I was reading the other day about what might be called “antipathy gaps,” as measured by a series of sociological surveys, which revealed that there is a greater and stronger divide in terms of antipathy between Republicans and Democrats than there is between races… for the first time in decades, and probably ever, although there aren’t any studies that go back that far.

As someone who was active in politics for roughly twenty years, I can certainly attest to the growth of the divide between parties. When I began my career as a political staffer on the national level, there were numerous friendships across party lines, and there were even a great number of issues on which both parties worked and reached agreement. That began to change in the 1970s, and by the early 1980s existing friendships were often fraying, and very few cross-party friendships were formed between newcomers to the U.S. House and Senate. This process appears to have continued, and I suspect any politicians who are friends with their peers in the other party appear to be keeping any such friendships under wraps – assuming more than a handful of such friendships even exist.

I’ve noticed the same among politically active acquaintances, and it’s very clear that almost any discussion of political issues almost invariably degenerates into party-line positions among the vast majority of them. So far, at least, we’ve remained on good terms with friends who have other political leanings, if at the cost of never discussing certain issues with them in any depth. This “social” polarization is also reflected in the letters to the editor in the local and regional newspapers, but I suspect part of that reflects an editorial predisposition to fan the flames in order to generate controversy and, thus, sales.

As a nation, we’re faced with incredibly complex issues, all of which have arisen from the conflict of multiple factors, and none of which can be resolved by the simplistic rhetoric and “solutions” of either party’s current political stance on the “hot-button” issues because both parties have developed positions reflecting the views of their activists, and those views are seen as extreme, not only by the opposing party, but also by a significant number of Americans. Neither set of so-called solutions will work, either, because they ignore social and economic realities in favor of comforting “common sense” bromides that ignore unpleasant and inconvenient facts.

Yet, increasingly, the so-called dialogue has come to consist of both sides shouting past each other, and with the shouting getting louder every year, those seeking common ground have less say and less input… and the only change I’m seeing is a hardening of position on both sides.

It’s past time both sides looked at the facts – ALL the facts, and not just those that support each side’s position, but then, that’s not likely to happen because there’s far too much money for the media in fomenting conflict and far too much profit for the gun-makers and military industrial complex in arming everyone for the coming disaster… and the financial community doesn’t care so long as they can keep increasing their share of the national wealth.

There’s more unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and the “black lives matter” movement certainly hasn’t gone away as more and more people, especially African Americans, are demanding that the “justice system” be fixed. I agree that it needs fixing, but I’m not so sure that the most necessary fixes are the ones the protesters are demanding.

I got to thinking about this as the result of reading about two events. One was the fatal shooting of a young unarmed black man who apparently attacked an automobile dealership with his car, finally driving through a showroom window. The other was about a Utah county commissioner who has been convicted on misdemeanor charges and faces up to one year in jail, $100,000 in fines and possibly large restitution awards for damage he and other protesters caused to the archaeological resources on federal lands by leading a mass ATV ride through an area where motorized vehicles were prohibited. The state legislature attempted to pass a bill to pay the fines and restitution awards, and when that failed, the governor contributed $10,000 from his campaign war chest toward legal fees. Then I got to thinking about Cliven Bundy, the rancher who has failed to pay federal grazing fees for over twenty years and who threatened armed resistance to BLM agents who attempted to confiscate his cattle to pay those fees. The BLM backed down, over a year ago, and Bundy still hasn’t paid up, and nothing has been done about the fact that he and his supporters offered armed resistance to federal officials.

Somehow, I just can’t imagine a black rancher, assuming one could even obtain grazing rights, ever being allowed to offer armed resistance to the federal government without being gunned down post-haste.

The Justice Department has rightly condemned the town of Ferguson for operating a police system that preyed almost exclusively upon lower income blacks, and reports of other towns operating in exactly the same fashion have also come to light and have been condemned, but I don’t see the federal government doing much condemning of the billionaire finance types who nearly destroyed the U.S. economy. Nor do I see much support for those who protest illegal government leases and procurements unethically benefitting the corporate sector.

In fact, as an example, after Tim DeChristopher offered a fraudulent protest bid at a BLM mineral rights auction, he ended up serving 21 months in prison for that bid – despite the fact that his acts hurt no one and cost almost nothing and that the U.S. Attorney General declared the auction illegal and voided it – even before DeChristopher went to trial. No one was ever prosecuted, let alone tried, for attempting to illegally sell drilling rights to industry. When that happened in the Teapot Dome scandal in 1923, the Secretary of the Interior went to jail for accepting bribes, but, unsurprisingly, the official of Pan-American Petroleum who paid the bribes was acquitted. You can see how far we’ve come… or not.

There’s been a great focus on the police for a whole string of events which resulted in the deaths largely of black men. In a great percentage of cases, however, those black men had done something wrong, often illegal. The problem wasn’t, in my opinion, with the attempts to arrest them, but how those attempted arrests were carried out… and what happened after that. Yet no one shot Cliven Bundy or any number of white criminals.

Part of this is perception, a very deadly perception. Because of the amount of guns in American society, and because of the high level of violence and death in the majority of black communities, the police too often perceive any black man, especially one caught in a questionable or illegal act, as a deadly threat. Sometimes, those men are a deadly threat, but as recent events have shown, all too many times, the threat is not that deadly. And, at times, there has been no threat at all. But how are the police to tell?

As a supporting point to the critical role that perception plays, recently I wrote about a man fatally shot in a nearby town, a very white man. I’m convinced that one reason he was shot was because most of the police in the entire county knew that he was violent and dangerous when drunk. When he refused to drop his gun and aimed it at the investigating police officer, the officer believed that the man was a deadly threat, which he likely was, and fired in self-defense. I suspect, although we’ll never know, that had the officer been faced with the same situation with someone who had no record, he might have waited just a bit longer…but how that might have turned out is another question.

There are two deadly sides to the perception problem. First is the fact and the perception that, in general, whites get away with a lot more during and after being arrested, and the fact that often they don’t even get arrested, especially if the wrong-doing is large enough and financially related, no matter how many people it hurts. Second is the fact that, like it or not, black men doing things that look to be illegal are considered dangerous, and that perception can be all too deadly, usually to the black man.

“Community policing” can certainly help the problem in black communities, but a good part of the anger that has led to demonstrations and violence is simply because of the rather accurate perception that the justice system continues to show a double standard, particularly in the areas of drugs and theft. Blacks who use crack cocaine, for example, which is more prevalent in minority areas, face far harsher penalties under law than whites found with cocaine powder with the same amount of the drug itself. Likewise, a black man who commits comparatively small theft is likely to spend more time in jail than most of the white men who crashed the economy.

Interestingly enough, the white collar criminals who get the longest sentences aren’t the people who crashed the economy or tried to illegally auction off federal lands or drilling rights – they’re the ones convicted of “insider trading,” profiting from non-public knowledge to make money for themselves. But at whose expense are they profiting? You guessed it — the multibillion dollar investment firms. What makes this so fascinatingly hypocritical is that the high level executive can decide to make a decision or move that will impact stock prices, can then buy or sell stock, and then, weeks or months later, actually carry out the decision… and profit enormously… and that’s perfectly legal, just so long as he tells no one.

What bothers me, again, about the “black lives matter” movement is that all the debate over what has happened seems to be limited to black deaths alone – and continues to avoid the far larger questions of justice and fairness. And that means that, once the current furor dies down, and it will, no matter what anyone says, the underlying problems will largely remain. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but I’m certainly not betting on it.

August sixth, last week, was the seventieth anniversary of the destruction of the Japanese city of Nagasaki with the second, and last, atomic bomb used in warfare. The two atomic bombs dropped on Japan killed almost 130,000 people immediately, and the eventual death toll was estimated at close to a quarter million people, of whom only about 20,000 were military personnel.

In ceremonies memorializing the event, at least one speaker asked for the abolition of atomic weapons as “inhumane.” That got me to thinking. While there’s no doubt that an atomic weapon is “inhumane,” is there any effective weapon used in war that is “humane”?

The allied firebombing of Dresden in February of 1945 killed 25,000 civilians. The Japanese attack on the Chinese city of Nanking in 1937, known popularly as “the rape of Nanking” resulted in 200,000 civilian deaths, according to the International Military Tribunal, largely inflicted by rifles, grenades, and bayonets. Arrows, swords, and trampling by horses resulted in the death of over 200,000 civilians when the Mongols sacked Bagdad in 1258. If my sources are correct, there have been at least seventy wars in the last 2000 years with death tolls exceeding 100,000 people, and almost thirty with death tolls exceeding a million people.

So why are atomic weapons any more inhumane than any other weapons? Given all these wars and deaths, all of these wars that were waged by people, human beings attacking other human beings, what do we mean when someone talks about atomic weapons being especially inhumane?

The word “inhumane” and its linguistic roots mean “not human” or “not having the qualities of a human being.” Yet, obviously, it’s very human for human beings to slaughter other human beings. As far back as archeologists have been able to find human remains that can be analyzed, they find a significant percentage, roughly fifteen percent, of the individuals died violent deaths from weapons.

Today, we use the word “humane” to denote kindly or civilized conduct toward others and showing a lack of cruelty toward animals, but isn’t that almost a combination of wishful thinking and hypocrisy?

Despite predictions that his support will fade, polls show Donald Trump well ahead of all other contenders among Republican voters, despite his boorish and brusque ways. More than a few political pundits have asked how that can possibly be. To me, the answer seems obvious, despite my personal uneasiness with simple or obvious answers [which so often turn out to be neither].

Trump is articulating all the concerns that millions of Americans have – that the political system is broken, that career politicians are only interested in themselves, that excessive concern for those at the very bottom and very top of the economic ladder has resulted in screwing the middle class, especially the working middle class, and that corporate leaders and politicians have conspired to destroy millions of American jobs by allowing those jobs to be outsourced overseas while allowing millions of illegal immigrants to flood into the United States to get both welfare and take jobs from Americans by being willing to work for less under miserable conditions.

The people to whom Trump is appealing aren’t just angry, they’re furious, and they feel no one is listening to them.

On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders is appealing to similar concerns, except his platform also includes appeals to minimum age workers and to minorities by doubling the minimum wage and taking on the economic structure that creates barriers for the financially disenfranchised. Over the past two decades, minimum wage workers have seen their purchasing power decline more than any other economic class in the United States, which has resulted in some cities and states increasing state and local minimum wages, but those increases have had a limited effect so far. Sanders is also talking about reforming Wall Street, making the very wealthiest Americans pay more in taxes, universal affordable health care, and affordable college.

The political pundits thought Sanders didn’t have a ghost of a chance – except he’s already raised more than $15 million exclusively from small donations, is drawing crowds in excess of 10,000 people, has enlisted more than 100,000 in support efforts, and is within ten points of Hillary Clinton in early primary states.

If these two very different campaigns don’t tell you that there are a lot of angry Americans out there who want change… you’re not seeing what’s really there.

While I still doubt that either Trump or Sanders can capture a nomination, history shows that angry and unhappy voters can totally change the political calculus. There was this mountebank candidate, a racist anti-Semite that no one took seriously in a faraway time and place… Germany, I think it was…

In the first Republican Presidential debate, Donald Trump reiterated his proposal to build a fence between the United States and Mexico, and even said he’d get Mexico to help pay for it. Given Trump’s current polling figures, millions of Americans believe that it’s a “common sense” proposal.

The fence issue illustrates one of the big problems with so-called common sense ideas. Often they’re anything but sensible. The land border with Mexico stretches 1,969 miles, and the Department of Homeland Security has already fenced some 651 miles of that border, mostly near urban areas and international bridges. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, with over 58,000 personnel and a budget of $4 billion, also patrols that area and the more remote borderlands in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, using 16,875 vehicles, 269 aircraft, 300 watercraft, and 300 camera towers, as well as aerial drones.

While the number of illegal immigrants crossing from Mexico annually has declined more than sixty percent since 2000, the Border Patrol still apprehends more than 100,000 illegals annually, and agency cost estimates to fence the entire border top twenty billion dollars, not including annual maintenance. And even fences are not secure, since each year the agency repairs more than 4,000 breaches in the existing fencing. To effectively seal the U.S.-Mexico border would require the equivalent of a 1,969-mile Berlin Wall, and maintaining and staffing it would likely cost well over $100 billion over the next ten to fifteen years. And illegals would then take to the seas, or tunnel under it. Also, does anyone really think Mexico can come up with that kind of money when they can’t even control the crime syndicates in Mexico?

In the meantime, there are over eleven million illegal immigrants in the United States, and trying to apprehend and deport them would require the equivalent of Nazi Germany’s SS troopers. Gee… a Berlin Wall and the storm troopers… what ever happened to America, the land built on the hopes of aspirations of immigrants, the land where 95% of the entire population consists of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants?

Likewise proposals to “bring back American factory jobs” are nonsense. The United States manufactures far more than it did twenty years ago – and it does so with far fewer workers through the use of computers and automation. Those kind of jobs are never coming back.

Yet tens of millions of people swallow such simplistic political promises. Yes, we need a better handle on immigration and better jobs for millions of Americans, and a lot of other improvements, but simplistic political promises based on wishes and so-called common sense aren’t going to do anything effective to deal with either.

1. Almost everyone is suited to college.

2. College’s principal function is to prepare a student for a specific occupation.

3. Everyone should complete college in five years or less.

4. Colleges should meet all student needs.

5. Popular professors are good professors.

6. College courses should be entertaining.

7. Student evaluations improve college level education.

8. Colleges should accommodate all ranges of personal beliefs.

Each of these “myths” is widely held by a great number of college students and their parents, as well as by a significant segment of the U.S. population. Each has a grain of truth behind it but is effectively misleading if not totally false.

Not everyone is suited to college, either in terms of intellectual ability, ambition, inclination, and determination. While everyone needs a skill set to succeed in providing for himself or herself, the traditional college education isn’t always the best place for each individual to obtain that skill set. Often, for some individuals, it’s absolutely the worst place.

With the increasing cost of college, more and more students have to work to pay for their education. Working means they have less time to devote to studying an often these students either take lighter course loads or drop out for a semester here and there to obtain the money to continue. Others, such as in Utah, often take off several years for various reasons, including church missionary work, voluntary “sabbaticals,” or even just to “find themselves.”

College is not a vocational school. Most college-educated young people graduating today will change jobs and/or fields at least several times after graduation, yet some state legislatures and others, such as accrediting bodies, are now “grading” colleges on the percentages of graduates employed in their undergraduate field of study.

Colleges are now required to provide an ever-greater range of “personal” services to students, going far beyond course advisors to counseling, special arrangements for test-taking, study-abroad programs, even design-your-own course/major options. This proliferation of “services” is a significant factor in increasing college costs. At the same time, students are less and less willing to spend time outside the classroom in pursuit of their studies. Even so, the demands for more “services” and options continue to grow at the same time as colleges and universities are trying to reduce the instructional costs by utilizing more adjunct professors and fewer full-time faculty.

There are good professors and popular professors. Some few popular professors are good, and quite a few not-so-popular professors are good. Studies show, however, on average, that the very most popular professors are the least demanding and easiest graders.

Likewise, education is about widening the students’ knowledge bases and skills, and for most students, that process is often uncomfortable. Courses that are primarily entertaining seldom stretch the students to improve their capabilities and understanding.

A rather wide range of studies show that the more student evaluations are employed as an evaluation tool, the greater the likelihood that the curriculum is being dumbed down. The age period when most students attend college is that period of their life when they’re the most self-centered and, therefore, the most resistant to change. It’s also the period when they need to come to grips with the fact that they are not special and that they are not the center of the universe. That’s a large part of what a good college education does. Students at this age evaluate based largely on what they want, not what they need. Giving them what they want is the easy way for colleges to fill seats… and create empty and/or closed minds.

When I taught, I had students who were offended by the beliefs and the words in certain assignments, and who wanted special assignments in place of those works assigned. There have been numerous court cases of students demanding not to have to read passages that conflicted with their personal and religious beliefs. A college education is not about restricting knowledge, but about exposing students to a wider range of information and opinion. They’re not required to agree with it, only to be exposed to it so that they know what it is and what it represents.

If these “myths” continue to proliferate, colleges will continue to become more like high schools… and neither the students, nor society, need another four years of high school.

An article in the latest Scientific American presents the case that the success of homo sapiens in dominating the planet and essentially wiping out the Neandertals and Denisovians, if not other yet undiscovered hominid species, resulted from the ability of humans to cooperate on a larger scale than other hominids.

It appears from the fossil and archeological evidence that we’ve so far discovered that Neandertals never congregated in large groups, and yet they were successful in making weapons and hunting rather large game. They were physically stronger than homo sapiens, and their brain size was comparable, possibly even larger. But it’s pretty clear that over time, they never had a chance once homo sapiens moved into the same territory.

The article also postulates that the human tendency toward cooperation is at least partly genetic. If so, this leads to a very interesting corollary – that prejudice indeed “has to be carefully taught.” And, in fact, human history bears this out in large degree. In every war and conflict that there appears to be a record of, and probably in all those without any records, at least one side has gone to great lengths to dehumanize the other side… and in many cases, both sides have attempted to dehumanize their opponents.

The same is true in terms of discrimination. From the beginning of slavery in the United States, blacks/Afro-Americans were considered inferior. Even the vaunted Constitution only counted each of them as three-fifths of a person. The same pattern exists with regard to gender discrimination, particularly of women, with pervasive and long-standing suggestions that women were inferior because they were “emotional” or “weak” or whatever else would make them “lesser” than men.

Yet experience, science, and history all refute such allegations. There have been great “black” civilizations and cultures and some pretty abysmal “white” ones. There has been no shortage of black “geniuses” or white idiots, or vice versa. And whenever women have been given equal opportunity and resources, they’ve done just as well as men in terms of intelligence and achievement… and in innumerable instances far better than the “best” men in almost any given field.

Given all this, it seems apparent that, because humans actually have a tendency to cooperate, dehumanization has become a cultural tool for overriding the cooperative trait and for gaining personal power. We don’t necessarily think of it that way, but even I find myself doing it, for instance, by calling people “idiots” when they do something stupid or thoughtless. Admittedly, individuals can be idiots, as we all know, but idiocy is generally individual, not cultural, and there’s a very fine line between accurately assessing someone’s lack of ability on an individual basis and applying that “lack” to an entire group in order to dehumanize them, yet dehumanization persists,and it’s usually used in pursuit or maintenance of power.

Some long months ago I contacted an organization about scheduling something. I waited, and waited, and heard no response. I tried again, and again. No response. I nosed around and found the personal email of the head scheduler, and inquired again. I got a curt response saying that I couldn’t be accommodated because I’d made my request too late, despite the fact that I’d made mine months before others who had been accommodated,although the scheduling was supposedly on a first come, first accommodated basis. When I pointed this out, the response was equally curt, to the effect that too many people had requested to be scheduled. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The personal email address was: Me@[person’s name].net.

I wondered about this. I have friends with email addresses such as Bob@BobZwerkel.net [this is fictional, I hope] or djs@djsplace.com, but then I started looking around, and discovered more than a few email addresses where the primary initial name was Me@ wherever.com. I think most of us use some identifier in our email address so that people can easily remember or find it, and I don’t think that’s particularly egotistical. Perhaps I’m just horribly outdated or old-fashioned, but using the word “me” as the initial identifier in the email address seems incredibly self-centered.

Is this another facet of the “Me” Generation? A blatant – or thoughtless – declaration to the world that “I’m the only important person at this address.”? A convenient quick decision with little consideration for what others just might think? A disregard for convention? Another generational thumbing of the nose at manners or what they believe to be phony and false modesty? Or something else entirely?

I have no idea, but, given the responses of the person whose email address spurred these thoughts, that person was anything but modest or helpful, and I have to wonder what percentage of the people who have email addresses at Me@me.com are that self-centered and dismissive.

Last week, a former fire fighter from a neighboring town was shot dead by a local police officer. The officer was responding to a 911 call that reported a man severely beating a child. When the officer approached, the man shouted something and raised a gun, aiming it directly at the officer. The officer fired twice.The man died on the way to the hospital.

The news story in the local paper had a headline that read, “Victim Had the Greatest Heart” or words to that effect, and went on to quote friends and relatives about how the victim was such a good person and how it was all such a tragic mistake. What was never mentioned was that the victim was indeed a very good person – when he was sober. What was not mentioned was that the dead man had a history of violent actions and arrests when he was intoxicated, and there was absolutely no doubt that the dead man had been carrying a loaded weapon.

Several of the other incidents that made headlines this past year featured similar cases, such as a young man who robbed a convenience store and attacked a policeman, and was shot by the officer, but whose family insisted he was a good-hearted young man. Or the young woman who tried to run down police officers on foot with her car. She had been previously arrested for various problems, including another high speed chase, but her family insisted she was a good girl. Or the St. Paul man who tried to run down two police officers with his SUV. Family said he was good hearted, despite the fact that he had a court-ordered restraining order because of violent actions. Or the Denver man with a felony record who was driving a stolen car and was shot when he tried to run down two police officers, also described by family as “good-hearted.”

I’m sorry. Good hearted people don’t beat up others. They don’t steal goods, money, or cars. They don’t try to run down police or shoot at them. And, if one of these so-called “good-hearted” individuals gets shot by police officers who are threatened with weapons or vehicular force, the officers shouldn’t be vilified. Yes, it’s always regrettable when a police officer has to use a weapon, especially when the results can be lethal… but in a nation with 300 million firearms, like it or not, there are going to be cases where people who break the laws and attack police in one way or another are going to be shot.

Just don’t tell the world that people who’ve perpetrated violence, robbery, and assault are good-hearted. That’s not helping anyone, especially those unfortunate unarmed individuals with no criminal record and no acts of violence who are truly good-hearted and still get shot, by either police or criminals.

The other day I came across an observation about one of my Recluce books noting that the Saga of Recluce, unlike many popular fantasy series, does not have an “overriding plot line.” While I agree with the observation, what struck me as I read it was why so many fantasy series do in fact have such an overriding plot line. The most obvious reason for “an overriding plot line” is that such series tend to sell more books, but I find such plot lines that span years and even generations to be somewhat artificial.

Perhaps it’s my background in history and experience in politics, but when it’s rare for even a capable and distinguished family to maintain power and influence for more than a few generations, when most rulers are fortunate to last a decade, trans-generational consistency and aims seem rather unlikely, except in the most general way. Even in ancient Egypt, which boasted the longest continuity of any earthly ruling structure and culture, there were dynastic changes, outside invasions and foreign rulers.

My own years in politics taught me that accomplishing even a few goals took an incredible amount of effort, coordination, and resources… and that there are almost always those with power who, for various reasons, oppose what seem to be the most reasonable goals. As for secrets, forget it. Over any length of time, the old adage that three people can keep a secret only if two are dead pretty much holds. It’s also true that a good leader can maneuver matters so that acts and events that supposedly serve one purpose serve another as well – provided he keeps the details in his head and to himself. But that effectively limits the scope of his actions in double-dealing.

Admittedly, there are scores of books about secret societies that have manipulated governments for centuries, and there are some institutions, such as the Catholic Papacy, whose influence has indeed last centuries, but the evidence of long-term success of such societies is virtually non-existent, and it appears that few popes have followed very closely the aims of their predecessors in anything but attempting to keep the Catholic Church strong.

Human beings seem incapable of or unwilling to maintain eternal and unchanging governments, and the stability of human governments seems almost inversely related to the level of technology, in that the higher the level of technology the faster governments change or rise and fall.

For better or worse, I’ve tried to stick fairly closely to that model in what I write. In the Saga of Recluce, over the roughly two thousand years about which I’ve written, empires have risen and fallen. Cities have been destroyed, some never to rise again. The balance of power between nations and continents shifts. There’s no such thing as an “eternal empire,” even though some lands have styled themselves as such.

In the Corean Chronicles, the almost magic feudalism of the Alectors only holds Corus together until the Cadmians and Soarers gain enough power to destroy the basis of that power, while in the Imager Portfolio, governments are continually in flux in one way or another.

So it’s not surprising that I have no “overriding plot line,” except perhaps for the principle that extremism in any form inevitably leads to disaster.

Last week we had a brief and very local gully washer, the kind of storm that happens comparatively infrequently here in the high desert, where a given area gets an inch or two of rain in less than an hour, and it remains hot and dry everywhere except in a few square miles. During the storm, a white Ford sedan hydroplaned on the interstate and crashed into a guard rail. A Utah state highway patrolman investigated to see if anyone was hurt. Just as he approached the vehicle a late model BMW hydroplaned into the Ford which was pushed over the trooper. The trooper had to have heavy equipment and “jaws-of-life” to extricate him from the wreckage. He was life-flighted out and spent several days in intensive care. He remains, at the time I write, in serious condition, but is expected to recover, but not for months, possibly a year. Those in the vehicles suffered far less serious injuries.

The speed limit on that section of the interstate is 80 mph. What any licensed driver should know is that speed limits are set as the maximum under good conditions, not in a driving rain. Not only that, but exactly why was the driver of the BMW still driving too fast for road conditions, especially considering that it was pouring rain and a highway patrol vehicle had flashing lights on and there were stopped cars at the side of the road? And if the driver was going too fast to see all that in time… what else does that say?

That at least two drivers were idiots, and almost killed a highway patrolman, and possibly crippled him for life… because they were either too self-centered, too thoughtless, or too stupid to pay attention to the road conditions. And they not only injured him, but risked their own lives as well.

This isn’t a sometime occurrence. Virtually every time there is a rainstorm, or a snowstorm, there are accidents, often fatal ones, on I-15, because people are driving too fast for the road conditions. If these individuals only injured or killed themselves, that might be one thing, but even when no one else is injured, their deaths have impacts on spouses, children, parents, or… highway patrol officers.

Sometimes, accidents do happen, despite the driver’s best efforts, but most times, they wouldn’t happen if we didn’t do something stupid. But then, isn’t every day a challenge not to do something stupid?

Last Friday night, my wife and I saw the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s production of South Pacific. [For those of you not familiar with the festival, in the summer season they do three Shakespeare plays – this summer, Henry IV, Part 2, King Lear and The Taming of the Shrew — and two non-Shakespeare plays, South Pacific and Amadeus.]

When Lieutenant Cable finished singing “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught,” I realized, again, what a powerful song it is, especially considering that it was an anti-prejudice, anti-racist song composed in 1949 by two white males, and a song that initially stirred more than a little controversy in the then-largely white theatre community because it points out graphically the prejudice is taught, not inherited, and that whites were the ones doing that teaching. I don’t think that it was incidental that Cable is portrayed as a Princeton graduate, a university that was then a bastion of upper-class white privilege.

But my second realization was the fact that in more than fifty years of hearing popular songs, I’ve only heard it performed once outside the context of South Pacific, unlike songs from many other musicals, such as “Send in the Clowns,” which has been performed by something like fifty different artists. When I tried to search for singers who had recorded it solo, I could only come up with two, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Barbra Streisand. There certainly may have been others, but I doubt that there are many.

At the same time, there are many written references to the song, but a written statement doesn’t have the same impact as a song, as witness the impact of many black and protest songs, ranging from “Follow the Drinking Gourd” (associated with the Underground Railway), “We Shall Overcome,” “If I Had a Bell,” “This Land is My Land,” etc.

The “problem” with “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught” is that it’s not a triumphant song, but a remonstrative one, and one that strikes directly at the failings of the “white culture” of the pre-civil rights time period… and, unhappily, still is relevant to far too many white Americans….which is why I suspect you’ll seldom hear it outside of South Pacific.

On Wednesday, various computer glitches resulted in the cancellation of more than 800 flights by United Airlines, as well as delays of hundreds of other flights, the closing of the New York Stock Exchange for roughly four hours, and similar problems at the Wall Street Journal. While three such occurrences in one day appears to be unprecedented, it should hardly come as any great surprise.

Our technological world runs on computers, and almost every business of any size is hampered, if not brought to a halt, by anything that crashes its computer system and online/internet communications. Equally to the point, all too many businesses do not to have back-up plans/systems because: (a) they can’t or don’t want to spend the money; (b) back-ups aren’t technically feasible, usually because alternative access to the internet isn’t available; or (c) no one even considered the necessity.

Most of these problems get back to money. As I noted before, several years ago, one backhoe in the wrong place knocked out fiber-optic internet access for much of Southern Utah for over a day. Did anyone even think about a parallel line? Hardly.

Then add to this the continual changes and upgrades to computer systems. Some companies can barely keep up with upgrading one system, and if the back-up systems aren’t upgraded and maintained as well, then they’ll soon be useless as well.

And what about all that data? Is it backed-up and stored elsewhere? Just how reliable and accessible will it be if internet connections are disrupted? Yet, if it’s onsite, that’s a different vulnerability. What tends to be either overlooked or minimized is that the world wide web not only maximizes opportunities, but also maximizes vulnerabilities, and minimizing those vulnerabilities takes time, resources, and money… and those measures don’t always work, as Wednesday’s events just proved.

Good computer systems can multiply advantages, but those systems are anything but as cost-saving as too many individuals and businesses seem to think. Cyber cheap is courting disaster…but I’d wager that lesson will be lost on too many CIOs and corporate managements.

A great many people have pointed out just how much mere numbers miss the mark in education, politics, and business, but do they miss the mark in the world of books and publishing as well? I suspect, at least in some ways, that they do.

Is a book that sells a million copies necessarily a “good” book? That depends on what one means by good. Such a book is obviously good at entertaining readers if it sells that many copies, but it may not be, and probably isn’t, in terms of other “literary” qualities, in that the grammar and structure may be weak, and often there are great improbabilities in the background and economic/political structures of such books. But none of that matters all that much to the readers, especially if the book is fast-paced with an interesting plot, or if it has other qualities, such as sexual intrigue, overwhelming romance, or characters that suck the reader in.

By the same token, just because a book doesn’t sell well doesn’t mean it’s a bad book. It might not sell well because it’s been published by a small publisher, or because it’s a book about a character or situation that doesn’t have great appeal. It could even be a book by a major publisher and author with good reviews and those readers who liked it thought a great deal of it… but it just didn’t appeal to a larger audience. Then, it could just be a really bad book. There are some published. But the mere sales numbers say nothing, really, about why it didn’t sell more copies.

Even in the case of best-selling books, the numbers can be deceiving. A novel that sells 50,000 hardcover copies in a week will likely be near the top of the bestseller charts and possibly at the very top, even if total sales over its lifetime are only 150,000 copies in all formats, while a book that sells 30,000 copies a year for 25 years, but never a huge amount at any one time, will never appear on any bestseller list, yet will sell five times as many copies as the short-term wonder.

Publishers plan their publication schedules in hopes of maximizing sales. That’s why any given publisher’s top five authors seldom have new releases in the same month, and possibly not even in the same publishing season. Many consumers only have limited dollars for purchases, and the same is true of the book retailers, whether they’re Amazon or Barnes & Noble, or the local independent. So what’s available, and when, to the reader is in fact based on the numbers, and the interplay between what different publishers offer may result in higher or lower sales for the author, and the publisher. And first-time or midlist authors who release a book in the same genre or subgenre at the same as a mega-selling author may see their sales suffer somewhat, depending on how strong their reader base is, which, again, is not necessarily a reflection on how good the book is, but the numbers may make it harder to publish another book or may result in a comparatively lower advance on the next book.

There are some numbers whose impact I’ve never figured out, like the time when I was told one of my books was the best-seller of the month for the largest book wholesaler in the country. I’m guessing that meant that B&N and the brick and mortar retailers had under-ordered copies and the customer orders required getting immediate copies from the local distribution warehouse of the wholesaler… but that’s just a guess. And then there was the time when an ebook version of one of my books was in the top 100 in the Apple store serving Finland – just for a fraction of one day. That had to be a statistical fluke… I think.

So… take what all those numbers and what they mean with more than a grain of salt. The only semi-certain meaning is that more sales usually mean more money for the publisher, but not always all that much more for the author, at least if it’s a media tie-in novel.

Until comparatively recently, in the speculative fiction field, fantasy was the home of the endless, or seemingly endless series, while science fiction sported stand-alone titles or short series. From what I can see, now there’s little difference between fantasy and science fiction in the sense that more and more of new S.F. titles being published are those in a series… long series after long series.

What’s behind this shift? My gut reaction, unsupported by any statistical or other empirical evidence, is that it’s the result of the confluence of marketing gurus and the ever-decreasing attention span of the vast majority of readers, who tend to forget authors more quickly if they don’t see their books on shelves or the internet equivalents. It’s also easier to market a series by an author than individual stand-alone and unrelated novels, and a series also provides marketing continuity.

I’ve already noticed that the sales of my books drop off far more rapidly after the book is released than was the case a decade ago. Part of that is, of course, because more sales come from Amazon and other online sources than ever before, and many of those sales are pre-release, something that was effectively impossible before internet marketing, so that a greater percentage of sales occur either before a book’s release or fairly immediately after release. Another factor is the decline of mass market paperback sales, which often persisted in significant numbers for months, if not years. Now those continuing sales tend to exist only for on-going series, especially those with media tie-ins.

With comparatively fewer and fewer titles being released in mass market paperback, and those being printed in smaller numbers for most authors, authors of single books lose market presence, because readers don’t see their books for as long on shelves or on new release lists. The answer? Write books in a series. I’ve also heard from at least a few up-and-coming writers that editors and agents want a commitment to a series.

Personally, I’m finding it harder and harder to discover stand-alone SF books, and I can’t believe I’m alone. At the same time, it’s also very clear that stand-alones generally generate far less revenue than volumes in a series, which is why I write fewer of them. But I haven’t given up yet. Whether I do, in the end, though, is up to the readers, and whether you buy the stand-alones, such as Solar Express, which will be coming out in November.

One thing I’ve discovered over the years as an author is that most people don’t really read books as much as they claim they do, and that, except for the comparatively rare devoted readers, any conversation about publishing and books lasts less than five minutes with most people, no matter how educated or intelligent they are. But as my wife reminds me, the same is true about her profession – voice and opera. When I went back to my college reunion last month [the first and possibly the last reunion I will attend], a number of my classmates made kind remarks about the number of books I had written and published… and in less than a few minutes the conversation was elsewhere – and these men were all high-paid and respected professionals. Interestingly enough, perhaps one of the best conversations I had was with the one who’d become a professional guide and bush pilot in Alaska. But then, only a handful of all of them have ever read science fiction or fantasy.

I suspect other authors, especially F&SF authors, run into the same situations, and I have no doubt that devoted readers have the same problem. Why else would so many flock to conventions? And why else would so many F&SF readers take off weekends and sometimes even a week to mix with other readers and professionals and would-be professionals in the field? [As a side note, this casual disregard for the written word is possibly why those individuals who are not F&SF readers join book-reading clubs, because that may be the only alternative for them.]

Some of the most involved F&SF readers do feel incredibly strongly, as evidenced by the furor over the Sad/Rabid Puppies slate voting for the Hugo awards, strongly enough that a number of those involved even reject suggestions that some moderation just might be in order, all of which reminds me of the ancient political furor over Barry Goldwater’s 1964 declaration that “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And… moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

The problem in both politics and the current Sad/Rabid Puppies kerfuffle is that each side’s assumptions behind the words differ. Conservatives view “liberty” and “justice” in terms of property, while liberals focus on human rights. I’d like to think that moderates realize that both property and human rights are essential to a functioning society.

Likewise in the F&SF kerfuffle, it seems to me that the Sad/Rabid Puppies tend to focus more extensively, at times almost exclusively, on the importance of action, storyline, and individual worth and action, while the more “liberal” side insists that the context of the society/world in which storylines exist should play a far greater role, and that no functional future society should be racially/culturally unidimensional. The Sad/Rabid Puppies appear to believe that the other side wants to continue using the Hugo awards to reward works and individuals that further their goals, while the “liberal” side believes that the Sad/Rabid Puppies want to wrench the awards back to representing the male, patriarchal U.S. culture of the 1950s. That’s an oversimplification, since each group has individuals who don’t fit those definitions, but I think it captures the gist of the conflict.

The sad problem is that the unspoken simplistic assumptions on each side ignore their commonalities, and the fact that, for F&SF to continue as a vital form, elements of both sides need to be represented and that neither should “dominate” the awards. Of course, since the politicians and all too many voters haven’t been able to comprehend this concept, why should mere readers and authors?

One of the great benefits touted by exponents of social media is that it brings people together. It does indeed, but each social media group brings together only those sharing similar views.

A good example of this lies in the “sad puppies/rabid puppies” kerfuffle involving “slate voting” to determine the nominees for the annual World Science fiction awards. The situation continues and appears to be getting increasingly acrimonious, with partisans on each side making declarations and demands, and even threatening the boycott of the books of one major F&SF publisher because of the intemperate comments of two employees on social media.

From what I can tell, this acrimony likely involves at most perhaps several thousand individuals, and probably less than a few hundred who are deeply involved and committed… and who feel that the entire literary “culture” of fantasy and science fiction is threatened in one way or another, with the “liberal” side declaring that “traditional” F&SF is the bastion of old white males who embody all of those stereotypes, and the “sad/rabid puppy” side declaring that the liberals have hijacked F&SF into everything they detest, including novels that focus on multi-culturalism, gender diversity, extreme environmentalism, etc. Each side is industriously employing social media to assail the other.

The truth is that F&SF is big enough for both sides, and in fact is far bigger than either. Most readers haven’t even heard of this “death of F&SF as we know it” jeremiad. What’s published today in F&SF spans an incredible range, enough that a careful reader can find almost any political “range” or social structure. Yes… there is a struggle over which group controls the awards, but, face it, literary awards are always political, and always have been. At times, usually rarely, excellence triumphs over politics, but most of the time, awards reflect the social and political biases of those controlling the process. Thankfully, fiction publishers try to determine what readers want, rather than what literary groups declare is “good.” And readers know what they want, and that’s what they buy.

Unhappily, the “puppies” kerfuffle has far larger implications. Each side in this tempest in a large teapot has used social media to convince itself that not only is its view correct, but that far, far more people share this view than in fact do. Social media has become a tool for group self-selection, and group isolation. This seems to be resulting in greater polarization, greater intransigence on the part of each self-selected group, and a far greater sense of self-importance than is in any way justified.

After all, our entire planet has a population of eight billion or so, and is just one of eight in our solar system, which is just one of over fifty billion stars and associated solar systems in our galaxy. Current observations suggest over two hundred billion galaxies in the universe. Most F&SF devotees should know this, but paradoxically, the more invested they are in their identity in F&SF, and the more involved in social media, the less they seem to recognize this.

And that is the great danger of great investment in social media, which all too often reinforces group identity to the exclusion of even considering the views and values of other groups. Is this really desirable? Or do you want everything to be a replay of the American Congress, which has used technology and social media to effectively polarize U.S. politics into near total gridlock, where each side refuses to consider almost anything suggested by the other? Or of academic politics where the vast majority of university faculties are dominated by either the left or the right, and where pettiness and vicious infighting abound, now intensified by email and social media?

American politics has always contained an element of “gotcha” mudslinging designed to reveal or suggest unpopular attributes or acts of candidates for public office, but in recent years it appears that all too many campaigns have become little more than contests dominated by gotcha elements and efforts.

In general, voters have become, in my opinion, ever more hypocritical. We revel in the efforts of the media to dig up dirt and distasteful items about the candidates we dislike, and we ignore the unpleasantnesses revealed about “our” candidate. We claim virtues we often don’t exhibit, but castigate candidates whose actions reveal that they’re not all that different from the rest of us. Let’s face it. Everyone has skeletons in their closet… and if not in their closet, then in the closets of their families and associates. That’s why it’s not exactly surprising that the majority of violent crimes are committed in the home and that the largest percentage of murders are committed by someone who knew or was related to the victim.

Even some of our greatest presidents weren’t exactly saints. Jefferson’s intimate relations with a slave who also happened to be his wife’s half-sister resulted in a number of children born on the wrong side of the blanket. Lincoln was consistently depressed, told thoroughly racist and vulgar jokes in his early years, and was married to a woman who was anything but stable. Franklin Roosevelt not only hid the severity of his polio; he also hid the number of extra-marital affairs. Jackson married a woman when she was still married to another man. George Washington owned the largest distillery in the United States when he was president and sent troops to put down the whiskey rebellion. He also persuaded Congress to buy stone from his quarries for the capitol building, stone that eventually had to be replaced because of its deficiencies.

That didn’t mean that these men didn’t accomplish a great deal as presidents, because they did. It does suggest that we might be better off as voters if we stopped focusing exclusively on their negatives.

After all, would you want to be judged solely on your failures and worst traits?

The political structure of the United States has been in a state of virtual gridlock for almost a decade. The rhetoric has been heated, often vitriolic. Yet for all that, most of the so-called debate misses the basic concerns and points.

The issue isn’t whether black lives matter. Of course they do, but concentrating on policing ignores and minimizes the need to change the circumstances in which the poorest Americans, especially minorities, live. Concentrating on the police may well reduce the number of young male minorities being shot by police, but it does little or nothing to reduce the number of young minority males being shot by other young minority males, nor does it deal with any of the other problems faced by poor minorities.

All the furor over Obamacare, aka The Affordable Care Act, focuses on who pays how much for what health care, as opposed to focusing on why health care in the United States costs incredibly more than anywhere else in the world – and often for exactly the same procedures and the exact same pharmaceuticals.

In political campaigns, the rhetoric these days seems to be more about who will impose or not impose pseudo-religious “moral values” through legislation than in dealing with bread and butter economic, infrastructure, and environmental problems.

We have the greatest level of economic inequality in more than a century and possibly the highest in the history of the United States, and every study done on this issue indicates that high income inequality hampers the economy and creates a greater number of the poor. Yet the entire issue seems to center more on avoiding the real issue – that tax rates are likely too low on the top one percent and too high on the middle class – and focuses on how tax increases on the wealthy hurt job creation [proven to be totally wrong] or how more government handouts will solve the problem [also a most dubious proposition].

Environmental issues have become a conflict between one side insisting that all environmental regulations destroy jobs and the other insisting that almost anything “environmental” is beneficial, rather than a debate over what degree of regulation is proper for what substances in what situations.

Shouldn’t we be asking the politicians exactly how they intend to address specific problems and insisting on specific answers, rather than letting them use vague sound bites to avoid the issues while appealing to the prejudices of their potential supporters?

But, of course, that won’t happen, because any politician offering specifics will lose… and that speaks badly, not only of them, but of us.

The other day, I tried to book a flight on Delta, using the airline’s website, since using the telephone costs more and usually takes longer. I got to the end and clicked on the “purchase” icon/button. Two miniature airplanes circled, with the word “loading” appearing, only to be replaced by a box stating that there had been a “booking error” and that I needed to start from the beginning and try again. I did. I got the same result.

So I figured that the website had a glitch and waited several hours. When I tried again, I got the same error box. I tried two hours later, with identical results. Then I attempted to call Delta, only to get a message that my call did not go through. That happened twice. I tired once more, another hour later, with the same results. Another hour later [I tend to be bull-headedly persistent], I then managed to get through to Delta after a fifteen minute hold. While the Delta representative was very helpful, it took her three attempts and some creative programming to get my reservation and ticket, and she indicated that she would be filing a report on the system malfunctions. She was not much happier than I was about the system.

As long-time readers of this blog may recall, this is not the first time Delta’s website has malfunctioned. The last time, I could at least reach real people quickly. This time, either too many people were trying to do the same thing, temporarily overloading the circuitry, fiber-optic lines… or whatever… or Delta now has fewer real bodies staffing the lines.

Delta is one of the largest air carriers in the world… but they apparently don’t have a real back-up system for internet reservations and tickets, in all probability because the suits at the top or the accountants advising them have decided that the cost of such a back-up would cut profits, or, if factored into ticket prices, would render Delta less competitive. Some of that is understandable, especially given the amount of information a passenger has to provide in order to get a ticket, and woe betide you if you don’t use the exact name on your government-issued I.D.

All of this brings up a question larger than merely attempting to acquire airline reservations and electronic tickets. Just how long will it be before the United States – or perhaps the entire world – is so electronically linked and co-dependent that we risk losing our entire civilization because of a cascade of failures that cannot be countered fast enough to stop the collapse?

We have a fragile national power grid, an interstate highway system falling apart faster than we’re replacing and repairing it; water and sewer systems that need massive repairs and upgrades; and a communications system that is woefully vulnerable to power outages, hacking and physical sabotage [a single backhoe in the wrong place last year knocked out all internet to southern Utah for well over twenty-four hours]. We have military aircraft that often require tens of hours of maintenance for each hour flown. We also have a government that is more interested in cutting taxes and arguing over social mores than in addressing any of these problems, and a corporate community dominated by an obsession over profits, despite the fact that they’re essentially at an all-time high.

How about a government and a corporate structure that address some of the real problems?