anything that comes after that seems like a let-down, especially to those readers who read only for the action. Those are the readers, of course, who usually won’t enjoy my books anyway because they’re “toooo slooow,” to quote one of them. But an action-packed opening can be a trap because it tends to imply that more and more action will follow, and if the action level doesn’t increase, that lets down “action-oriented” readers, and even if the level of action stays the same, then it’s just “more of the same,” and to avoid that an author needs to ratchet up the levels of violence, and often, sex and gore.

I’ve been reading F&SF for about sixty years, and it appears to me, especially in the last fifteen to twenty years, that the violence, speed, action, and shock-value quotients, so to speak, have all accelerated and become ever more prevalent. I’m certainly not against action, or even violence, and my characters, have, upon occasion, done some terrible deeds – and I’m talking about the protagonists, not about the villains – but I have the feeling that more and more authors are relying far too heavily on action and violence and shock value for the sake of shock value, rather than on plot, character, and, frankly, the technical strength of writing, in order to reach and hold readers.

Recently, say, over the past ten years, I’ve seen an increase in letters and emails to me that say that I’m one of a handful of authors that the writer can still enjoy reading because too many authors focus on action, sex, and violence. In the first twenty-five to thirty years of my professional career, I doubt that I got even a handful of such communications. Obviously, many of these writers are older and more traditional readers, but some clearly are not.

Given this reaction, limited as it may be, and my own continuing ability to sell books, I do have the suspicion that there’s still a market for a less violent approach to writing F&SF, but, as in many things, only time will tell, but I will say to any aspiring writer that the story should trump the marketing appeal of the slam-bang opening.

Last week a shooter killed five Dallas policemen and wounded nine others at a protest held in Dallas to protest the killings of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana. This is the largest single killing of police officers since 9/11.

Too many people remain focused almost exclusively on police abuses, and such abuses clearly exist. There’s absolutely no doubt that they do. And for all the light shined on such abuses, they continue to occur. Some police departments have made great strides in dealing with the issue of discriminatory “over-policing” of minorities, especially blacks, and some have done far less to address the problem of police abuse, especially of black males.

Police officers need to realize that the problem isn’t going to just die down and go away. It won’t, not so long as abuses continue, so long as black anger increases, and so long as there are three hundred million guns in the United States.

Yet, from what I’ve seen reported, the Dallas police department is one of those that seems to have been trying hard and doing well in this regard, one headed by a black police chief, and one where the officers killed were on duty protecting a peaceful demonstration, ironically against police excesses – until the shooter opened fire.

That said, the black community has to face up to some very hard facts as well. By any standard, even taking into account poverty, poor schooling, and various systemic problems that cause discrimination, including racial profiling, the crime rate among young black males is unacceptable. Other impoverished minorities face a great many of the same structural and social problems, and the crime rate of their young males comes nowhere close to that of young black males. Drive-by shootings and random violence and killing of children as a result of gang fights are not deaths caused by police behavior.

Yet all too many on each side of this divide, and it is a divide, refuse to see or address their own problems, and the anger and the shouting seem to grow louder. While neither side is totally blameless and neither side is totally to blame, too many on each side are behaving that way. In effect, it’s another example of polarization.

David Brown, the Dallas police chief, said it well, that the divisiveness has to stop, but it won’t stop until the majorities and minorities on each side in all metropolitan areas and towns take a long, hard, and honest look at their own problems. There’s been progress, but not nearly enough, and we as a society are running out of time.

Theoretically, the words “diva” or “divo” are Italian for the most prominent singers, either female or male. Among professional classical singers, usually when those terms are applied to a singer, they’re meant in a much less complimentary way, a form of shorthand for a self-important pain in the ass, who makes life difficult for colleagues, conductors, accompanists, or anyone else who does not worship at the diva’s/divo’s feet.

While such divas or divos may be even outstanding and highly acclaimed, few end up having long or lasting careers. One of the very basic reasons for this is that, compared to the number of extremely talented professional singers, the number of top-flight and high-paying opera houses is very limited, and the number of good roles suited to even the best singers in each voice type is also limited.

There’s also a misconception that divos and divas only exist in the world of music, but I’ve certainly run across them in other fields, particularly in politics, but also in education, and even among F&SF writers. No… I won’t name names, because that’s not the point of what else I’m going to say. The point is simple. If you’re enough of a pain in the ass, no matter how talented you are, sooner or later, you’re going to be replaced. If you have enormous talent and ability, it will occur later, but it will happen. This is true whether you’re a writer, an artist, or an editor.

And if you’re a beginning author, you won’t even get to the point of being recognized as a divo or diva. I know. I’ve seen it happen on more than a few occasions, where an author insists he knows more than an editor and that the editor doesn’t know how to market his book or doesn’t understand his genius… or something else. In most cases that I’ve seen, those writers never really went anywhere. [And by the way, from what I’ve seen, in writing, there are more divos than divas.]

I’m not saying that editors are always right. They’re not. But almost always, a seasoned editor is far more likely to be right than a beginning author. The seasoned editors got there by having a better track record than other editors, and if you don’t think editing is a competitive business, talk to a few editors.

All that doesn’t mean an author can’t ask why, especially if the asking is done politely. And it doesn’t mean an author can’t suggest. But unless you’re already at the top of the bestseller lists, you’d best not demand. And even being at the top of the list isn’t proof against divo-self-destruction of career. I’ve seen that happen, too.

Just like singers, we authors are kept in business and kept writing by having enough people buy our books that the royalties pay the bills for us and for our publishers – and the same is still true if you self-publish. Most editors handle a number of authors. They tend to resent authors who take up a great deal of their time unless those authors produce incredibly good sales numbers, and they still resent those authors, which means, if you’re one of those, when the sales numbers drop, that editor isn’t going to be quite so solicitous. And if you’re not one of those authors, and are barely making the sales cut, when someone else comes along who’s much easier to work with, your books will go on the back burner, and that’s if you’re lucky.

I suppose the point I’m hammering is simply: Be the best you can be, but never be a divo/diva.

Most of us, as human beings, tend to feel very strongly about those beliefs that we hold dear. In most places, those strong feelings center on religious faith, sometimes on the family, sometimes on political or social beliefs, and to a lesser degree on other matters, at least for most people, from what I’ve observed. There’s nothing inherently wrong with believing in something strongly, even passionately, but most of human history is replete with violence seemingly triggered by those passionate beliefs. Why do I say “seemingly”? Because, in the overwhelming majority of instances, those seeking power and dominance use those beliefs in causes against others in order to bolster their own position and power.

Henry VIII’s split with Rome and the Catholic faith, and his creation of the Church of England, had little to do with the vast majority of tenets of the Catholic Church, but everything to do with his desire to divorce his queen and remarry in order to have a son to inherit the crown – surely an issue of power and dominance.

Luther’s ninety-five theses nailed to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, sparked the Protestant Reformation, which was initially far more about reforming abuses of power in the Catholic Church than about changing fundamental beliefs in God and Christ.

The split in Islam, between Shia and Sunni, arose essentially over the issue of who should lead the faith after the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632 A.D. While other issues separating the two have arisen, the split was basically about power and dominance, and it remains the same today.

While Ireland has seen a long history of Protestant/Catholic conflict and animosity, that conflict is far more rooted in power than doctrine, since the vast majority of those in power in Ireland after the end of the Williamite War in 1691 were, prior to the Irish Revolution of 1916, members of the Protestant Ascendency. After the partition of Ireland and the end of most hostilities in the Republic of Ireland in 1923, the Protestants retained economic and social control in Northern Ireland, and that conflict continued almost unabated until the agreement of 1998, although hostilities still simmer, largely because of economic and political inequalities.

The American Revolution, for all the talk of freedom, was about who controlled the resources and the economy of the then thirteen colonies and about British restrictions on trade and manufactures.

The Taliban and ISIS, while they claim to be Islamic, seem to be far more interested in power and control than in any of the more peaceful aspects of Islam. And certainly, the Crusades were far more about power and plunder than religion, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary.

This desire for control, and wanting to have government force people who are different to “do things my way” remains a disturbing aspect of politics in the United States, and elsewhere.

No matter what anyone may say in religious terms about the abortion/anti-abortion conflict in the U.S., that conflict is purely and simply about who has control of a woman’s body – the woman or an outsider, whether that outsider is either a religious belief, her husband, or the government. All the rationalizing and reasoning, all the saying why, doesn’t change that basic fact. It’s about control. So is the issue of who can marry whom.

Yet government has to have laws, and enforce them, or there will be chaos. As a number of politicians and sages have noted, liberty also requires order. Order requires popular support. So any law that enslaves or unnecessarily controls a significant percentage of the population eventually creates unrest and often violence. This rather obvious truth tends to be ignored by those who use beliefs to obtain or maintain power over others.

As far as laws or practices being unnecessarily controlling, there’s a simple question that can resolve many of those questions. Does the law in practice physically or economically harm certain groups of people? It would seem to me, simple man that I am, that believing in a different god or the same god in a different way harms no one. Taking up a gun to force that belief does so.

The bottom line is whether beliefs are used for self-motivation and guidance or whether they’re used to force beliefs on others – or to harm or kill those who believe differently.

Beware those who trumpet beliefs while brandishing laws or weapons and ask who will gain control of what – and how.

The other day I ran across an interesting statement from a scientist (which I’d attribute if I could recall where I read it) to the effect that the “universe has no colors.” He went on to explain that what we see as colors are essentially the different energy levels of photons either emitted by or reflected from objects and that colors are the interpretation of those levels by our brains. Experiments and observation have determined that this visual perception differs from species to species and between men and women. Women perceive more different shades than men in the ranges of blue and green.

None of this is necessarily particularly surprising, and while colors may only be an interpretation of photonic frequencies by my gray matter, I certainly prefer that interpretation to shades of gray. To me, it would seem that living in a world of gray would be rather depressing, but that just might be my personal bias.

Years ago, Charles Harness wrote a book entitled Redworld, set on a world around Barnard’s Star where colors and color perception are very different because Barnard’s Star emits largely reddish light and the planetary atmosphere is an oxygen/ammonia mix. The result is that all the planetary phonic frequencies, if you will, are overwhelmingly shades of red and ochre, and the intelligent humanoid life there has evolved to discern a wide range of reddish shades, but infrequent “colors” like violet or yellow are perceived as gray or black. I won’t speak to the accuracy of this depiction, but since Harness had an undergraduate degree in chemistry, I would suspect it’s largely correct.

In retrospect, Harness was on to something, although I didn’t see it that way when I first read the short novel nearly thirty years ago. Since “colors” are more easily and quickly distinguished than are shades of gray, that interpretation enhances our perceptive ability, and as a result, our survivability as a species, and the same would have held true of Pol and his people in Redworld.

Yet how many people consider how perception colors not only our views of the world [yes, it is a terrible pun], but biases how we think? And yet, that perception of the universe varies between individuals and species… and yet, as the protagonist in Redworld is told, white [or blond] for him is black.

Earlier this year, all of the Democratic candidates for the presidency proposed a new tax, one targeted almost exclusively at the wealthiest Americans. Such a financial transaction tax (FTT) would impose a sales tax on trades of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other securities. The tax levels proposed differ, and range from one basis point [one hundredth of one percent] to as high as fifty basis points, although most economists seem to think the lower ranges will actually generate more tax revenue. Just to keep this in perspective, an FFT of one basis point would raise revenues of just ten cents on a transaction of one thousand dollars. A $100,000 transaction would raise just ten dollars.

That doesn’t sound like it would raise that much in revenue, but consider that annual trades in stocks alone in the U.S. are approaching fifty trillion dollars, and the total trading in stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other similar financial instruments exceeds six hundred trillion dollars, according to the Tax Policy Center. Depending on the tax level chosen, annual revenues would range from around $40 billion to as much as $210 billion.

The interesting aspect of the FTT is that the vast majority of the taxes would fall on the wealthiest Americans and particularly on high volume automated securities trades, those trades which contribute the least to economic growth and perhaps the most to the pocketbooks of hedge fund managers and the like. Over 75% of the tax would fall on the top fifth of the population in earnings, and 40% on the top one percent, but even for the top one percent, the tax would increase their overall tax liability by less than one percent, and for those in lower income brackets, the impact would be less than a quarter of a percent of income.

Some of those in the finance industry complain that such a tax would reduce trading volumes without decreasing market volatility, especially if an FTT is imposed with tax levels as high as those under consideration in Europe, but even the highest rates proposed to date in the U.S., by Senator Sanders, are well below the proposed European levels. Critics also suggest that an FTT would turn investors away from U.S. markets, but in practice that seems highly unlikely, given that such taxes either already exist elsewhere or are under active consideration.

Critics of the FTT tend to overlook several basic points. First of all, high-speed stock trading is simply using advanced technologies in order to get information a millisecond before other traders. High-speed trading doesn’t make markets more efficient, but it does increase stock prices, out of which the traders make money. It’s actually a sophisticated form of an old practice, called front-running, which was illegal. High-speed trading doesn’t create efficiency, but it does create the possibility of debacles like the “Flash Crash” of May 2010.

Second, use of high-speed computers, sophisticated algorithms, and confidential information unavailable to small investors doesn’t improve the productivity of financial markets. Such technology and systems just tilt the market in favor of those traders. Likewise, trading in ever more complex derivatives – making bets on bets – doesn’t add real value. It’s merely speculation that makes the system more vulnerable to big losses, as occurred in the financial crisis of 2008.

Third, one of the aspects of the finance sector that’s been overlooked is that it now produces a quarter of corporate profits while creating just 4% of American jobs. Who says speculation and computerized market-churning doesn’t pay?

Given all that, why shouldn’t we push for a financial transactions tax? Especially since most of those insisting that we need to balance the federal budget are the very people who’d pay most of the tax?

In the musical Hamilton, there’s a song, although it pains me to call it that, entitled “The Room Where It Happens,” which deals with the whole idea of compromises and deals made behind closed doors, as well as a few other matters. In counterpoint to that, a recent article by Jonathan Rauch in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled “What’s Ailing American Politics” dissects the reasons for the current failure of the American political system, and much of the reason for that failure Rausch attributes to “excessive reforms,” all made with the best of intentions, but which now, in the age of excessive media coverage, which he fails to note, interesting enough, has resulted in a situation where political compromises in Congress are essentially almost impossible, except in extreme and extenuating circumstances. In turn, that forces the President to use what administrative tools he or she has in order to get much accomplished, and that, in turn angers Congress more and further polarizes the political spectrum.

As illustrated both in history and the Hamilton musical, in the past often the bitterest of political opponents managed to hammer out compromises – except on one issue, that of slavery, which failure led inexorably to the Civil War. Some have said it was over states’ rights, but the principal reason for wanting a greater degree of states’ rights in the old South was the perceived need to continue the institution of slavery. In the end, however, that failure to reach an accommodation resulted in the bloodiest war in U.S. history. In an intellectual sense, and in terms of the views of southern landholders, the need to retain slavery is certainly understandable, since often the majority of the worth of those plantations lay as much, if not more, in the value of the slaves as in the value of the land. And no one likes the idea of an “outsider” confiscating by law family assets and changing an entire way of life, particularly when those in charge of the state governments are also generally from the ranks of the affluent landholders.

Unhappily, we’re seeing a variation on this theme today, where the current “landholders” are various segments of the one tenth of one percent of the U.S. population that don’t want their ways of life changed. The quest for profits and control have become paramount in the U.S. today, particularly the profits of massive corporations, and much of that profit has come from reducing the cost of labor as a percentage of operating costs, either through off-shoring labor-intensive processes or through automation. Although I’ve never seen it quantified, these two initiatives have resulted in the displacement of comparatively well-paid skilled and semi-skilled workers, putting them into the labor pool at a time when not as many other good-paying jobs were being created in the United States. In turn, this effectively restrained wage growth across the entire economy. The result was the effective devaluation of the worth of the minimum wage and general degeneration of middle class wage levels over the past thirty years.

Because of the popular perception that the majority of higher-paying jobs require a college or even a post-graduate degree — a perception that has a great deal of truth in it, but which neglects higher-skilled jobs requiring additional non-collegiate training and education, not surprisingly, young people began attempting to obtain those credentials at an ever higher rate, but with the demand, colleges and universities had to expand, and expansion costs money, which state legislatures didn’t want to fund. So tuition costs soared. And because a great number of parents of these younger people didn’t have the funds to pay for their children’s higher education, unsurprisingly, since their wages hadn’t kept pace, the students took out student loans.

This has resulted in a situation where the U.S. is now producing roughly twice as many college graduates each year as there are higher-paid college jobs for them, and that, in turn, has a depressing effect on the wages and salaries of those who do obtain those jobs, and a debt burden that most likely can’t possibly be repaid be those who have to settle for lower-paid jobs. Another result of all these trends is that we now have possibly the largest percentage of “under-employed” people in the history of the country.

And they aren’t happy about it, as shown by the recent presidential primary campaigns.

Yet those who are responsible for this situation seem to be oblivious to the potential forces that they have unleashed, and they oppose any changes, any compromises to deal with this continuing and growing problem, just as the old South refused to confront the growing problem of slavery. The same is also true, by the way, of the position of the NRA.

As Mark Twain is reputed to have said, while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme. I might be missing something, but it seems to me that the Russian aristocracy of 1910, the southern landholders of 1860, and the U.S. robber barons of the 1880s all might rhyme with the U.S. economic aristocracy of today.

That sort of rhyme usually doesn’t turn out well.

I’d be the first to admit that there are people I do not like; faiths which I feel are destructive, prejudicial, and antithetical to human rights; and politicians who I believe pursue unproductive and often evil ends. But, at least so far, I haven’t gone around shooting them or filling the air and the internet with vituperation and hate speech. And I certainly wouldn’t even think about doing violence to individuals merely because of their beliefs, sexual or political orientation, gender, or their ethnic background. I might well consider violence against those who have actually committed violence against others on grounds of belief, gender, ethnicity or the like.

But what I want to know is why so many people in the world believe that it is their right, duty, or obligation to beat up, torture, kill, or restrict the personal freedom of those who do not share their religious faith, sexual orientation, or political beliefs. I can understand locking up people who commit violent acts, and I can even understand violent protests against oppression.

But what earthly or unearthly good is accomplished by staging a protest against someone’s sexuality at that person’s funeral? Especially when someone has been cruelly murdered because of their sexual orientation?

Europe was wracked with centuries of religious wars over which faith would control what government. Tens of millions of innocents died. That was exactly why the Founding Fathers wanted separation of church and state, yet today we now have millions of various religious fundamentalists here in the United States demanding that secular law conform to their beliefs.

Just because it’s far worse in much of the world shouldn’t really offer much comfort. In terms of basic human rights, why should any government have the right to support or to enforce practices that insist that leaving the faith – whatever that faith might be – merits a death sentence? Or that anyone who criticizes or mocks a faith or its tenets or its prophets or leaders deserves to die? Or that genders other than straight heterosexual males have lesser or no rights, or perhaps even no right to life?

All of that boils down to outright hatred of anyone who is different. It’s one thing to hate someone for actual despicable acts; it’s another to hate simply because people are different. Or perhaps, it’s just an excuse to grab or hold power, and that makes it even more despicable.

But then, it’s oh so much simpler just to claim that all differences are “wrong,” and should be punished… or that people deserve what comes to them because they don’t share the same beliefs. It’s funny, too, how so many people who pray to the same almighty god are so willing to kill people who don’t believe in that same god in the same way.

Hatred, anyone?

Last week I watched a gun advocate claim that household guns deter crime. Like most political claims, there is a small grain of truth behind this enormously misleading assertion, but in only one area.

Statistics from the National Crime Victimization study show that having and using a gun did reduce the loss of property against theft. Looking at crimes where the perpetrator’s intent was to steal, the victims lost property in only 38% of the incidents when using a gun in “self-defense,”compared with 56% of the incidents when taking other actions against the thief.

In all other crimes against households, having a gun seems to make little difference in the outcomes. Using a gun in self-defense doesn’t reduce the risk of injury in the case of a break-in or assault in the home. Just over four percent of victims were injured during or after a self-defense gun use — the same percentage as were injured during or after taking other protective actions.

Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) indicate there are fewer than one hundred burglaries resulting in a homicide in the U.S. each year. BJS statistics also show that there were only 1,600 defense gun uses in the U.S. in 2014, but there were more than 200,000 firearms stolen in household burglaries and property crimes each year.

Studies of all fifty states have also shown that the higher the rate of firearm ownership, the higher the rate of gun deaths. When firearms ownership goes down, so do gun deaths. Likewise, when firearms ownership climbs in an area, increased gun deaths follow, indicating that gun ownership creates more deaths, rather than the contention that people buy guns because they’re reacting to firearms violence.

Nearly two-thirds of the people in the U.S. live in homes without guns, and statistics show no evidence that they are at greater risk of being robbed, injured or killed by criminals compared with citizens in homes with guns. Instead, the evidence is overwhelming that a gun in the home increases the likelihood not only that a household member will be shot accidentally, but also that someone in the home will die in a suicide or homicide. In the case of sexual assaults, in less than one half of one percent of the assaults did the victim use a gun in self-defense.

So… given all these statistics, why is there such opposition to even modest gun control measures?

The first reason is fear. People fear being victims, and they want to take action so they won’t be, even if that action creates the certainty of greater gun deaths. It’s in effect a form of selfishness, of saying, “I don’t give a damn about what my actions do to other people; I want to protect myself and my family.” The problem is, as the statistics show, having a gun usually does just the opposite.

Over the years, I’ve seen people lobby and complain about seat-belt laws, initially insisting that seatbelts would trap you in a burning car and otherwise create more deaths. I’ve seen motorcyclists complain about helmet laws and claim that such laws restrict personal freedoms. Or companies complain about environmental laws restricting their emission of harmful pollutants because those laws would make them unprofitable or put them out of business. A tremendous percentage of the opposition to measures that make society safe comes out of the very human motives of fear and not wanting to lose control.

What the NRA and the gun lobby people don’t want to admit is that they don’t really care about anyone or anything else. Their crusade for “second amendment rights” is based on appealing to people’s fear of losing control and becoming victims. We all have that fear. It’s fundamental to human existence.

The problem is that more guns, especially guns with larger magazines and more rapid rates of fire, just make the likelihood of more people becoming victims even greater. And the more victims there are, and the more widely those shootings are publicized, the more fearful people become, and the more guns that are sold, if to a smaller percentage of households.

Fear based on irrational feelings leads to more guns and more deaths by than guns than is the case without guns, and that’s something that’s gotten overlooked in all the furor.

The other day I came across a summary compilation of health care data put out by Optum, which is said to track over a hundred different health metrics across the United States and which shows various regional differences in health problems.

Some of those differences are easy to comprehend, such as the high prevalence of hypertension in the “old South,” because a variety of associated other serious conditions also occur there, including diabetes and high cholesterol, most likely because of a higher level of rural and urban poverty, a diet higher in saturated fats, as well as other factors. Likewise, the incidence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) occurs in the states with both the highest levels of smoking per capita and the areas with some of the greatest percentages of deep shaft coal mining. For some reason that the Optum researchers can’t determine, lower back pain is the highest in North and South Dakota.

The area that has the highest rate of depression is, according to Optum, the “Rocky Mountain states,” and Optum opines this just might be because people there are just more willing to talk about their depression. I don’t buy it, at least not entirely. When I looked at the map Optum provided, the highest levels of depression coincide, from what I can determine, with the concentrations of LDS population. Now I can see why no health researcher would want to put that in print, but since I’m an economist by training and like looking into numbers, the coincidence was striking.

Also, to me, it makes sense. It’s a well-known and documented fact that the highest rate of Prozac use nationwide is by Utah women, which is hardly surprising, since Mormon women are under incredible social pressure to be perfect in every way, while also deferring, if quietly, to the males in their life. For whatever reason, they have, on average, more than twice the number of children women in other faiths, or no faith, in the U.S. have, yet married Utah women work at about the same percentage as other married women, and, as also documented, for lower wages and salaries than women elsewhere in the United States, and Utah is the state with one of the lowest, if not the lowest, percentage of adult women with a college degree. They’re also expected to be smiling and cheerful all the time.

This suggests to me a great deal of pressure, unrelenting pressure, and unrelenting pressure can often result in depression. This, of course, doesn’t mean all Utah women are depressed, just a higher percentage than women elsewhere in the United States. And, certainly, having more children in a lower-wage state with ten percent of your gross income going to the church might just add some stress to the men as well.

But I can almost guarantee that very few, if any, health professionals will dare to suggest that a particular religion or religion-influenced culture might just have an impact on the incidence of depression.

Once again, members of the U.S. Congress are pounding on the National Science Foundation, demanding that the agency focus on “useful” research. While there is a rather large difference of opinion about what might be “useful” research, there is, I believe, a question of whether any NSF research should be immediately “useful,” especially since the U.S. corporate sector has moved away from funding basic research to a great degree. Various studies over the last five years show that in all fields corporate funding of basic research has dropped to one third the level it was thirty years ago, although total corporate R&D funding has remained comparatively constant in inflation-adjusted dollars. This finding includes the acquisition of start-ups, as well, meaning that even when the basic research done by star-up companies later acquired by large companies is included, overall basic research remains at one third the level of 30 years ago.

Obviously, there are exceptions, such as Google and Elon Musk, but those exceptions are far outweighed by the bulk of corporations, which are far more interested in short-term, incremental research that results in immediate product improvement or new products that don’t require significant development expenses.

At the same time, U.S. federal funding for research and development has fallen significantly over the past 50 years, from almost 10% of the budget in 1968 to around 3% in 2015.

The problem with focusing on “useful” research is that no one, literally no one, knows what basic research will turn out to be useful… or when. Einstein’s theories are absolutely necessary for today’s GPS systems, but it was seventy years or so after he postulated them before GPS systems came into wide use.

When Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier discovered CRISPR, the most powerful DNA editing technology ever discovered, described by the MIT Technology Review as “the biggest biotech discovery of the century,” they were studying the system that bacteria use to defend themselves against viruses, not looking for a world-transforming DNA editing tool, which is what it turned out to be.

Google, now a $250 billion corporation, actually got its start with an NSF grant to a research project.

Hunter Rawlings, president of the Association of American Universities, has been quoted as saying that “the iPhone depends on eight or nine basic technologies, none of which were invented by Apple. Those inventions were discovered at research universities or government laboratories, which were funded by the taxpayer.”

What’s troubling about all of this is that more and more basic research is being funded by governments other than the U.S., and that means that more bright young scientists go elsewhere, and that more and more of the basic research that underlies tomorrow’s technologies is going to come to U.S. corporations second-hand, if at all, and that some of them might also find yet another reason to move their operations and headquarters somewhere other than the United States.

In this world,for politicians, “useful” basic research translates into government-restricted research and far less future benefit for the U.S., a lesson not learned by the late Senator Proxmire a generation ago and still unlearned by senators and representatives today.

My fantasy books are often labeled as “epic fantasy,” but over the years, more than a few readers have complained that I don’t write epic fantasy. One even noted that the only thing epic about the Recluce Saga was the number of books and words. While I disagree somewhat with that description, that reader was on to something.

My fantasy books are largely about protagonists, as individuals, who are involved, or often caught, in epic events that go far beyond them. I write about their conflicts, beliefs, and struggles as they’re caught in times of great change.

Admittedly, in some cases, those individuals are in positions of power, or attempting to get into such positions, but even those who do gain power find that many of the events with which they must contend or endure are indeed beyond their powers. Creslin, in The Towers of the Sunset, discovers that he cannot change the mechanics of basic economics, and he doesn’t create a powerful land from scratch, but rather a small outpost of order that’s just strong enough and tough enough and worth little enough that the major powers don’t want to bother any longer. Cerryl, from Colors of Chaos, discovers that he can either have the woman he loves or children, but not both, and that even as High Wizard, he’s definitely constrained. Dorrin, The Magic Engineer, cannot change the culture of Recluce single-handedly, although what he begins will in fact do that. Even Lorn, who achieves great power, is limited in what changes he can make… and how long they will last.

Part of that is because, for better or worse, what I learned as a junior officer, a pilot, an economist, a political staffer in national politics, and as a consultant is that the sweeping changes and great battles that dominate much epic fantasy seldom happen that way in real life, not that there aren’t occasionally sweeping changes and great battles. Also, societies and their cultures are far more powerful than most people think, and what a single individual can accomplish is anything but unlimited, and that the greater the accomplishment, generally the higher the price.

That doesn’t mean I don’t write about protagonists that don’t accomplish a great deal, just that the focus is more on them, and what they do within the framework of the world in which they exist, whereas, so far as I can determine, “epic” fantasy revolves around great battles that determine the future of the world, or at least a significant part of it… and sometimes the universe. By that definition, I don’t write epic fantasy, and I have no desire to write that kind of novel or series.

Every so often I run across a commentary or published letter to the editor that both infuriates and saddens me. The great majority of them are along the lines of the most recent one I saw, which is why I decided to comment on it and what it represents. The letter in question asked why we’re spending so much money on space programs and research when so much needs to be done on earth. Besides the point that a tremendous amount of good for those of us on earth has come from such programs, the other point is that the amount spent on space programs is a tiny fraction of the U.S. federal budget. In fact, right now NASA spending is one half of one percent of total federal spending.

In past years, the same complaint has been leveled at foreign aid. Even today, polls show that Americans believe, on average, that 26% of federal spending goes to foreign aid, when the total is actually less than one percent.

Americans believe that ten percent of federal spending goes to pay non-defense federal employees. The real amount is a third of that. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is another area. Americans believe it takes up five percent of federal spending. The reality is one tenth of one percent.

Interestingly enough, popular estimates of spending for the programs that most people find “worthwhile” are far more accurate, as in the case of Social Security, where people believe, again, on average, that Social Security takes up twenty percent of total federal outlays, which it does.

In short, the figures that people use are the ones that support their beliefs, despite the fact that the correct numbers for foreign aid, for instance, have been published for years. And even when “everyone” knows the correct numbers, they can’t or won’t do the figures. An example of this is immigration. The figure of eleven million illegal immigrants has been printed, denounced, graphed, and presented in almost every way possible over the past several years. The U.S. population is now roughly 320 million people, and “legal” immigrants comprise just over ten percent of the population, so that all immigrants, legal and illegal, comprise less than 14% of the total population of the U.S. – as opposed to the 33% that Americans, on average, believe. [Of course, both the correct and the “popular” figures ignore the fact that everyone in the U.S. is either an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants, and that includes Native Americans, although their ancestors arrived some 15,000 years before everyone else’s.]

Such distortions abound everywhere politically. One “liberal” group has been declaring that 57% of the U.S. budget goes to defense spending, except a look at the fine print reveals that’s 57% of federal “discretionary” spending, which doesn’t include the bulk of federal spending. Defense spending amounts to around 21% of total federal spending, possibly as high as 24%, given which recent fiscal year’s data is used.

It used to be said that people were entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. Apparently, now, everyone is also entitled to their own facts.

There are many ways to define or categorize politics, whether by tactics, structure, customary practices, or other means. One of those other means is categorizing the politics of a system by the basic purpose of such politics. The noted military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted, “War is a continuation of politics by other means.” But what is often missed in that definition is Clausewitz tacitly assumes politics is a form of conflict short of war… and that, in my experience, is certainly true.

While there are many purposes behind political conflict, those that are most basic, at least from what I have observed, are the politics of economic conflict, which one might call the politics of avarice, and ideological conflict, or the politics of belief. Historically, these two conflicts have usually been intertwined to some degree, in that economic systems reflect the beliefs of those in control of the economy and that belief systems cannot persist without economic support.

History has shown that when the politics of belief take control of a society and explicitly dictate who may hold power, or even survive, based on their adherence to a particular system of belief, that’s usually when politics get really nasty, and life gets unpleasant, if not fatal, for those who do not share the beliefs of those in control, as witness Spain under the Inquisition, the Taliban, ISIS, Germany during the Third Reich, and other political systems dominated by a requirement for absolute adherence to a belief.

One might claim that it’s just as bad when pure economics reign, but I’d contend that, while an unfettered market system will invariably create great income inequality, the privations created by that inequality generally don’t create the systemic executions, torture, and oppression regularly imposed by the tyranny of political systems that require adherence to a specific belief structure.

That may be why I have great concerns about those individuals, even those with the best of intentions, who wish to use politics as a means to legally impose belief structures on individuals. A true believer, even with the best of intentions, still poses a danger to all society, while a pure free market advocate poses a danger to the poor and disenfranchised.

Both need to be curtailed, but the danger posed to society by not curtailing the true believers is far greater, something that the Founding Fathers felt most strongly, and that was why they insisted on the separation of church and state, something that today’s true believers would have us forget or ignore.

We Americans live in the most technological and complex world society that the world has yet known, and yet, if we’re to be judged by our political rhetoric and campaign slogans, we’d come off as simplistic idiots.

Illegal immigration is a problem? Build an expensive wall thousands of miles long that is largely irrelevant to the problem? Or just deport eleven million illegal immigrants, many of whom have children who are legal U.S citizens, not to mention those who were brought involuntarily as children and who know no other culture? And without those immigrant children, and the U.S. Caucasian birth rate below the replacement rate, who will pay the Social Security taxes and benefits of older Americans in another generation? The current INS bureaucracy can’t even cope with the status quo, let alone attempting to round up eleven million people. Nor do those who propose this seem to consider that doing so would essentially require the establishment of a police state. Let’s see… walls, ethnic purity, forceful removal of undesirables… didn’t that already happen somewhere?

How to deal with the loss of middle class jobs? Increase taxes on the wealthy and give everyone a free college education? Except that ignores the problem that we already produce twice as many college graduates every year as there are jobs that require a college education. Or perhaps impose punitive tariffs on foreign-produced goods that will double the price of imports, which means further impoverishing those millions of Americans who are underpaid? That also ignores the fact that the greatest percentage of formerly middle class manufacturing jobs that were lost were not outsourced, but automated so that, even if foreign outsourcing were prohibited, all that would happen would be greater automation.

Income inequality? Just pile huge taxes on the “rich”? How long would the super-rich remain in the U.S.? Even the egalitarian Swedes had to scale back on their confiscatory taxes to stop the flight of wealthy individuals. Then what happens when the confiscatory taxes hit the merely affluent, who tend to be generally productive individuals?

Provide affordable health care? Exactly how is that possible without totally restructuring the entire health care, medical technology and pharmaceutical industries? And, oh, yes, the financial sector as well.

Make America militarily strong again? With the strongest and most powerful military force in the world and a huge annual deficit, exactly how do you propose to finance greater military expansion… and for what purposes?

Global warming? What problem? Is it just a hoax or an over-reaction, despite the fact that 99% of all glaciers have diminished or vanished over the past 50 years, that Arctic sea ice is smaller than at any time recorded, that CO2 levels are higher than in tens of millions of years?

These are just the top headliners in the current political campaign, and there’s precious little consensus on the total nature of the problem, aside from the fact that in some cases, there’s not even agreement on whether there is a problem. Solutions to any single one of them will require complex multi-faceted approaches over years.

And given the tens of millions of Americans believing in simplistic answers and/or denials, as well as simplistic political slogans, I must confess to considerable doubt as to whether we, as a people, are really interested in solutions, or even recognizing the problems.

Over the last six months or longer, we’ve had the assorted candidates for president make various promises stating that, if they were elected, they would expel all illegal immigrants, provide a free college education for young people, create Medicare for everyone, build a wall the entire length of the U.S. southern border to keep out any more illegal immigrants, end “birthright” citizenship, abolish the IRS, lower U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 30% in ten years, “wage a real war on terror,” and… about a hundred other promises, the majority of which have been tossed off and out by Donald Trump.

Speaking as someone who spent twenty years in national politics at the federal level, I can say, without much fear of contradiction by subsequent events, that none of the promises I listed will happen and most likely only a handful of the less “comprehensive” promises have any chance of being considered, let alone enacted or successfully promulgated through executive orders.

So why do politicians knowingly make such empty promises?

Because they’re appealing to people’s fears, greed, or dreams… or some combination thereof.

In a way, such promises are little more than a way of saying, “I understand what concerns you, what you want out of life, and what you want for your family and children.” The fact that such promises have gotten more and more outrageous over the years, at least here in the United States, is, I believe, a reflection of people’s distrust and disbelief in politicians. They no longer believe a simple statement like, “I understand the problems you face.” So the politicians make even bigger promises, with the underlying hope, one that has some reality behind it, that a grandiose promise might just translate into some smaller action in the same area. Or that the politician will at least attempt something.

It’s clear from the results of the presidential primaries so far that very few of each candidate’s supporters care very much about the actual impracticality of such promises. Only those opposing a candidate consider such impracticalities or impossibilities, even while they tacitly accept the impractical promises voiced by their own chosen candidate.

The only problem with all this is… what happens if a candidate does get elected with enough support to try to build a wall, throw out all illegal immigrants, or fund college educations for everyone? Or… what happens if the candidate tries… and is stopped?

After a year of political unrest and anger, those may not be rhetorical questions. And then what?

The other day several friends and I were having a discussion about a number of things, and the issue of health insurance came up. One friend said that one of the problems with the Affordable Care Act was that it made people pay for coverages they didn’t need. And he’s absolutely right… and totally wrong.

The entire point of insurance is to spread the risk among a large number of people and over time. If people were allowed to buy insurance only after they needed it, then there wouldn’t be any insurance, because the insurers would be broke. For better or worse, that was the reason why insurers refused to cover “pre-existing conditions,” or would only do so with a far higher premium, unless the insured had already been covered by the same insurer prior to the discovery of that condition [and some insurers wouldn’t even do that], which often tied people to a given job or resulted in huge problems when they were laid off or had to switch jobs because an employer went out of business. No matter what one thinks about the Affordable Care Act, it is a plan based, if less than optimally, on commercial insurance, and that means that the costs of health care have to be covered by premiums. Those premiums also cover the high salaries and profits of the insurance companies, and the trade-off between the ACA and a single-payer, government-backed system is whether the “efficiencies” [about which I have certain doubts] of the private sector outweigh the costs of a profit-making enterprise enough to make the cost to the insured lower than would be the case in a government-backed single-payer system.

The second problem of understanding is simply that the principal problem underlying the insurance costs is and will continue to be the rising cost of health care in the United States. So long as those costs rise, so will the costs to anyone who is insured, and if there are large numbers of uninsured people who need health care, those costs will be added to the costs of the insured, either through higher premiums and/or greater co-pays because, at present, the vast majority of hospitals are required to treat people who need care, whether or not those individuals can afford it or not.

The third problem is that no country in the world, even the United States, has the resources to provide the ultimate in high-tech health care to every single individual in the country. There isn’t enough funding, enough medical personnel, and enough equipment to do that. So, like it or not, health care is effectively rationed. The “traditional” way of doing that in the United States has been through the market system. If you have enough insurance and money, and enough intelligence to deploy the insurance and money effectively, you can generally get the best health care. If you don’t, you get less, and in some cases, you effectively get nothing. In countries with government-mandated systems, most people get coverage for what the system determines is “equitable” for everyone, although, in some of those countries, if you have great resources, again, you can get better care.

All the political rhetoric about health insurance boils down to how society will pay for the rising health care costs of those who either cannot afford it or choose not to afford it, and how this impacts each person. In our extended family, my wife and I have ended up paying more and more out of pocket every year as the insurance costs, deductibles, and co-pays go up, but we have relatives who work long hours who now have better coverage for less.

But there isn’t a “magic” answer. Health care costs. It’s that simple, and all the political rhetoric in the world won’t change that. That political rhetoric is merely “code” for saying who should pay more.