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 Perhaps I’m just horribly outdated or old-fashioned, but using the word “me” as the initial identifier in the email address seems incredibly self-centered.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?

We have survived another family wedding. In fact, this one was largely uneventful and generally pleasant. When I was younger, I wondered why there were so many what seemed to me stupid movies about dysfunctional weddings. Some fifteen years later, after having endured, and sometimes feeling like we barely survived, almost a score of family weddings, I no longer wonder, except perhaps why there aren’t more movies about murders at weddings, or even films noir.

A dear but departed friend once observed that while we can all choose our friends we don’t have that choice with our families. What I’ve noticed is that often an excess of family characteristics, each one perhaps admirable in itself, is multiplied by the presence of innumerable family members with that same characteristic confined in a small locale for too long a period can result in various forms of high temperature reactions and meltdowns.

Fortunately, the latest wedding was organized and orchestrated by a family member with great tact and skill, who also understood the need for the placement and spacing of volatile elements. But, then, maybe I’m just getting worn out after years of being expected to be the human equivalent of a reactor damping rod.

Or maybe it’s relief that there won’t be any more family weddings for a while — like years.

Over the past several years, the news stories and the statistics about thousands upon thousands of people being murdered in the name of this or that religion have proliferated. Yet, among the many things I’ve never quite grasped about various gods, or the various manifestations of the supreme being, if you prefer that terminology, is how such deities can be omnipotent, while at the same time so powerless that human beings have to conduct all the massacres of non-believers, former believers, “infidels” who mock the deity, or not-quite-fully-brain-washed believers who question some aspect of the faith or the deity, or others that the priesthoods, clerics, mullahs, and ayatollahs declare necessary to be disposed of to glorify the deity or to remove those who would question the deity’s existence or purpose, a purpose far beyond our mere mortal minds?

I mean, if a deity is supreme, why doesn’t the deity do its own dirty work?

Or are the endless killings and massacres necessary to prove true belief? But, if the deity is omnipotent, then the deity already knows who has the true belief and who doesn’t. So are all the killings and massacres to prove the power of the faith to other humans and confirm the power of the priests, mullahs, ayatollahs, and other humans who have either anointed themselves as keepers of the faith or been anointed by other human keepers of the faith? Again, an omnipotent deity could accomplish the same thing with a clear, scientifically observed great miracle of some sort, thereby confounding the scientists and rationalists, and also saving millions of lives and clearly demonstrating truly awesome power.

Funny thing, though. It hasn’t happened.

All of which suggests a possible absence of an omnipotent deity who cares in the slightest about human beings. That being so, what is the point of the “faithful” slaughtering unbelievers and heretics – except to bolster the temporal [not spiritual] power of those who lead the faithful? By definition, temporal power has no impact on the various kingdoms beyond those on our poor battered Earth. Yet the most prevalent faiths that postulate the existence of as deity seem in their postulates to be less than enthusiastic about the amassing of power and material goods, even as their believers and leaders in effect do just that.

So… are those human servants of the divine misinterpreting the rules? Or are they just being hypocritical? Well… why hasn’t, over the scores of centuries, the deity set them straight?

That hasn’t happened, either.

One doctrine, close to the faith in which I was raised, raises the spectre that the deity gave humans free will so that they could choose good or evil – good meaning following the deity and the deity’s ensuing commandments, revealed but to a select few, among which is the commandment not to kill.

Given how many millions have died in conflicts over faith, might not a compassionate deity want to set the record straight? Or does all that carnage in the name of the supreme somehow please a deity? If so, what does that say about the deity? If not, why do so many think it does?

Or does it suggest that the concept of a personally-involved deity of compassion and justice might just have a flaw or two?

When it comes right down to it, human beings have to operate on belief. To survive, we cannot prove and demonstrate every aspect of life anew each day. Based on past experience, we believe that the sun will rise each day. When we take trip on an airplane we believe it will get us there. But there are two kinds of belief. There is belief based on the intangible and belief based on the observable and demonstrable.

Belief in a deity or a greater power is belief in the intangible. I’m not saying that a higher power does or does not exist. I am saying that there is absolutely no physical evidence that the universe in which we live was created by such a power or that such a power intervenes directly in our lives. Nor is there any physical evidence of an afterlife. All that may or may not exist, but all religions that postulate any or some of those beliefs as fact are based on faith, not on observable or provable evidence. Conceivably, if improbably, in my opinion, that could change. Robert Sawyer wrote a science fiction novel [Calculating God] in which a future human society and an alien society discover such observable and physical proof of the existence of a higher power.

So when critics of science insist that scientists operate on belief and that the sole difference between scientists and fundamentalist deity-worshippers is in what they believe, the only element of truth in that assertion is that, by necessity, all humans operate on what they believe, to a large degree, in their everyday lives. The question isn’t whether we believe; it’s what we believe.

At one time, the Catholic Church insisted that the earth was the center of the universe. Giordano Bruno insisted otherwise, particularly that stars were actually suns similar to our own, with planets with life upon them, and that there was no “Celestial center” to the universe. Unsurprisingly, given the fervor of true believers and a Church wanting to maintain control, his “beliefs” were denounced, and he was executed. He was, of course, largely correct, especially in overall concept, and the guardians of religion were wrong, as they have been to a great degree whenever they have opposed what science has discovered.

One of the problems that believers in intangibles have is that all too many of them want a simple and complete explanation to the universe. Belief in a supreme deity offers such. So, in a more limited way, does intelligent design explain where we as a species came from – except that explanation is totally at variance with what science has discovered.

Science cannot offer the sweeping absolutes that religion does, because science is based on what we have discovered, and we have not yet discovered everything that is potentially discoverable about life and the universe. In the recent past centuries of scientific progress we have learned more and more about both, but whether we will ever learn everything, I suspect, is unlikely. To me, belief based on facts and what can be demonstrated to be so, even if such explanations of the universe and life are not totally complete, is far more satisfying than simplistic wish-fulfillment. And, in the meantime, until all the evidence is in, I’m perfectly happy in not knowing whether there is or is not a supreme deity, especially since, if there does happen to be such a deity, given all we’ve undergone as a species, there’s certainly no proof that such a deity is unreservedly just and beneficent.

Tobacco, lead, and atmospheric modification [i.e., global warming/climate change/air pollution]… what do they all have in common? It’s actually something incredibly fundamental.

All made or make billions of dollars for U.S. industry and created severe adverse health impacts for all Americans, in fact, for pretty much the majority of human beings… and the industrial conglomerates involved in producing and marketing the products that created these massive health problems fought tooth and nail against efforts to educate people and against regulations and laws to stop those impacts…and in the case of atmospheric modification and tobacco, they still are.

From the time of the Romans, people have known that lead has adverse health effects on human beings, but lead has attractive properties for manufacturers. It makes paints brighter and more durable, and in the late nineteenth century essentially all paints were lead-based, but studies showed the danger, particularly to children. As a result, in1922, the League of Nations banned lead-based paint, as did Australia, and within a few years, so did most of Europe. The U.S. did not. In 1943, a report concluded that children eating lead paint chips could suffer from neurological disorders including behavior, learning, and intelligence problems. Finally, in 1971, lead-based house paint was phased out in the United States with the passage of the Lead-Based Paint Poisoning Prevention Act. Even so, a study in 2000 found that 38 million housing units in the U.S. still had lead-based paint, if down from 64 million in 1990.

That wasn’t the only lead problem. In 1921, General Motors came up with a new gasoline formula to allow high compression engines – tetra-ethyl lead. Despite the fact that scores of employees producing TEL either died or suffered severe lead poisoning, GM and its subsidiary, the Ethyl Corporation, effectively lobbied against regulations and managed to avoid prohibition of lead in gasoline for another sixty years. By the time the United States formally banned lead as a gasoline additive in 1986, so much lead been deposited into soils, streets, building surfaces, that an estimated 68 million children registered toxic levels of lead absorption and some 5,000 American adults would die annually of lead-induced heart disease. As lead affects cognitive function, chronic lead exposure resulted in a measurable drop in IQ scores of exposed children during the leaded gas era. And more recently, researchers have suggested that TEL exposure and resulting nervous system damage also contributed to violent crime rates in the 20th century. Within twenty years of the prohibition of TEL, average blood lead levels dropped so markedly that today less than a million children have lead blood levels of concern, although no safe threshold for lead exposure has been discovered—that is, there is no known sufficiently small amount of lead that will not cause harm to the body.

As for tobacco… in 1912, Isaac Adler published the first medical monograph on lung cancer which suggested that the cause might be toxic effects of smoking tobacco and alcohol consumption. The first known controlled study, by Franz Hermann Müller at Cologne Hospital, appeared in 1939, and five separate and detailed studies appeared in the early 1950s, all showing the direct and adverse effects of smoking.

This was no surprise to the tobacco companies. As early as 1946, Lorillard [producer of Old Gold, Newport, and Kent cigarettes] had a report from its director of research observing that scientific studies linked tobacco use to cancer. Despite the fact that a confidential 1953 ‘Survey of Cancer Research’, written for upper management at RJ Reynolds, makers of Camel cigarettes, concluded that tobacco was ‘an important etiologic factor in the induction of primary cancer of the lung’, cigarette manufacturers buried the evidence and continued to oppose public and government efforts to link smoking to lung cancer.

The 1964 Surgeon General’s report, which officially recognized smoking as a cause of lung cancer, wasn’t a discovery, but an acknowledgement of 20 years or more of research, yet as late as the mid-1970s, Phillip Morris was still spending millions on PR claiming that second-hand smoke was not dangerous to non-smokers.

All of this is scarcely surprising, given that the annual world production of cigarettes is about six trillion and that the annual profit of cigarette manufacturers runs to around $60 billion. The industry clearly doesn’t care that cigarette consumption will result in six million deaths in 2015 or that, according to a report of the Surgeon General just released, the annual cost of smoking just in the U.S. now is $300 billion a year, of which $130 billion are direct medical costs.

Regardless of the rhetoric from deniers, climate change is real. Irrefutable evidence from around the world that includes record temperatures, the incredible shrinkage of Arctic ice coverage, rising sea levels, the overwhelming preponderance of retreating or disappearing glaciers, ,the marked increase in extreme weather events, and record temperatures all point to the fact that climate change is happening now and at rates much faster than previously thought. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) incorporates the work of more than 2,500 scientists from more than 130 countries (and that’s one of the largest bodies of international scientists ever assembled to study a scientific issue) and has concluded that most of the warming observed during the past 50 years is attributable to human activities. IPCC’s findings have been publicly endorsed by the national academies of science of all G-8 nationals have publicly endorsed these findings, as have those of China, India and Brazil.

Yet in the United States, climate denial skeptics still abound, or seem to. Why might that be?

Well, according to various sources, the Koch Brothers, owners of Koch Industries, a privately-held fossil fuels based conglomerate with annual revenues estimate at $115 billion annually [enough to rank #17 on the Fortune 500], have so far spent almost $80 million in funding politicians and organizations denying that global warming/climate change now exist. Exxon Mobil has made over $10 million in traceable donations to shill or right-wing, fellow-traveler organizations that deny global warming, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, among others.

And interestingly enough, Exxon Mobil has been consulting with those folks in the tobacco industry on how to fight science, and they’re adopting the same tactics as big tobacco, and even some of the same consultants.

Given just these three examples, you might see why I tend to be rather skeptical when industry types, and all the organizations that they fund, assure me that whatever they’re doing really isn’t a problem… and, in fact, that the problem isn’t even a problem at all, just like lead and tobacco weren’t.

After forty years of teaching at the collegiate level, my wife the professor is getting exceedingly tired of new administrators and presidents who have the “next great idea” or plan or system, but who are largely re-inventing the wheel. Part of that is simply a lack of understanding of the past and failing to take time to learn what has already been tried and worked, at least to some degree, and what hasn’t.

But part of the reason programs and systems are discarded by institutions is because NO program or system offers a “one size fits all” solution. Yet, in the always-chasing-rainbows mindset of too many idealists, politicians seeking votes, and university presidents trying to please legislatures and alumni, all too many good approaches have been tried, worked for a large majority of faculty and students, and been discarded because they weren’t successful enough, because some group didn’t benefit.

The same, unfortunately, is also true in national politics. Despite close to a century of U.S. government programs to help the disadvantaged, while the vast majority are better off, the problems of the poor, and especially the minority poor, still remain. In some areas, one might argue that they’re worse.

All this leads to a question no one, but no one, wants to ask. Is there really a complete solution to such problems? Can all children really learn enough to get a college degree or advanced vocational training so that they can be economically self-supporting with a decent or better standard of living? Can we really come up with effective treatments for all those with mental illness? Can the U.S. military police every foreign conflict that might have an adverse impact on the United States?

Most thinking individuals would answer that there aren’t solutions to such problems that will be universally effective, but everyone shies away from trying to answer the logical next question: What degree of success is realistically obtainable and affordable for a given program or system?

No matter what anyone says, not all children can grow up to be economically and socially self-supporting. Not all those with mental illness or impairment can be treated to make them societally functional. But right now, expectations in so many areas are so out of line with reality and generations of experience and evidence that good programs are saddled with demands for impossible results, and many are junked and discarded because they cannot meet expectations… and another set of administrators, executives, and others must set out to reinvent the wheel once more, usually doomed to fail before they start because expectations demand a physically impossible level of perfection.

All species with some form of cognition, especially humans, have a cognitive bias that we almost never consider. We focus almost exclusively on what exists, if you will, what we see, hear, feel, and believe we know exists, not on what doesn’t. This sounds supremely rational at first glance, but it’s not, because we ignore the impacts and the costs of what is not present, but might otherwise be.

What brought this to my attention was a demonstration of canine skills by the local police organizations’ canine [K-9] units. One of the points that emerged was that while trained police canines are not cheap, they save lives and money, at least in our region. Just over the last ten years, there have been more than a score of documented cases where armed suspects who were involved in narcotics, armed robberies, and other stand-off situations would not surrender to police officers, but who immediately or quickly surrendered when they were faced with police canines. This not only likely saved the lives of officers, but also saved the lives of the suspects. Even those suspects brought down by canines came out better off, suffering at the most the need for a few stitches, rather than being shot and likely severely wounded or killed. The medical costs alone that were avoided in these cases likely far exceeded the costs of acquiring the dogs and training these K-9 units, not to mention the costs of deaths and burdens on families that were also avoided, but I’ve never seen even an estimated quantification of costs that were avoided.

A study whose results were just published in New Scientist attempts to quantify in general terms how U.S. elections would be different if the death rates and imprisonment rates of African American males were the same as those of Caucasian males, and according to the analysis the effects of the absence of those dead and imprisoned blacks, as well as those who died prematurely because of health factors, would have been significant. You might say it’s another unquantified effect of how black lives matter.

I mentioned in an earlier blog how American aerospace R&D is decreasing. What’s not decreasing are the R&D efforts of major players outside the U.S. What’s not there – more basic research and development – will definitely have an impact in years to come, but I doubt many will trace it back to what wasn’t spent on R&D over the past few years.

Today, everyone in politics and business talks about cost-effectiveness, about how to do more with less, but I don’t see anywhere close to the same enthusiasm about asking what investments that we are not making could reduce costs. And sometimes, I suspect, what isn’t there just might be more important than what is.

Like most people, I do try to be charitable, both in attitude and in making an effort to give something to organizations whose charitable purposes with which I agree. But I’ve noticed a change in almost all of them over the past five to ten years. Now, it seems, as soon as I contribute, not only do I get a thank you, but another plea for more money, and another… and before long, another. Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon, but repaying my charitable efforts with more and more demands for contributions tends to make me less charitable, not more… and I find myself more willing to contribute to groups that don’t press me and less willing to give to those who do.

It’s not just charities. It’s everywhere. The U.S. air transport and aerospace industries are investing less and less in research and development and spending more and more on share buybacks and dividends. Airline profits are up, thanks to all the extra fees and charges levied on travelers. This trend is sweeping business, as I’ve noted before. Not only that, but now business after business wants the consumer to do their market research for them, by asking for customer feedback on everything from banking services to lodging, consumer products, transportation, automobiles, and who knows what else. Company after company wants me to go paperless, but I can’t go paperless for many because the IRS likes paper receipts and documentation, and if I go paperless, I’m the one who has to take the time and paper to print out all those receipts and documents.

Our state electric utility now wants to charge customers who use solar and wind power – because their use of less electricity will impact the utility. Politicians want more and more contributions for their re-election, and, in turn, business lobbyists want more and legislative favors for those contributions.

Students coming to universities not only want scholarships and more financial aid, but they also want better grades for less effort, and unhappily, due to the fact that most universities had bought into using student evaluations as part of the formula for determining faculty raises and retention, they’re getting higher grades for less effort. Of course, fewer of them are being taught by full-time experienced faculty.

All too many readers want books that are cheaper and cheaper – if not free – and I’ve had more than a few readers complain that the prices of my books are too high. Yet, given inflation, and market pressures, most publishers are making less per book, in real dollar terms, than they were ten or fifteen years ago, and that goes for almost all authors as well.

In ways large and small, almost everyone is being asked to do more, give more, spend more, do more of businesses’ work. Is it any wonder many people are less charitable in thought and deed?