When I married an operatic soprano more than two decades ago, I had absolutely no idea how much that would change my life and also affect my writing. One of the earliest directly observable results was Of Tangible Ghosts, the first of the three books comprising the “Ghost Series.” Later came the Spellsong Cycle, as well as other books and other characters. I’ve also come to enjoy opera, not all operas, I’d be the first to admit, but many, and I’ve been introduced and observed a great many opera professionals, largely because my wife is a national officer in a national opera association as well as president of the local music arts society and in charge of bookings and contracts for classical artists and groups.

Consequently, I’ve ended up doing a certain amount of research in the field, and I have to say that I’m worried about the future of opera. While the number of tickets sold to operas nationwide has not seen a significant decline, overall, the number of patrons has declined, but the decline in diverse patrons has been offset by the fact that core supporters – those who really love opera – are buying more tickets. One of the problems with this, though, is that many of these patrons really love old established operas. Part of this may be due in part to the fact that a number of the newer operas are more avant-garde and have fewer singable melodies. That’s not to say that some new operas aren’t gripping and melodic, but for whatever reasons, new operas are staged less frequently and don’t appear to draw as large an audience as the old chestnuts.

Another critical factor, and this is strictly a personal belief on my part, is that all too many opera directors are so wedded to “period,” i.e., the movements and the way the opera is believed to have been originally sung and staged, that they’ve forgotten the basic and original purpose of opera – to entertain the audience. To me, it appears that the press for the new and different and the emphasis on “period” and tradition tend to come at the expense of entertainment value.

As I’ve noted before in my blogs, the first thing that I as a writer must do, if I’m to continue as a professional writer, is to entertain my reader. If I don’t do that, nothing else I do will count, because I’ll lose readers rather quickly, possibly all of them.

This is not a new issue in the history of opera. Almost all early operas were about gods and other mythical figures, or about rulers. Mozart broke convention by writing operas about everyday people – like a valet and the lady’s maid he loves – in The Marriage of Figaro and in other operas. This trend proved wildly popular for Mozart and other composers, as evidenced by the subsequent success of La Boheme [with a consumptive seamstress and starving artist], Carmen [cigarette factory girl and love triangle between her, a soldier, and a bullfighter], or many others, not that a few royalty-based or diety-based operas also weren’t popular, but they all emphasized human qualities and entertainment.

When she directs, my wife is well aware of this precept. She has to be, because she’s presenting operas in a university town set in rural Utah where a majority of the students are from rural backgrounds and even most of those from urban backgrounds have never seen an opera before. What she presents has to both be true to the basics of opera and yet to entertain… or she won’t have an opera program, regardless of its educational and instructional value, because universities do look at both student participation and audience numbers. She’s been successful, as evidenced by the fact that her program is in its twenty-third year and that a significant number of her students have gone on to careers in music, and while some of her operas have won national awards, she’s also been criticized by those judges for not being “period” or traditional enough.

I’ve seen some of the more “traditional” presentations, both professional and scholastic, and frankly, I’ve been bored stiff in some cases, possibly because a beautiful voice or set of voices and a “stand and plant” presentation of an aria just doesn’t do it for me… and I have my doubts that it did it for Mozart either, if The Magic Flute is any example.

To begin with, the term “political honesty” is an oxymoron, a complete contradiction in terms, and a practical impossibility in governing a nation as diverse as the United States.

Yet large numbers of people clamor for politicians and candidates who speak their mind simply and directly and stick to their guns, so to speak.

The problem with such “honesty” is that, because we live in a diverse and highly complex society, both socially and technologically, anything that most people think is simple and “honest” is so oversimplified that it’s inaccurate and anything but honest. And any politician or public figure who tries to give a more detailed and accurate depiction of matters can’t fit that within the sound-bite limitations of the media and the attention span of the majority of voters, all too many of whom distrust what they can’t understand and who seldom make the effort to understand anything not required in their everyday life.

Add to that the fact that the growth of lower-wage jobs that are physically tiring and often emotionally stultifying has built a culture of anger and resentment among those individuals who hold them and who more and more want simple and satisfying answers – except simple and satisfying is usually simplistic, misrepresentative, and inaccurate.

Then there is the fact that those who are fortunate enough to have higher-wage jobs find themselves being asked to do more and more as business after business strives to be leaner and meaner than the competition, which results in all too many of those higher-paid individuals also being time-stressed and forced to focus on their jobs and family [and sometimes not even family] in order to hang on to their jobs.

To this mix, add a generation of career politicians, for whom the first priority is keeping their office. Combine with a gerrymandered political system, and the result is that almost any politician who says anything his or her constituents don’t like is likely to get voted out in the next primary election, “primaried,” as it were. And since only a tiny percentage of Americans actually understand the issues in depth – or even want to – most voters really don’t like anyone, either an incumbent officeholder or a challenger, who tries to explain why “simple” won’t work.

A border wall won’t work. Neither will lowering income taxes further. Neither will turning federal lands back to the states [besides the fact that doing so is unconstitutional]. Neither will trying to deport eleven million “illegal” aliens. Neither will banning the teaching of evolution or absolutely banning abortions. Nor will free universal college educations [at least not without significant tax increases]. All of which means that almost all of the “simple and satisfying” solutions proposed by the “honest politicians” can’t be implemented and won’t work.

As the Founding Fathers designed, we have a government that requires cooperation and muddling through… and that’s another honest fact that few politicians want to admit… if they want to keep their jobs, anyway.

One of the problems with good language and good ideas is that more than one person can come up with a good thought or idea – honestly, without plagiarizing the idea. Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace both were working, initially independently, on the idea of natural selection and evolution at the same time, and, in fact in July of 1858, both their papers on natural selection were jointly presented to the Linnean Society of London.

Dozens of men were trying to develop the first powered aircraft at the same time as the Wright brothers. And the first mechanical computer, as I’ve noted previously, wasn’t that of Thomas Babbage in 1837 [although the entire simplified analytical engine was never actually constructed in his lifetime], but the Antikythera device of the ancient Greeks, which has been dated to 100-150 B.C., and which was, and is, an ancient mechanical analog computer (as opposed to digital computer) designed to calculate astronomical positions.

Which brings us to parachutes and minds…

Until last week, I’d never heard of Sir James Dewar, perhaps because he was a noted British chemist of the last century and because chemistry was the only general science course I never took in either high school or college. Then, I ran across a quote attributed to Dewar:

“People’s minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open.”

This took me a bit aback, because, having never read Dewar or even heard of him, some twenty years ago, in writing The Parafaith War, I had one of my characters note:

“Minds, like ancient parachutes, function better when open, but, like fists, they strike harder when closed.”

What I wrote was not quite the same as what Dewar said or wrote, but it was eerie to see a quote so similar when I had thought myself so original. Well, I was original, in the sense that I thought the idea up independently, even if I hadn’t been first, and so far as I know, I was the first to complete the idea in the way I did… and, in the time since I did, American politics have once again demonstrated the effective striking hardness of a closed mind.

Which all goes to show that there’s a certain risk in claiming originality.

By the way, for those as ignorant of Dewar as I was, he was born in 1842 in Scotland and died in 1923, and was a pioneer in the solidification of gases. He invented a special double-walled vacuum flask, now known as a Dewar flask, that facilitated his work in liquefying oxygen and hydrogen. He was also a co-inventor of cordite smokeless explosive powder, and was awarded the Copley Medal, Rumford Medal, Franklin Medal, Albert Medal, and the Lavoisier Medal. Reputedly, he was also a fascinating lecturer.

Over the past year, there have outbursts of sporadic violence as a result of police actions regarded as excessive by American blacks, many of which have indeed proved to have been excessive. These outbursts have been followed by at least some political efforts to improve police behavior and tactics in a number of locales, but they have also resulted in some locales in higher crime rates because of local police deciding to patrol less aggressively. All of these instances deal with one side of the “justice problem” — the perception, and in many, but not all, cases the fact that the law and law enforcement appear targeted more intently on poor and minorities.

In one basic sense, any form of punishment for criminal behavior will fall more heavily on the poor and disadvantaged. If someone lives from paycheck to paycheck, or doesn’t even make enough money to get from paycheck to paycheck, any fine, any time in jail, even any requirement to take time off from work to deal with charges or citations – any of these are a far harder burden on the poor and minorities than upon middle-class or affluent Americans. Interestingly enough, some Scandinavian countries have recognized this to a degree – and wealthy individuals there can receive mere speeding tickets with five-figure fines, based on the rationale that such high penalties are equivalent in impact to much lower fines for poor or less affluent speeders.

At the same time, over the same period, I’ve watched how “justice” deals with certain white and more affluent Americans, such as Cliven Bundy, the rancher who refused to pay over a million dollars in overdue gazing fees to the government, fees that, to begin with, were a fraction of what private landowners charge for leases. Bundy gathered a militia and forced a stand-off with the BLM, who relented and released the cattle they had been seizing for non-payment… and so far, roughly a year later, from what I can tell, the BLM has done nothing.

Now, Bundy’s son, Ammon Bundy, leads another “militia” group that has seized and occupied a Fish and Wildlife Service building at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Ammon Bundy and this group vow to stay there until the federal government returns federal lands “to the people” and that the government release two ranchers jailed for arson and other offenses on federal lands, despite the fact that the lands have always been federal lands, and before that they belonged to the local Native American tribes. If the government acquired those lands by fraudulent means, which Constitutional scholars agree it did not, then the lands should revert to the local tribes, not to white ranchers and loggers. Yet, so far, the federal government has done nothing to deal with young Bundy and his backwoods white toughs.

After County Commissioner Phil Lyman illegally not only rode an ATV through a federal roadless area, and one of the protected and most sensitive archeological sites in the state of Utah, but also organized and championed that ride, he was fined and sentenced to ten days in jail – and the state legislature commended him and attempted to pass legislation to reimburse him for his legal bills.

The Bundy and Lyman cases are certainly a far cry from the “justice” received by all too many of those far less affluent, and what bothers me is that these are just examples of what happens every day. That’s not to say that I’m unabashedly in favor of anywhere close to all the recommendations made by the more extreme of those in the “black lives matter” movement, but the plain fact is that if a group of black men had behaved the way Phil Lyman or either of the Bundys have, they’d almost certainly been dealt with far more strongly. I can’t imagine an armed black lawbreaker owing the federal government millions of dollars confronting government officials with high powered weapons, being allowed to continue to refuse to pay what he owed, and being allowed to continue his lawbreaking unimpeded.

Some of this “double standard” rests on political beliefs. White environmental activist Tim deChristopher, as I chronicled earlier, submitted a fraudulent bid to lease oil and gas rights on federal lands,in order to keep the lands from being despoiled,and was sentenced and served 21 months in jail, despite the fact that, even before he was sentenced, the U.S. Solicitor General had voided the lease sale as illegal, while the same “justice” system merely sent Phil Lyman to jail for ten days, although Lyman destroyed archaeological artifacts and flouted federal law, while deChristopher’s acts cost the public and the public welfare very little.

All this tends to suggest strongly suggest that affluent and well-connected white conservatives definitely are treated ultra-leniently, unless of course they fraudulently take money, or threaten to do so, from ultra-wealthy white conservatives… and then, of course, all bets are off.

It’s not often that a F&SF writer can use one of his own books to show the shortcomings of statistics. However, as I write this, Solar Express has an “average” rating of three stars [3.2 stars, to be more exact], yet precisely one reader has given it a three star rating. Fifty-nine percent of the reader reviewers like it fairly well or a lot, and thirty-eight percent dislike it a little or a lot. So much for averages.

Yet as a society we tend to rely on statistics, all too often without really understanding what they mean. How often have you read a news item that states that eating something or using a certain product will increase the likelihood of getting cancer, or diabetes, or something else horrendous by ten or twenty or even a hundred percent? Yet do these statements ever point out the baseline risk?

For example, some advocates of using statin drugs [such as Lipitor] claim that use of statins reduces the incidence of heart disease by 50%. According to clinical studies over any five year period, roughly 2% of American males in the 50-60 age group will suffer a non-fatal myocardial infarction. Studies also show that statin use will reduce that rate to one percent. That is indeed a fifty percent reduction rate, but it’s only an actual risk reduction of one percent. Other studies showed that the decrease in mortality from fatal heart-related factors was offset almost completely in patients older than 70 by a corresponding increase in cancer deaths. But unless you or your doctor read the fine print in the studies, all you’re likely to hear is the fifty percent reduction in heart events. And if cancer runs in your family… well, you just might be better off not jumping at that “50% reduction.”

And take family income. In 2014 average [mean] family income was $72,641, but the median income [the amount where half the families make more and half make less] was only $51,939, or $20,702 – 40% less than the average. As a result, actually, about 67% of U.S. families make less than the “average.” Nor do such averages consider that one third of all American families live “paycheck to paycheck” and that 66% of those families are middle class with a median income of $41,000, well below the “average” family income.

Or take firearms. While there are 88 guns for every hundred Americans, all those firearms are actually in the hands of 43% of U.S. households.

Or… if you look at the Amazon stars, Solar Express is just an average book, despite the fact that only one person thought so.

Martin Shkreli has been arrested. The man who took over a generic drug selling for $13.50 a pill and who then raised the price to $750 a pill has been charged with fraud and other financial crimes, essentially defrauding those who had money to invest in his fraudulent and money-losing hedge funds.

Yet under our laws, he can’t possibly be charged with price-gouging those who needed Daraprim order to survive, although he even claimed that he made a “mistake” in setting the price at $750 a pill, because that was “too low” and that he was behaving altruistically because Daraprim was unprofitable at the old price. Even those with insurance coverage would have ended up paying $150 a pill. In his next move, Shkreli led an investor group to take control of KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, where Mr. Shkreli agreed to license the worldwide rights of a drug used to treat Chagas’ disease, a potentially deadly parasitic infection – but at a much higher price. And, of course, most of those infected won’t be able to pay that price, which will either result in more deaths… or in gouging the public health agencies that treat such infected individuals.

Shkreli’s acts and the way the law treats them are just another example of how U.S. justice has gone overboard in recent years in “protecting the market system” – the ultra-capitalistic market system. Now, I freely acknowledge that any workable economic system has to have a capitalistic/market basis, but when the ultra-rich pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than do middle-class wage earners, when basic health care becomes increasingly less affordable for tens of millions of Americans [and when the Republican response is essentially to declare that requiring healthcare insurance is the cause, rather than a symptom of an unnecessarily overpriced private health care bureaucracy], when maximizing profits at any cost, regardless of the social and environmental costs to everyone else, has become a “necessity” for executive survival in the corporate world, doesn’t it seem that a few changes in the legal, regulatory, and taxation structure might be a trace overdue?

And if those changes aren’t made…

When the laws protect only those who have money, and it doesn’t look like matters will change, it may not be all that long before those who don’t have massive wealth decide to take matters into their own hands… and bring the entire system down. Such events have occurred more than a few times before. And I’m sure that most of the Russian and French aristocracy felt that such an uprising was nothing to worry about.

“Would anyone consider Einstein merely a ‘successful scientist’?” I don’t remember who said or wrote words to that effect, but that question has stuck with me for years. And it’s even more relevant today, I believe, than ever. Just what is success?

The first two dictionary definitions I came across were: “a favorable or desired outcome from something attempted” and “attainment of wealth and fame.”

A favorable or desired outcome. That sounds so milquetoastish…almost pedestrian. It’s not exactly soul-inspiring, and what does being rich and famous have to do with real accomplishment? Is “success” just settling for comfort, as opposed to striving for something more?

Is the United States too focused on success, especially as opposed to greatness? When I was young, people had dreams of great achievements, of being President, or a doctor or astronaut, of writing the great American novel, or coming up with a cure for a horrendous disease. I can’t recall anyone who just wanted to be rich or famous. Or of being merely a successful doctor or dentist or teacher or whatever.

Then again, world-class achievement is getting a bit harder to accomplish. Everest has been conquered, and now it’s just another mountain that hundreds if not thousands have climbed. Astronauts have walked on the moon, but not for more than thirty years, and exceeding the speed of sound in an aircraft is so passe that we’ve abandoned the only supersonic passenger jet because it was too expensive, just as manned space exploration has been put on the far back burner for the same reason – despite all the hoopla about The Martian and the record-breaking opening weekend gross of the latest Star Wars movie. Even the New Horizons mission that recently reached Pluto and sent back breath-taking images was launched over nine years ago, and I’m not aware of anything that ambitious in the works in even the unmanned exploration programs. And given that the comparatively low-budget New Horizons mission was begun roughly fifteen years ago, that suggests no “great” achievements in space exploration are likely or even possible for 20-30 years, despite a series of “successful” smaller missions.

Once upon a time, composers were truly celebrated for their works, but today in the music world great success doesn’t mean great musical work; it means great financial returns, and works that show musical excellence seldom are those that generate enormous financial returns. In pharmaceuticals, success isn’t measured so much by discovering drugs that “cure diseases,” but in finding blockbuster drugs that yield billion-dollar returns. In business, success isn’t building an outstanding product, but building one that makes billions, and whether it’s outstanding is very much secondary. In politics, success is getting and holding office, not what one accomplishes through that office.

In short, today’s “success” seldom, if ever, reflects great or lasting achievements, and I find that sad and worrisome.

Much has been said about “living in the moment,” and there is in fact some truth to the need to live in the moment, simply because we cannot undo what has happened in the past, nor can we do much about the future, except prepare for it, and there is such a thing as over-preparing for a future that may never come, or a future that bears little resemblance to what we’ve predicted or imagined.

Unfortunately, as many wise individuals have declared, the past and history have a tendency to repeat themselves, or at least rhyme, as Mark Twain put it, and the saddest and truest rhymes are those based on human failings. This unhappy truth has a great bearing on one of the greatest weaknesses in current U.S. culture and education – the lack of knowledge and understanding about past U.S. culture and history by younger Americans, and an almost total ignorance of even recent past world history. The failing is compounded by a great lack of knowledge of basic economics and politics and an over-emphasis on present-day culture and instant satisfaction, supplied in large measure electronically.

What most young Americans know about Hitler, for example, is that he killed a great many Jews [and some even doubt that] and started World War II. Most cannot explain either World War I or World War II. Nor do they know anything about the student protests surrounding the Vietnam War. They don’t know and can’t explain the factors underlying the Russian Revolution, and the Great Depression is essentially two meaningless words to them. Oh, they may be able to cite various dates and events, but understanding is almost nil – and irrelevant to them.

On the other hand, most can recite from memory an incredible array of present-day trivia. They’re glued, if not welded, to their smartphones. Most of them are against any form of discrimination, which wouldn’t be so bad if so many of them didn’t confuse unpleasant facts and honest discussion of difficult ethnic and racial issues with hate speech. They don’t, in general, like learning facts and situations contrary to their beliefs and hopes, and they avoid doing so as much as possible. And to make matters worse, far too many educators are indulging this incredibly childish view of the world.

In short, most of today’s younger generations are largely living in the moment, shutting out the lessons of the past and ignoring the future ramifications of what is happening now. Oh, a significant percentage of the top ten percent of students and young Americans, perhaps half, don’t fall into this categorization, but, as history shows, five percent isn’t enough to save a nation against the ignorance, the indifference, and the self-centered anger of the remainder, or to stand against a revolution of the disappointed when the satisfactions of the “moment” vanish, possibly for generations.

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.