I ran across an interesting blog analyzing/critiquing my recently released hard SF novel – Solar Express. The blog used the intriguing construct of a discussion of the book between a futurist, a science fiction reader, and a UFO researcher… and none of them were particularly pleased with the book. I’m likely simplifying, but the bottom line was that the book portrayed a future a hundred years hence that was far too much like the present, and that I’d failed to show massive social changes, or any of the potential new scientific advances predicted by SF fans and futurists.

And all three of these presumably fictional characters were generally right. I didn’t, and I didn’t because most of them won’t happen, and most certainly won’t happen in a hundred years. Now, I’m not saying that there won’t be changes, some of them dramatic, over the next hundred years, because there will be, but very few will be of the nature postulated by those three characters, or by most futurists or science fiction writers.

Why? Because, despite all the rhetoric, hype, and hope to the contrary, we’re entering the Age of Limits. I’ve touched on this before, but it’s true nonetheless. We now have, on this planet, instantaneous communications. The limitation now is our ability to process and act upon those communications, and even if we replaced our biological circuitry with instant/electric capabilities and cyborged bodies, the physical speed of effective reaction couldn’t be that much faster. Nor would most human beings, even in that state, assuming we as a planet could afford it, which we can’t, think and comprehend that much faster.

We aren’t going to see superfast interplanetary or interstellar travel either. While there are some intriguing theoretical possibilities, using those possibilities would require massive amounts of energy,and for interstellar travel that would mean harnessing energy at the level contained in small black holes, and using that much energy near any planetary body or surface would have devastating impacts.

We now have ebooks, the instantly available electronic texts on every subject… and it doesn’t appear that they have markedly increased literacy or learning [and may have decreased reading longer works among the younger population], which is scarcely surprising, given that learning is limited by the individual’s biological and cultural cognitive development. Technology itself doesn’t automatically improve cognition.

It’s very possible that we’ll see solar voltaic films with much higher power generation efficiency than anything so far developed, and I’d be surprised if we don’t see that, but to use that energy requires supporting technological devices, and while 3-D printers can do a lot of that on an individual basis, where will all the raw material come from, because not everything can be printed solely out of carbon-based feedstocks?

We’re seeing incredible advances in medical technology, but those increases have come with equally incredible price tags, so that the real limitation on the implementation of some of these technologies wouldn’t be the technology, but the resources with which to pay for them. Greater and greater percentages of even the citizens in developed countries are either unable to afford or are precluded from obtaining cutting edge medical treatments, and using those technologies to extend and save lives only increases a society’s energy and resource requirements. Add to that the fact that population is still increasing and is projected to exceed 11 billion by a century from now. That means a greater demand on resources.

The bottom line is that the universe has physical limits, and human societies do as well. We have to make choices about how to allocate the application of effort and resources, because we can’t do everything we theoretically could do for everyone. And that’s why any halfway realistic portrayal of the near future is going to incorporate many factors and limitations of the present. They just don’t vanish because it’s the future.

Does this mean that Solar Express is a total “downer”? I scarcely think so. The greatness of human beings, I believe, lies not so much in exceeding limits, but in the struggle for meaning and greatness against those limits. That’s why, as an author, I’ve struggled against portraying unrealistically great and soaring achievements, and why my characters usually pay very high prices for their achievements – because struggling against the limits of the universe – any universe – is costly.

But recognizing this is hard for most people to accept, and that’s another reason for the proliferation and success of mighty heroic, and totally impossible, comic book heroes in movies and books these days. And why some people who call themselves futurists really aren’t at all, because the future our children and grandchildren will live in will be based, like it or not, or aspects of the present-day reality.

Human beings are the ultimate tool-using species on this planet, and in this Solar System, it would appear, and yet… all too often our most powerful tool is ignored, minimized, and overlooked. I’m referring to language, the use of words. Without language, our tool-making skills would likely be stuck in the Stone Age, if not before.

Despite its power, it often seems to me that people go out of their way to abuse language. The other night I watched part of the Hundred Year Grammy Celebration of the birth of Frank Sinatra, and listened while a bevy of Grammy Award Winners performed a host of Sinatra’s original arrangements. I came away from what I watched with two impressions. First, none of those talented Grammy artists sang those songs as well as Sinatra had. Second, all of them sounded better singing Sinatra’s arrangements than they did singing what made them successful and popular. Now, that’s just my opinion, but it was so nice to actually hear and understand the words the more “modern” artists were singing.

Why is it that so much modern vocal music effectively degrades the use of words, twisting them and singing them against a melodic cacophony that so often makes it impossible to decipher what they might have been? Or for that matter,even finding the melody line itself [and I can certainly do without high bass volume repetitive percussive abuse]?

But pop music isn’t the only offender. Attorneys, bureaucrats, education administrators, politicians, entertainers, programmers, and even writers, often torture language to the point where it becomes excessively jargon-laden and meaningless.

These days it often seems that the most used aspect of language as a tool is not to communicate ideas, not to educate, not to share emotions or experiences, and not even to entertain, but to persuade people to buy, to buy ideas, goods, propaganda, various religions, and, of course, political candidates. But then, humans are also the ultimate opportunists, and it’s clear that our market-driven culture knows just where the highest value of words lies, and that’s in sales.

So much for the Bard, A Brief History of Time, “The Waste Land,” “Easter 1916,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” or even The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or War and Peace.

From what I can determine, PC, or political correctness, has become almost a tired and trite phrase, and I can see why. It really doesn’t fit the politics and cultural conflicts of the present, and the reason it doesn’t is because there’s very little that’s “correct,” let alone accurate or effective, in most of today’s politics, political policies, and especially in the shouting past each other that passes for political discussion.

Add to that the fact that very few political figures, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders excepted in some, but not all cases, have the political courage to “tell it like it is.” And for that matter, neither do most individuals in positions of power… because almost all of them are afraid that accurate evaluations of situations will cost them power…as well as endless litigation.

I’ll offer a few examples. With the exception of the comedian and political commentator Bill Mahar, no one seems willing to offer a public assessment of the Islamic faith. How can anyone with a shred of objectivity offer a favorable assessment of a faith that predominantly believes that: (1) women are second or third class individuals whose rights should be determined by the men in their lives; (2) that anyone who leaves the faith should be put to death; (3) that anyone who criticizes or mocks the prophet deserves to be put to death; (4) that women are responsible for all sexual violence perpetrated upon them and should be killed for dishonoring their families in such cases. Studies from all around the world confirm that a majority of Muslims believe all of the above, and what a religion truly is must be based on what its practitioners believe and what they do, not by its scripture. This isn’t a just matter of “differing beliefs.” Those beliefs, as presently manifested by the opinions, attitudes, and actions of Muslim believers, denigrate and literally demonize those who do not agree with them, with the results being everything from mass murder to honor killings in the name of Allah.

In historical terms, the Catholic Church wasn’t much better, at one time turning most of Europe into a charnel house with religious wars, and Catholicism still minimizes the worth of women and places their value as vessel for childbearing above anything else, while denying them equality in the theological structure.

The United States certainly isn’t particularly honest in its self-assessments, either. The LDS faith and extreme Christian evangelicals are both essentially and excessively patriarchal and place women in socially and theologically inferior positions, with their greatest value apparently as brood mares, and yet anyone who says this is ignored, dismissed, or attacked.

Yet anyone who mentions loudly these problems is shouted down for being “disrespectful” of other religions. Accuracy in description is disrespectful?

The failure to face facts goes well beyond religion.

The idea that more weapons in more hands will stop crime is insane, especially given that we have both 300 million weapons in private hands, the greatest number of deaths perpetrated by private individuals of any country in the world, and also the greatest percentage of our population incarcerated. Likewise, given those 300 million weapons, the idea of getting rid of privately owned firearms is a pipe-dream. Black male inner city culture is toxic and a disaster, and while poverty, discrimination, and police procedures definitely play a huge role in the excessive murder rate of blacks by blacks, the role of inner-city culture is conveniently dismissed as another facet of discrimination. Yet a comparison of black murder rates to other poor areas with different racial and ethnic backgrounds still finds blacks with a far higher murder rate than other poverty-stricken ethnic groups. When in certain cities, police patrols recently became less intensive, the crime rates in those inner cities went up.

Now, stories are appearing about how college students are actually suppressing free speech and demanding “trigger warnings” because they don’t want to hear news, facts, discussions, or opinions contrary to their feelings or beliefs – and all too many of them see anything that disturbs them as disrespectful or even verging on “hate speech.” In fact, a recent Pew Research study found that forty percent of Americans in the 18-40 age range favored government censorship to prevent speech offensive to minorities. One of the big problems with this idea is that even the most accurate and relevant facts can be offensive to someone’s beliefs, as I’ve certainly discovered over the years.

The largest overall difficulty with all of this is that it’s impossible to even attempt to find solutions to problems if any form of complete discussion of these problems is effectively muzzled by the desire not to offend and the outrage of those who are offended… and when the only people who will bring them up bluntly are demagoguing politicians like Donald Trump or liberal comedians like Bill Mahar.

Many years ago, I was a Navy helicopter search and rescue pilot, and, consequently, I do tend to follow aircraft developments… and their costs. The first helicopter I flew as a full-fledged Naval Aviator was a Sikorsky UH-34, the last large piston-driven helicopter, and, as I recall, each cost somewhere less than a million dollars. Today’s Navy uses Sikorsky Seahawks [SH-60R/S] for carrier search and rescue, and they come with a price tag in excess of $30 million each.

The other day I was reading a report on the Air Force’s proposed new long range bomber. Each one is projected to cost something like $564 million, and the total program cost of the one hundred planned high tech stealth bombers is expected to exceed $80 billion. This may seem expensive, but the most expensive bomber procurement ever was that of the B-2. Only 21 B-2s were built, and the total program cost for each amounted to $2 billion per bomber.

The newest U.S. advanced fighter plane is the F-35, rated with a top speed of Mach 2.25, each one of which will cost a minimum of $163 million. Unhappily, the program appears to have run into a number of problems, including a flight test in which an F-16 apparently bested an F-35 in a trial dog-fight, which created some consternation, given that the F-16 is a far older aircraft with a forty year old design, giving rise to concerns that the F-35 might not live up to its billing.

Prior to that, the unit cost for an F-22, a stealth air superiority fighter, was $155 million each in 2009. By comparison, in 1965 a Mach 2 capable F-4E Phantom jet fighter cost $2.4 million [$18 million in today’s dollars].

So, we now have a fighter aircraft that is only ten percent faster that the top-rated fighter of fifty years ago, but which costs nine times as much. Why the difference? A good aircraft designer could give a better answer, but some of the most obvious reasons for cost increases are the need for stealth technology and design and the incredible advancement in avionics and missile technology.

As an old-line pilot, though, I have to wonder. Even years and years ago, the F-14 had an incredible “stand-off “ capability and was theoretically able to destroy aircraft beyond the pilot’s range of vision… and so far as I know that capability was seldom if ever used, simply because there was no way to reliably determine whose aircraft the F-14 could destroy. Now we have even greater stand-off capability at far higher costs… but do we dare to use it?

Let’s ask a question. What do Cyrus the Great, Alexander, Ramses II, Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Pol Pot, Vladimir Putin, Ayatollah Khomeini, Mao Zedong, Vlad the Impaler, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Mohammed, and Jesus Christ all have in common?

Besides the fact that thousands, if not millions, died either because of their actions or policies, or as a result of their teachings… they were all men. And I could have made the list longer, a lot longer, but it does bring up another question. With the record that males have compiled while they’ve been in charge of countries, religions, armies, institutions, corporations, and other groups… why do human beings continue to allow men to lead anything?

The simple answer is, of course, that men in general have been and remain larger and physically more powerful, in most instances, than women. Another answer is that studies show that men, either for genetic or cultural reasons, tend to defer to other males who are taller and present an image of greater personal power, often even when it’s obvious that such men are largely lacking in other areas, such as foresight and intelligence.

From historic times onward, and possibly before, men have almost always controlled societies, and in almost all of them used their power to keep women in a secondary position, invariably opposing attempts to give women legal and social status and power equivalent to men. Even today, the vast majority of women across the world are still in a secondary position and a significant percentage are little more than slaves.

All this leads to yet another question. Just how well have men done at ruling and directing societies, governments, and organizations? The “boys” in control over the last century have presided over two world wars, a long-running “cold war,” not to mention more than fifty smaller wars, rebellions, insurrections, and various other lethal conflicts across the globe.

Because so few women anywhere have political and military clout, it’s difficult to make a direct comparison, but, recently, studies have shown that U.S. corporations where women have voice and power close to that of men outperform corporations dominated by men. But it certainly doesn’t seem that this is welcome news to the good old boys in the boardroom. Might it be that, despite their insistence that they’re looking for the best talent, they’re only looking for the best male talent, and performance comes second to maintaining male superiority?

Now… where would I ever come up with such an outrageous idea?

One of the problems that tends to get overlooked with belief systems, particularly religious belief systems, is their inherent hypocrisy, which can be illustrated simply by taking given tenets of the belief system and comparing that tenet to actual statistics. I’ve seen a number of articles and statements that claim the violence we’ve seen from Islamic terrorists is not typical and certainly not representative of what the Koran says.

Such violence may in fact not represent what the Koran states, but a wide range of statistics show that such behavior is in fact typical and highly representative of the beliefs of a majority of Muslims, particularly in the Middle East.

In addition to such attacks as the 9/11 attack on the United States and the recent terrorist killings in Paris and Mali, not to mention the horrific violence perpetrated by ISIS, last year there were over five thousand so-called “honor killings” of women internationally, with over a thousand in Pakistan and another thousand in India. Even in the United States, there were at least thirty, and probably more, given that some of these killings were simply reported as “domestic violence.”

Almost one in five Muslims in Indonesia, considered a “moderate” Islamic nation and the largest predominantly Islam nation in the world with a population of 250 million people, with 87% of the people being Muslims, believes in the honor killing of women who have been raped or otherwise “dishonored” their families.

According to a BBC Poll, one in ten British Muslims support killing a family member over “dishonor,” and a Daily Mail survey reported that two-thirds of young British Muslims agree that ‘honor’ violence is acceptable.

A 2013 Pew Research poll reported that, among Muslims, stoning women for adultery is favored by 89% in Pakistan, 85% in Afghanistan, 81% in Egypt, 67% in Jordan, 58% in Iraq, 44% in Tunisia, 29% in Turkey, and 26% in Russia. Also, a 2010 Pew Research report showed that 84% of Egyptian Muslims, 86% of Jordanian Muslims, 30% of Indonesian Muslims, 76% of Pakistani Muslims, and 51% of Nigerian Muslims support the death penalty for leaving Islam.

In addition to the murder of those who are not believers in Islam in the ISIS controlled areas of Syria, the ISIS “modesty police” in Syria are now beating [and most likely doing worse to] women whose garments are too tight or who wear make-up.

This is not a “moderate” religion, nor is it one that respects women, no matter what the Koran says, and while extreme religious believers in the United States also have problems with respecting women, for the most part, they aren’t murdering them wholesale. So, while the Koran may say that men should respect women, that’s definitely one tenet that’s being ignored by the majority of Muslims… and they’re ignoring the fact that they’re ignoring it… and many appear to be proud that they are.

The terrorist attacks in France illustrate that there exist within the human population people who are not only willing, but apparently eager, to lose their lives for a “cause” so that they can slaughter hundreds of people even if the actual victims of their efforts are innocent bystanders who personally have not fought against them and whose only “crime” is being a citizen of a country fighting against those terrorists, or in some cases, only being present in that country. In the case of ISIS, what makes it worse is that ISIS and its sympathizers believe, or at least publicly declare, that their struggle is to create an Islamic Caliphate. Unhappily, this struggle for “freedom” is to create an “Islamic State” in which they are free to kill or enslave anyone who does not believe exactly as they do and in which women are slaves and brood mares.

Tens of thousands of angry young men who feel disenfranchised and marginalized have flocked to this cause, and it’s clear that a great many of them, if not a majority, are fanatics in every sense of the word. As history has shown, negotiating, talking, or compromising does not change the mindset of a fanatic. Most people cannot drastically change their mindsets once they become adults, and that means changing the mindset of a large body of extreme fanatics, i.e., those willing to kill repeatedly for their cause, is highly unlikely, to say the least.

The only successful remedies in dealing with such fanatics are either isolation from those fanatics or the application of greater force. In the modern high-technology world, as events in France and elsewhere have demonstrated, complete isolation or containment of fanatics is not possible, and since fanatics don’t ever give up, greater force essentially means large-scale slaughter of those fanatics, because small-scale slaughter only creates more anger and more fanatics.

This leaves the “West” with in an extraordinarily difficult position, either to beef up security and containment measures almost to the level of a police state, and still recognize that such measures will not stop all terrorist attacks… or enter into an all-out war in the Middle East, in which millions will likely die.

But then, all those ISIS fanatics will go to Paradise, while all the other combatants and non-combatants who perish will just die ugly painful deaths because the ISIS fanatics KNOW that anyone who doesn’t share their beliefs deserves to die for their apostasy, just as less violent fanatics know that everyone else’s beliefs are wrong and that non-believers should be required to comply with the beliefs of “the chosen.”

The Founding Fathers, of course, drawing upon their knowledge of past centuries of European religious fanaticism, designed a Constitution to keep the fanaticism of religion out of government and law, for exactly these reasons, reasons that American religious extremists seem to ignore, even as ISIS provides another example of the evils of extremism in pursuit of the true faith, whatever that may be.

The other day, I read a reader review that gave my new book a one star rating, and the reader declared that she was terribly disappointed, that she’s read all of my books, and had loved them all, but that Solar Express was dull and boring, not at all like the Imager Portfolio books.

I would be astounded if she has indeed read all of my books, but she likely has read all of my fantasy novels. Some of my science fiction is very different in subject matter and depth of technical aspects from my fantasy, and while I would like all readers to devour everything I write, in the real world that doesn’t happen. I know that I have readers that do indeed read and generally enjoy everything I write, but there are also those who only read and like the fantasy, those who only read and like the science fiction, and there are even those who only truly enjoy the Recluce novels. This is anything but surprising, because I do write a wide range of speculative fiction, including near-future political thrillers, very hard science fiction, and of course four very different fantasy series. I’ve also written technical non-fiction and published poetry as well.

I’m one of a comparative handful of writers still publishing both SF and fantasy (and everything else) under my own name and not a pseudonym… and that reader review, and others like it, is exactly why there are only a few of us who do.

When readers of a certain mindset read a work of fiction that they like, they tend to want that author to write everything else that way, and if they pick up another book by the same author they automatically assume the next book will be like the last one they read. And they get disappointed, sometimes even angry, if the second book doesn’t meet that expectation, even if the dust jacket describes the book accurately.

Publishers and editors are well aware of this tendency, as are writers, and that’s why the majority of newer authors tend to end up with pseudonyms for books or series that are markedly different.

Solar Express is a very science-oriented novel. All the events in the book are constrained by reality. No simple faster-than-light travel, no instant video communications anywhere and anytime, because that technology doesn’t exist, and probably never will… and if it does the costs and energy requirements will likely make it prohibitively expensive except for the highest priority communications, something that another reader didn’t seem to understand. The book is focused on people who live in that future and their problems. So far, at least, most of those with a solid science background who have contacted me have enjoyed the book. It’s also clear that some readers without such a background and without a true interest in real science have not enjoyed the book. It’s fine with me that different people with varying interests and backgrounds respond differently to dissimilar kinds of books.

What does bother me is when readers pick up a book that is obviously different in scope and approach from my other books and then complain that it’s not the same. Of course it’s not the same. The cover copy and dust jacket indicate that. So does the very first sentence. I don’t mind it if readers don’t like certain kinds of my books, but I can’t help getting annoyed when they post horrible reviews, not because the book was bad, but because they thought it was bad because it didn’t meet their personal expectations, especially when they’ve been warned that it might not.

But the fact that people are tending more and more to see authors as predictable purveyors of the same sort of satisfaction, rather than actually reading the cover copy and the dust jacket, is one of the main factors behind the proliferation of pseudonyms.

Just a little over a week ago, the regional theocracy more widely known as the LDS Church announced changes to Handbook 1, the guide for its lay leaders, not that the LDS Church has any other kind, since a degree in theology is not required for any of its “bishops” or other church functionaries. The changes state that same-sex couples who are married are “apostates” and are unwelcome in the church. This is essentially an official affirmation of a long-standing unofficial policy.

But that wasn’t enough. In addition, the new policy states that the children of same-sex couples cannot be baptized in the church until they are eighteen – and then only if they repudiate their parents’ marriage.

This is little more than a power play on the part of church authorities, using the children as weapons against the parents. Unfortunately, most people who live outside of the unofficial but very real theocracy of Deseret [i.e., Utah and sizeable chunks of the adjoining states of Nevada, Idaho, and Arizona] will likely not understand the ramifications, since, if this policy is followed by local bishops and congregations, it will isolate children of such marriages. That’s because the vast majority of socializing, politics, and most after-school activities in LDS communities revolves around the church. This becomes especially important once children reach middle school age and continues through high school, as well as college in Utah and in LDS affiliated colleges and universities.

In effect, the LDS Church has now officially declared that openly LGBT people must leave the LDS church and take their children with them, whether or not the parents or the children wish this. Personally, it’s hard for me to imagine wanting to belong to such a faith, but I know and have known enough LGBT individuals who desperately want to remain part of the LDS faith to see what a difficult choice this is for them.

It’s also incredibly hypocritical, given that the LDS faith has always portrayed itself as a loving, family-centered, and kind religion, but apparently that love and kindness only extends to those who totally disavow the existence of those whose sexual/gender orientations are not hardline heterosexual.

What also makes all of this even more hypocritical is the recent discovery that sexual orientation is at least partly determined by two human genes, which follows earlier evidence clearly indicating that the physical brain structure of LGBT individuals differs from that of heterosexuals. This evidence invalidates the entire LDS/religious argument that human sexual/gender orientation is a choice. Thus, this policy would punish people and their children for the fact that they are different, and punishing people, especially when that difference in itself harms no one, except possibly those individuals, is the last thing that a purportedly kind, family-centered, and loving faith should be doing… especially by using children as a weapon in the process.

Most of the past week I spent at the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, New York, not only attending panels, but also meeting with my editors, and my publisher, as well as being a panelist and giving a reading. It’s also one of the few times in the year when I can meet with other professionals in the field, given that my home town has exactly one other professional in the field, and she’s an artist who specializes in dragons, something that hasn’t exactly been a staple in in my fantasy. It’s also why there wasn’t a post last Friday.

More and more, however, I get tired of the same pattern in air travel. While occasionally I do get decent flight connections, more often than not, my connections fall into one of two patterns. Either I have to almost run, if not sprint, to make them, or I spend hours waiting for the next flight. On the flight out from Cedar City, a half hour before the flight was due to take off, the temperature dropped below freezing, and it started to snow. The plane was already a few minutes behind schedule, but when the de-icing time was added, when we reached Salt Lake, the airline was already boarding my flight to Detroit – two concourses away. I hurried and made it, but it wouldn’t even have been a problem if the scheduled time between flights had been even fifty minutes, rather than thirty five. Then when I got to Detroit, I had a four hour layover before the flight to Albany took off. I finally arrived in Saratoga Springs at 11:15 p.m.

On the return leg, my flight from Albany was delayed, and the gate agents told me I’d likely miss the flight from Detroit to Salt Lake. The pilot and ground crew made heroic efforts, and once more a great deal of hustle sufficed to get me aboard with even a few minutes to spare… so that I could wait for almost three hours in Salt Lake for my last flight home.

Now… these connections weren’t made in search of the least expensive fares. They were the only connections possible that would get me from Cedar City to Albany in one day, one very long day. I realize that creating airline schedules is a near-impossibility, but…

I really am getting tired of either worrying about whether I’ll make connections [because a few times I haven’t] or spending endless hours waiting, all of which are reasons why I don’t travel as much as I once did.

Economics has been called the “dismal science” by many people for many reasons. Personally, I’d like to think that it’s because, when employed properly, it reveals the aspects of human behavior very few people want exposed. One of the fundamental and simple principles of economics is that scarce goods are more highly valued and plentiful ones are less valued, and certainly human history continually shows that.

In fact, in that vein, if one applies basic economic principles to religion, the inescapable conclusion is that the wealthy and the privileged benefit disproportionately from religions and cultures that encourage the less fortunate to have lots of offspring.

Am I crazy in saying that? Or anti-religion? Hardly. It’s just the dismal science revealing what too many religions won’t or can’t admit. A few lessons from history might be instructive. After the Black Death ravaged Europe in the 14th century, killing well over a third of the population and possibly as much as sixty percent in some areas, a strange thing happened. Over the following centuries, life got a whole lot better for the working classes. Why? Because there was a shortage of labor, and even laborers became better paid. The higher cost of labor eventually led to the development of more innovations that were labor-saving and resulted in higher productivity and less brute manual work.

While China also suffered from the Black Death, the majority of the deaths were in the west of China, in the area dominated by the Mongols, as well as across the steppes, where in some areas as much as seventy percent of the population perished. This led to the collapse of Mongol rule, and the return to more traditional Chinese social and class structures… and continued reliance on a great deal of low-paid labor, of which there continued to be a great numbers… and no real incentive for the upper classes to build on the innovations that China developed centuries before the west, such as blast furnaces, gun-powder, and ocean trading.

Why did so many immigrants flee Europe for the United States? The ostensible and often-given answer is “for a better life.” But behind that answer lies economics – the fact that there was a shortage of labor in the United States, enough of a shortage that even unskilled workers could do better here than elsewhere.

Areas with high birthrates generally have lower living standards and an aristocracy of sorts that continues to live well and pay labor poorly. They’re generally also areas where women have fewer real rights and opportunities. There may be exceptions, but they’re very few and don’t last long. In such lands, the poor need to have large families just to survive, and the great numbers of the poor insure that wages for the poor remain low. With low wages, education is hard to come by, and that means only a small percentage of the poor ever rises above poverty. It also means that there are plenty of cheap servants, and most services are inexpensive.

When anyone talks about “right-to-life,” they’re really talking about a very selective “right.” They’re talking about the right to be born. The problem here is that these people’s “right-to-life” doesn’t extend to the right to live a decent life, and the higher the birth rate in any area, the more depressed wages tend to be and the fewer opportunities available to women.

So the “sacred” right-to-life really means that whatever divine being is behind it essentially supports misery and oppression. That’s sacred?

In all the hassles and kerfuffles involving the issue of education, it seems to me that one critical aspect of the problem has been totally overlooked, and that is the difference between the “right” to an opportunity as opposed to an outright right. All “rights” come with conditions, whether those are legal or physical or mental, or financial, or some combination thereof. One has to be a certain age to vote. One cannot exercise his or her second amendment rights under certain conditions… or if one has exercised those rights unwisely and ends up in jail.

Likewise, the “right” to an education is really the right to have the opportunity to gain that education. Not all individuals have the ability to become engineers, lawyers, physicists, or other professionals. Some individuals do not have the intellectual ability or the temperament to persevere through college and or graduate school. Saying that anyone has the unequivocal “right” to any particular kind of advanced education is either wistful dreaming or delusion. Saying that they should have the right to pursue education as far as their abilities may permit is far more accurate, although that still doesn’t address who will fund those studies and by what means. Nor does it address, as I’ve noted earlier, whether that education will lead to a job in that field.

The reason why the distinction between the right to an opportunity for education and the right to the education itself is vitally important is that if legislators insist on an unqualified right to a specific course of study that course of study will be dumbed down (while grades are inflated) in all but the most elite institutions, which is what has already occurred in U.S. public education, and which is why many parents mortgage their futures and everything else to pay to live in elite school districts and to send their children to the best colleges possible [or the best ones that they can afford].

Once upon a time, the vast majority of students who graduated from high school could write coherent sentences and understandable paragraphs and had a solid basis in fundamental mathematics, history, and science. Today, almost two thirds of all U.S. high school students have never written a paper exceeding five pages, and three quarters of them cannot write anywhere close to proficiently. Sixty percent cannot read with enough comprehension to effectively handle college level work, yet surveys show that over seventy percent of parents believe that public high schools are adequately preparing their children for college.

Those statistics are also another reason why more and more employers are requiring at least two years of college, not because the students need the college courses, but because only students who can complete two years of college are likely to have the basic reading, writing, and mathematics skills for most jobs.

So… if you want to finish destroying secondary and undergraduate education in the United States, by all means insist on every student’s “right” to higher education.

A week or so ago my wife and I went out to dinner at our favorite local Italian restaurant, a modestly upscale establishment, and as such, one of perhaps three in our entire geographic area.

We enjoyed the meal, as always, but I have to say that I was definitely distracted by the couple at the adjoining table, given that the male of the pair was wearing a tee-shirt of the type I usually reserve for exercise and yardwork, complimented by non-matching shorts that looked more like those worn by basketball players, and sandals. The woman with him was dressed very slightly more suitably.

Now, I know why the restaurant didn’t turn them away on grounds of attire – simply because it’s newish and is still running on the bare edge of profitability – and, in fact, one of the reasons we frequent it, in addition to the excellent food and setting [disregarding the attire of some patrons], is because we want it to survive and prosper and to continue to provide a higher level of food and service than all the fast-food outlets and mid-scale chain restaurants that proliferate in a regional university town.

Nonetheless, I am frankly baffled and astounded by what so many people wear out in public in the name of comfort(?) or convenience (?). The Italian restaurant is not exorbitant in its pricing, but it’s anything but bare-bones cheap, either, and I’m certain those thankfully few of its all too casually dressed patrons could certainly afford better attire than tee-shirts and running/basketball shorts, although from what I’ve seen advertised some of that sort of attire actually costs more than clothing that would seem more suitable to public appearances and dining in restaurants.

I understand the supposed lure of comfort, but what I don’t understand is why so many people wear “outfits” (for lack of a better term) that make them look their worst. There are plenty of clothes that are comfortable, affordable, and enhance the wearer’s presence – or at least don’t worsen his or her appearance. One fashion designer was reputed to have said that his clothes were designed to make a woman look more attractive than if she were stark naked, and as I unfortunately age, I know that my clothed appearance is definitely more attractive than my unclothed appearance.

The same general observation goes for men’s and women’s grooming. Why are hair “styles” and beard styles seemingly designed to make the wearer look worse? Or have people gotten so narcissistic that they can’t tell what does look good? And don’t tell me it’s for convenience… beards so unkempt that they get into everything including food, and that everything gets into, aren’t exactly convenient. I’m not against facial hair per se, and I have several acquaintances who look far better in their well-trimmed beards than they would bare-faced, but what’s with the growth of slovenly clothing and grooming that seems to be spreading? Is it just another aspect of the “shock culture? If so, I’ll admit I find it shocking, shockingly stupid and ill-mannered. But then I’m an anachronistic troglodyte who believes in wearing in public clean clothes that are actually clothing, as opposed to excessive skin-exposing exercise gear, and at least vaguely match, and grooming that doesn’t make people want to move away in fear and disgust.

One of the most regrettable trends I’ve seen in recent years is how many acquaintances and friends have given up landlines entirely for their cellphones. Included in this trend are several of our grown offspring. At first, this trend was a mere inconvenience for me, solved by making certain I had a personal directory of all their cellphone numbers, both in the directory of my seldom-used cellphone [except when I’m traveling] and in a short hard-copy list on my desk.

Now, I know why people are shutting off their landlines. First, it gets rid of – at least for now – a huge percentage of the obnoxious charitable and political telemarketers (who are exempt from the federal do-not-call regulations) as well as the scam artists and shysters who ignore the lists. Second, it reduces total telecommunications expenses, sometimes significantly. Unfortunately, it also does one other thing. It makes it just about impossible to contact people who aren’t either relatives, close friends, or frequent business associates, for the simple reason that, unless there’s a service I don’t know about, it’s just about impossible to find out someone’s cellphone number except on a personal basis. On more than a few occasions, when urgent work issues came up or when power failures occurred, my wife was unable to inform some faculty members because, when the computers crashed at work, so did email access, and without either email or their telephone numbers…

Now, I suppose, for most people, all of that is just fine, but what it means is that, effectively, people who rely just on cellphones are narrowing their contacts with the wider world. Sometimes, this is more than a mere inconvenience. On one occasion it took us days to discover whether one of our grown children had in fact survived a hurricane because, first, the cellphone towers had been disabled, and second, they were without power for almost two weeks.

Then, too, on more than one occasion, we’ve wanted to include people that we’ve met at various gatherings and invite them to one social occasion or another. In several cases, it took weeks before we could get in contact because they had no lineline and were new to the area. Without a listed telephone number, it’s hard even to find an address to send a written invitation.

And, finally, the last problem I have with exclusive reliance on cellphones is that it’s a reflection of the “me” generation, the idea that what’s convenient and cost-effective for “me” is all that matters. It doesn’t matter if people have a hard time reaching you, but then, I understand that, too, because ninety-five percent of the calls our land-line receives are from charitable organizations or political shysters, and I’d just as soon not have to even look at the caller listing, let alone answer them, which we never do. Although the other five percent are still important, I can definitely see the temptation in just ditching the landline, and its costs, and regrettable as what that represents is, I wonder how long we’ll end up holding out.

Depending on who’s taking the survey and when, between forty and fifty percent of recent college graduates are underemployed, meaning that they’re working in a job that doesn’t require a college degree. Add to that the ten to seventeen percent of recent college graduates who have no job at all, and that adds up to more than half of all recent graduates being either unemployed or underemployed. A Federal Reserve study which examined this problem both in current and historic terms discovered that historically around thirty percent of college graduates tended to be underemployed, but fifty percent is unprecedented.

Yet almost everyone keeps touting higher education as a way to a higher income, and, I suppose, in a way, even with these statistics, they’re right, because the income and employment picture for those without degrees is far worse. But isn’t there something wrong with a system where the number of taxi-drivers with a college degree has gone from 1% to over 15% in the past twenty years? Or where being a telemarketer and phoning every number the computers dial is one of the great opportunities for those with bachelor’s-level English and psychology degrees?

One of the answers that pops out of all the statistics is that college graduates with degrees in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] fields have higher rates of employment, and that may well be… except that, on average U.S. colleges and universities graduate twice as many degree holders annually as there are jobs in those fields.

In some ways, higher education has become almost what amounts to “the Red Queen’s race” [borrowing from Lewis Carroll], in that students have to invest more and more in higher education, in essence to stay in the same place or to find jobs with modest additional returns compared to past generations.

When we as a society are producing what amounts to twice as many degree holders as there are jobs for them, at an ever-increasing cost to the students, their parents, and society, shouldn’t we be looking at whether we need more college graduates, especially given the costs involved? This doesn’t even consider the costs to those who cannot afford higher education and who are effectively barred from jobs they could do, and often do well, by employers who look for college graduates they really don’t need but that they can get. Nor does it consider the costs to graduates with degrees, sometimes with multiple degrees, who are rejected for jobs because they’re over-qualified.

And now that we have candidates for president advocating free college tuition, exactly what would we get for the tens of billions of dollars that would cost, at a time when so many existing graduates can’t get jobs commensurate with their degrees? Or maybe, just maybe, we should allow more students to enter college, but toughen up the curriculum so that only the brightest and most determined graduate?

In any case, for the moment, doesn’t ensuring that there are more people with a college-degree education appear to be the one-size-fits-all answer that isn’t really the solution to a far more complex problem?

More than a few people have asked the question “Why can’t Congress simplify the laws, rather than making them more complex?” Similar questions are asked about federal regulations all the time as well.

They’re good questions, but they unfortunately also have fairly simple answers. The first is that, in a political system that allows “popular” input, laws can be changed, or tweaked, to benefit those with enough political or financial power to influence the lawmakers. Such tweaks add complexity.

The second reason is that the United States is overflowing with attorneys, and almost every law ever passed is challenged in some way or fashion, either to get benefits under it, to avoid being covered by it, or to widen the coverage. While not all those challenges require changes in the laws, a great number do. In turn, those changes spark additional legal challenges, which in turn often spawn more legislation…and more litigation… and possibly more legislation…

The quick answer to this is to keep the laws “simple.” And, it’s true, “simple” laws don’t offer as much opportunity for legal challenges. But, unhappily, if laws are too “simple,” they can also turn out to be horribly unfair in many cases. So, politicians, never wanting to seem unfair, try to craft laws that are more “fair.” More fair is also more complex, and often the provisions that are meant to make things fair are then challenged by one group or another claiming that the law should or should not apply to them, whichever is to their advantage, and sometimes on the grounds that the application of the law is inequitable.

And when you have a large and complex economy, based on complex technology, with global implications, the legal structure becomes equally complex, and more often than not, the idea of fairness becomes twisted into something that is anything but fair.

In the United States, the “outsiders” continue to dominate the Republican presidential nomination contests, and even among the Democrats, outsiders are gaining ground. What makes this all so surreal is that the same voters who are backing the outsiders are the ones who backed the insiders in all previous elections, because they’re frustrated that elected government isn’t doing what they wanted.

What very few seem to recognize is that what has led to governmental deadlock in so many areas is that voters penalize any official who tries to work out a compromise by throwing them out of office. So there are few compromises. With neither party able to muster a clear majority, compromise is the only way to get anything done, but compromise has essentially become political suicide, because of the polarization of the two main political parties.

So now the voters want to penalize the mainstream and experienced candidates because they didn’t commit political suicide. These voters are doing that by backing candidates who promise results they cannot deliver because their promises are based on ignoring reality. And anyone in the media or political arena who points this out is shouted down, mocked, or ignored.

Is this the result of the “me” culture? The “I want it now and I’m going to have a tantrum if I don’t get it” culture?

That may be, but I think it’s also largely the result of the two-fold failure of most Americans to understand that (1) none of us deserves special treatment merely because we exist and (2) none of us are exclusively self-made successes.

I’m not saying that successful people didn’t have talent and didn’t work to get their success, but I am saying that without all the social and physical “infrastructure” provided by American society and government, few if any of those successes would have been possible. Just having clean water and decent sanitation provides a great advantage. Almost half the world doesn’t have one or the other. Having a basic education is another great advantage. Roughly over a sixth of the world’s population is illiterate. Having enough food to eat with the right nutrients means that children don’t grow up mentally and physically stunted, but some 13% of the world’s population is malnourished, and in large areas, such as Africa, almost a quarter of the population is undernourished.

Wide-spread corruption and arbitrary laws stifle development, ideas, and success, and one of the major factors behind the success of the United States and Western Europe has been the development and enforcement of more equitable laws and regulations. Likewise, the encouragement and development of national and regional transportation systems by governments fosters success. There are scores of other factors in our culture without which individual genius, determination, and effort would be totally thwarted… and yet the myth of the totally self-made individual persists.

We are in great danger of losing everything if we persist in ignoring that our greatest strength is not survival of the individual most fit, but a culture of cooperation and compromise that allows those with talents to flourish. It might help to remember that the deadliest individual predator on the planet is the tiger – and it is an endangered species.

The other day I went to the grocery store for just one thing. Now, I’ll admit that, since I was there, I did pick up several other items, but I wouldn’t have gone if I hadn’t wanted to pick up that one item, which, by the way, happened to be Canadian bacon. When I left the store, I was departing without the Canadian bacon, because out of every single item in the meat department, the only thing the store was sold out of was, of course, Canadian bacon.

I should have known better. The time I wanted my particular shaving cream and nothing else, they were out of it. The same thing happened a month before when I went to pick-up extra-strength buffered aspirin for my wife [this is more than occasionally necessary for those who teach college students]. Or the time that I went just for dry cat food.

It’s also why I pick up two of all of those items, and try to remember to get replacements before we’re all out… because… exactly, when I wait until we absolutely need just that one thing, more often than not, the store happens to be out of it.

Whether this is because I have an unerring instinct that enables me to run out precisely when the store also runs out, or because the universe is perverse in dealing with the procurement of otherwise minor and insignificant items, I have no idea.

What I do know is that, at least for me, running out of anything leaves me with a fifty-fifty chance of finding the store without it at all… and that’s why we have a pantry with lots of duplication… and why I STILL have trouble picking up just one thing [because when you have duplicates/backups, you tend to think you have more than you do].

Enough of the surveys! Enough of rating everything! And especially enough of tests and studies conducted or designed by “impartial outsiders.”

Today it seems as though any business or institution of any size is trying to assess, study, and measure its effectiveness in doing its job and meeting its goals, from Amazon to education, from big banking to start-ups not even off the ground. On top of that, supervisors and managers are flooding subordinates with emails wanting instant progress reports on a daily basis, if not sooner, and the amount of time spent on answering such largely pointless communications continues to rise.

One of the critical points that all these “assessors” in search of data and accountability seem either to ignore or to never have learned is that every minute and every dollar spent on assessment is a dollar or minute not spent on achieving the institution’s or business’s objectives, and more and more assessment inevitably leads to less and less real achievement, no matter what results appear to come from such additional assessments.

Education is becoming the poster child for excessive and counter-productive assessment. No matter what those proponents of great testing and assessments say, and no matter what statistics they cite, American education remains at a crisis point, because, particularly at the elementary and secondary levels, and even to a degree at the baccalaureate level in college, instructors are in point of fact essentially being forced not only to test more and more, but also to “teach to the test.” Add to that the fact that at the collegiate level, they also have to teach to “student evaluations.”

While the tests show a slight improvement in basic skills, what they do not show is the losses. The fact is that the majority of graduating high school seniors cannot write a logical, coherent, factually based, and grammatically correct paragraph. They cannot analyze anything with much complexity involved, and they cannot integrate data, skills, and knowledge. Nor can they apply skills learned in one area to problems in another.

These are not skills that can be accurately measured by any “objective” test, yet they are skills vital to the continued success of a high-tech society.

We’re also seeing similar problems in the political and media arenas, as Americans seem less and less able to integrate data and analyze all the sound bites they receive, many of which are factually incorrect, contradictory, and logically flawed. Businesses over-focus on immediate short term goals, all too often in opposition to what would insure greater long-term success, because success in meeting short-term goals can be far more accurately and quickly assessed.

Metaphorically speaking, we don’t need to kill all the lawyers, as Shakespeare’s King Henry VI asserted, but a good start would be decimating the assessors.

It’s now approaching the halfway mark of the fall semester at the university, and certain all too predictable things are happening. A significant percentage of students, especially first year students, are getting sick. More of them are zoning out or only half- awake in class because of lack of sleep. A great many of them are also realizing that they’re way behind where they should be in terms of learning, reading, and getting assignments done, and the undone assignments are beginning to pile up, especially when they spend too much time on social media.

Then there are those upon whom it has dawned that they’re not special. In my wife’s field – singing and opera – this is particularly noticeable, because probably half of the incoming voice students were the top performers in their high school. Then they discover that they’re in college, amid other first year students who were used to being the center of attention, and all of them also discover, mournfully, that the singers in the upper classes are generally much better. Most of them learn that they have flaws in their technique, and that they need to learn their music far more quickly than ever before – while taking music theory, which is a far tougher course than most would-be music majors have ever seen before in their life, and also taking diction and literature, which requires scores of hours listening – on their own – to music the majority of which most of them have never heard, by composers whom they largely know only by name, if that, and not by their music, while learning things like the international phonetic alphabet (IPA)[so they can learn songs in foreign languages correctly].

And no, they won’t get a lead role. In fact, many will only get minor roles in the operas, or chorus roles. They also discover that they have to practice, and develop, if they haven’t already, basic piano skills and improve their skills enough to pass a proficiency test by the end of their second year…or be washed out of the program.

In short, many of them discover… they are not special in the slightest. They also discover that a great voice, a beautiful natural voice, is only the beginning. One of the problems is that too many of those with great natural talent have been praised every day of their high school life and have never really worked at music. Now they have to work, after discovering they’re no longer special, and every year at least one, if not more, student with great natural ability bails out or flunks out because they actually have to work, because they can’t accept that they just can’t get up there and sing, that they’re expected to develop a good technique, and learn not just arias, but art song, and things like secco recitative. These are just a few of the skills and knowledge that a good program will teach a student, the ones whose mastery will make a student special, rather than providing largely empty praise.

That’s because, in the real world, what makes one special is that you sing not only “beautifully,” but precisely and with emotion and expression, day after day, often under conditions that are anything but ideal. Only the results count, and that’s a hard lesson for students to learn, especially today. Some will… and that’s where their education for life truly begins.