Here’s a letter I’d like to send, but which I’ll just post, because it will have the same impact. That is, no impact at all.

Dear Media –

Would you please stop giving Donald Trump moment-to-moment continuous campaign exposure?

Are you so stupid to think that all your negative coverage of Trump is doing anything but boosting his image – or perhaps we’re stupid in believing that you’re interested in presenting the news rather than obsessed with gathering every last viewer and every last penny of advertising revenue, regardless of the effect on the nation… and likely the world.

Like every bully, Trump’s reveling in the attention, and every attack results in more voters and more donations.

You’ve even aired shows describing that effect, but you keep up attacking and analyzing, as if that would do anything. The only thing that would have any possible effect would be a Trump news blackout or brief bulletins saying, “Trump Made Another Legal Motion Just Like All the Others.”

But you’ll keep on, regardless of the consequences, and I won’t even be able to tell you that I told you so, because once he becomes President, he’ll likely abolish you as Fake News, unless you can fawn enough to become his de facto ministry of propaganda.

Sincerely,

What made me think about this was something my publisher, Tom Doherty, told me more than twenty-five years ago, when I worried about a not-so-good review one of my books had gotten.

He said, “There’s no such thing as a bad review. Even bad reviews increase sales. The attention helps.”

For years, I had my doubts, but Donald Trump has proved that Tom Doherty was right.

Part I

The Jewish people have had a difficult time in holding on to their identity and their presence in what is now Israel. Back in the eighth century BCE, a portion of their population was expelled from Samaria (Israel) over the period from 733 BCE to 722 BCE. That was followed by the Babylonian captivity in the early sixth century BCE. The Jews revolted against the Roman Empire in 66 BCE in the First Jewish-Roman War, which culminated in the Siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of most of Jerusalem and the Second Temple. In 132 CE, Bar Kokhba led a rebellion against Hadrian, and after four years of warfare, the uprising was suppressed, and Jews were forbidden access to Jerusalem.

The Jewish community in Palestine regrouped and remained numerous, until the Byzantine–Sasanian War in 614 CE, when Jewish rebels aided the Persians in capturing Jerusalem, where the Jews were permitted autonomous rule until 617 when the Persians reneged on their alliance. After Byzantine Emperor Heraclius promised to restore Jewish rights, the Jews aided him in ousting the Persians, after which Heraclius subsequently conducted a general massacre of the Jewish population.

Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant area, Jews were initially allowed to re-enter Jerusalem, but subsequent taxes and restrictions on non-Muslims significantly reduced the Jewish population. Depredations by European crusaders and others over the years further reduced the Jewish population so that by the beginning of the Ottoman Empire in 1517, there were only some 5,000 Jews in Palestine.

Matters weren’t that much better in much of Europe. In 1290, English King Edward I expelled all Jews from England. Shortly thereafter, Philip IV of France ordered all Jews expelled from France, with their property to be sold at public auction, and some 125,000 Jews were forced to leave. Then in 1315, Louis X lifted the ban on Jews, but later in 14th century Jews were accused of poisoning wells in France, and five thousand Jews were killed, after which Charles IV expelled all French Jews. Spain expelled all Jews in 1492. A great many Jews fled eastward and ended up in Poland and Lithuania.

In Russia, in the early 19th century, matters became worse, due to a series of Czarist decrees, beginning with the Pale of Settlement, establishing where Jews were allowed to live, which immediately uprooted 100,000 Jews, and forbade the Jews from living in any of the main cities. Next came the Cantonist Decrees which effectively forced military service and “indoctrination” on the Jewish population. By the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, Russian pogroms were intermittently ongoing.

The last and most horrific of attacks on Jews, of course, was the Holocaust, which almost no nation in the world even mentioned while it was occurring and which killed six million Jews, as well as five million others, the Nazis found “undesirable.

This summary is far from inclusive and doesn’t include the hundreds if not thousands of smaller incidents since 1945,

Part II (which may seem irrelevant, but isn’t)

The United States has mythologized itself as a bastion of freedom and a “shining city upon a hill,” and more than a few (older) histories have described North America before colonization by Europeans as a wilderness and sparsely filled with savages.

In fact, neither was ever true. Recent studies show that, before Europeans arrived, North America likely had between ten and twenty million inhabitants, that is, before gun powder, horses, greed, and European diseases ravaged the continent and destroyed more than ninety percent of the population because they lacked immunity to European diseases and because they didn’t have the tools of power – especially usable beasts of burden. It wasn’t that they didn’t know. There’s evidence that Indians were smelting copper on the banks of Lake Superior 6,000 years ago. But they gave it up because, without any supporting technology and beasts of burden, it wasn’t cost or labor effective, which also limited the development of weapons.

Historically speaking, what human beings can do without domesticated animal power is extremely limited, and there weren’t any powerful and domesticable animals in the western hemisphere.

So the indigenous peoples couldn’t compete with Europeans, initially. But some indigenous tribes went to work, and by 1830, the “Five Civilized Tribes” (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole) began to compete on the white man’s terms… and were successful enough that Southern whites got “good ole boy” President Andy Jackson to pass the Indian Removal Act (which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional and which finding Jackson ignored) and to use power – the U.S. Army, in fact – to force 60,000 Indians onto the Trail of Tears, killing thousands along the way.

But this abuse of white power wasn’t limited to the indigenous peoples.

In the century after the Civil War, almost every time a successful black business community developed, white men destroyed it. In 1921 mobs of white residents destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, burning and destroying more than 35 square blocks of one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States, colloquially known as “Black Wall Street.” More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 300 may have died. While the most notable massacre occurred in Tulsa, there were at least fifty others, with twenty-five occurring between 1917 and 1923, with an estimated death toll in the thousands.

The Point of All This?

History is littered with discarded or ignored principles that fell by the wayside or were pushed there by the unbridled desire for wealth or power or both, and the history of even great nations has more than a few despicable acts.

No people can rely on the promises of others unless it has at least a modicum of power.

This is a fact that nearly 3,000 years have taught the Jewish people, and asking them to forgo that power when they’ve been betrayed over 3,000 years is not only unwise, but, frankly, insulting, even if Netanyahu is little more than a corrupt street thug in tailored suits.

Despite both George Santayana and Winston Churchill declaring that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, most people really don’t learn anything from history. They’re more inclined to agree with Henry Ford, who declared, “History is more or less bunk.”

Not only that, but even when they’re faced with great horrors, unless it affects them, most people are inclined to do nothing.

In the time of Hitler, most Germans did nothing to oppose the death camps that killed millions of Jews and others classed as “undesirable” by the Nazis. Neither did most Poles or most French people. Americans, for the most part, ignored the genocide, at least until Germany was defeated.

Few if any Turks did anything to oppose the killing of Armenians, and many Turks still deny that genocide. The list of genocides is long, and most people know about only a small fraction, if that, unless they have personal, familial, or cultural experience.

Hitler’s death camps weren’t the first or only time Jewish people were threatened. Pogroms were common in Russia from the second half of the nineteenth century well into the twentieth century. Some of the bloodiest pogroms took place in England in the late twelfth century, which culminated with Edward I issuing an Edict of Expulsion that removed all Jews from England and forbid their presence until it was effectively revoked in the 1650s.

Given more than two thousand years of attacks and persecution, and given that history shows that almost no one steps up to prevent genocide, although there’s often futile handwringing and a great deal of tears [many of them of the crocodile variety] after the fact, is it any wonder that Israel has reacted as it has?

Exactly what is Israel supposed to do? Be “lenient” and give Hamas yet another chance, when all of Hamas and the majority of Palestinians seek Israel’s total destruction?

Too many of those condemning Israeli tactics have forgotten or never learned that defeating someone who wants to destroy you is anything but bloodless. Among the forgotten or ignored knowledge is the fact that over 600,000 German civilians, including 75,000 children, died from allied bombing in the effort to defeat Hitler, and, back then, Americans certainly weren’t bemoaning German civilian deaths when “American boys” were dying for their country. Or is it somehow different when “Israeli boys and girls” are dying for theirs?

A year and a little less than ten months ago, Russia launched a brutal attempt to crush Ukraine. Since then, the Ukrainians have slowly reclaimed some but not all of the territory seized by the Russians.

In late November, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has confirmed that to date, more than 10,000 civilians have been killed, and more than 18,500 injured, since Russia began the invasion. At least 300 children have died, and that doesn’t include thousands forcibly removed by Russian troops to Russia or Russian-controlled territory.

British military intelligence reports that Russian troop casualties are in the range of 120,000 Russian dead and 180,000 injured, while Ukrainian troops killed or wounded are in the range of 80,000. That doesn’t count the nearly three million displaced people or the scores of towns leveled by the fighting.

Yet, if one follows the U.S. news media, since October 7th, when Hamas attacked Israel, it’s as if the Russia-Ukraine conflict has almost vanished.

To date, in the conflict between Hamas and Israel, Israel has reported 1,400 deaths, the vast majority of which occurred on or from events on October 7th.

The Palestinian Authority’s Government Media Office has reported total deaths of 14,800, including 6,000 children and 4,000 women. This unverified number has been printed everywhere, but is currently likely exaggerated, given the past unreliability of figures coming from Gaza.

So… why has the Russia/Ukraine war almost vanished from the U.S. media.

Partly because it’s a grinding and ongoing war with no end in sight, and the U.S. media consumers are tired of hearing about it, but mostly because the Israel-Gaza conflict is so much more exciting, with hidden tunnels, the surprise that the IDF was caught so unaware, and all the possible deaths – and kidnapping – of children, not to mention the “bombing” of a hospital that wasn’t an Israeli bombing, and the humanitarian crisis that is more easily captured for media.

Of course, there’s a definite similarity, in that Hamas and Putin have both expressed the desire to crush the people they attacked.

But still…won’t what happens in Ukraine have a much greater long-term effect on Europe and the United States than what happens in Gaza?

Or is it that the news media are so narrow-minded or profit-driven that they can only cover one crisis at a time?

The other day I read the prequel to a very popular fantasy that I’d enjoyed a year or so ago, but somewhere around halfway through the book I knew exactly how it would end. Well, except for the death of the largely-out-of-view-until-the-last-chapters villain, whose way of death was definitely a surprise, but not quite enough to overshadow the feeling that the “emotional plot” was identical to the first book.

That brought up the question of where one draws the line between a novel set in the same world that, by necessity, shares a certain resemblance to others in a series, and a novel that is far too predictable.

Now, it’s pretty clear that, in books that have the same protagonist, the author isn’t likely to kill that protagonist in book one. I don’t consider that an overly predictable flaw.

Readers being readers, I doubt that few draw that line in the same place. That’s why some readers find some of my books too predictable, because my competent protagonists always find a way, if indirect, or excessively bloody, to obtain their goal, or a different goal that they never considered at the beginning of the book. Perhaps I’m too grounded in reality, but I’ve never seen someone who “lucks” into money or power, or who is strongly flawed, really make much of it in real life – not over their entire life (we’ll see how that works with Trump).

And sometimes, when readers get upset with predictability, it’s for the wrong reason. In a lower-tech world, when a leader first uses a significant innovation in weapons or tactics, each land he or she conquers will use the same old predictable tactics against the attacker – and usually fail – because no one’s seen them before and because, first, communications are slow, and, second, it’s often difficult to describe new tactics and weapons until you’re faced with them, and then it’s a little late. This problem becomes less and less of a difficulty with higher technology and faster and more in-depth communications systems.

In the end, every author has to find a balance between predictability and surprise, because too much surprise can be unbelievable to readers and too little makes the book too predictable. But readers have differing thresholds for determining what’s too unbelievable, even in fantasy, and what’s too predictable… and that’s why what’s too predictable for one reader can be just right for another, and why reader recommendations need to be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.

There are two basic problems with fanatics. First is the extremism of their beliefs, an extremism that they are fully convinced is anything but extreme. Second is their belief that everyone should be forced to follow all of their beliefs to the chapter, verse, and letter.

I don’t have a problem with other people’s beliefs – with three provisos: (1) no one gets hurt, physically or psychologically; (2) any adult is free to leave at any time; (3) no one is forced to conform to their beliefs, beyond the “normal” requirements of non-criminality, normal requirements being those agreed to by virtually all societies.

The attack on Israel by Hamas, or for that matter, the Nazis’ attack on western European civilization illustrates a great problem, and that is to stop the attack of a fanatical culture, you have to destroy it. Hamas continues to declare that they will never stop until Israel is destroyed. Israel attempted to contain Hamas within Gaza, and we’ve just seen how that turned out. Hitler refused to stop until Germany was flattened, and his death camps were killing those he claimed were “undesirables” almost to the moment when allied troops arrived.

There’s effectively no compromise with fanatics, and more reasonable people often have great difficulty understanding that the only thing that restrains fanatics is force. Within a society, the force of law may work, at least until the fanatics declare that they won’t respect the law in some fashion or another or until they take over the government and impose their beliefs on everyone else.

But this leads to the problem of those opposing the fanatics having to use massive force against the fanatics, with exactly what’s happening in Gaza… or what happened in Europe during WWII.

And, frankly, I don’t see this changing.

Here in the U.S., the far right is insisting on imposing a strict evangelical Christian set of beliefs on a nation where the majority of Americans don’t share their views, and they’re using laws and lies to do so, because they fervently believe that their way is the only “true way.” That’s why the House of Representatives is essentially paralyzed – because fanatics won’t compromise – unless forced to do so.

Over the past year or so, more and more Americans have been complaining about inflation, yet, on the surface, the usual statistics don’t seem to support those claims. But that’s only on the surface.

In September 2023, prices had increased by 3.7 percent compared to September 2022, according to the 12-month percentage change in the consumer price index, down from a monthly high of 9.1% in June 2022.

The problem with the statistics is that they only show the rate of price increases, not the comparison of real prices. For example, in October of this year food prices were up “only” 3.7%, but what that doesn’t reflect is the real pocketbook impact. The average cost of a pound of bacon was $5.34 in March 2020; today it’s around $7.25. That’s a 36% increase in two and a half years.

Gasoline prices have bounced around over the past three years, but even with recent price decreases, gasoline prices per gallon are 42% higher than three years ago.

For people who were already having trouble making ends meet, dealing with price increases often results in more credit card purchases. In March of 2022, the interest rate on the average credit card was 14.6%; today it’s 21.2%. With a credit card balance of $8,000 (the national average), the additional monthly interest expense is almost $50, or $600 annually.

At the same time, Americans keep racking up bigger credit-card balances. In the third quarter, the country’s credit-card debt burden hit a new record high of $1.08 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That was up $154 billion from the same period in 2022, the biggest year-to-year jump since the Fed started collecting the data in 1999. So, it’s scarcely surprising that, according to a national survey by WalletHub, 56% of all Americans say they have more credit card debt than they did 12 months ago.

All that has created, as the polls reveal, both a growing concern by most people about price increases and, apparently, a lack of understanding, particularly by Democrat politicians, who are looking more at the wrong statistics.

Just who’s behind all the talk and poll figures about Joe Biden being too old or the cause of higher prices? While some Republicans have mentioned it, they’re too smart to mention it, because Trump’s certainly no spring chicken, only three years younger than Biden. Nor are the rock-solid Democrats saying much. According to various polls, the people behind the ageism and ignorance that’s torpedoing Biden are largely unaffiliated voters or sometime Democrats who don’t understand economics or history.

They complain about inflation and blame it on Biden, but he didn’t start it. And, as I discussed earlier, the largest single component behind inflation is the massive increase in corporate profits and high executive pay. But those who oppose Biden and vote for the Republicans are voting for the interests and actors who caused the inflation they hate, as well as for the politicians who don’t want to give women the rights to their own bodies.

Because he’s actually going against his own party, Biden hasn’t said much, but in fact he’s done more to reduce illegal immigration than Trump ever did, and he’s done more to start revitalizing basic industry than any president in years.

But people are angry about high prices, even though inflation has moderated, and they’re going to blame the President, despite the fact that he’s not the one who triggered it. Some Republicans, like Nikki Haley, actually admit that Republicans share the blame, but most of them blame it on Biden, because it’s easier.

And, as for energy, the only real energy Trump shows is to blame everyone else at high volume. He still doesn’t have a practical plan for anything.

But almost half the country swallows his high-volume non-stop blame game, just like they feast on mass-produced “music” that features high -volume percussion and endless repetition of unintelligible lyrics. A certain similarity, perhaps?

This past week, Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of various financial crimes that could carry a potential sentence of over a hundred years, because he essentially created false money through his crypto-currency schemes, causing millions if not billions of dollars in losses. No one got killed, and the vast majority of those losers were speculators trying to make a quick buck. But Bankman-Fried is a crook, should face time in jail, and almost no one thinks otherwise.

Many of our elected federal representatives are demanding that a senator who took lots of money from Egyptian sources and likely influenced defense contract funding be removed from office. They’re also not too pleased with a different congressman who apparently broke every campaign financing law in the book as well as illegally diverted funds for personal use.

But, in comparison, there’s this fellow who’s already been convicted of financial fraud and tax evasion, been found guilty of sexual assault (twice) in a civil lawsuit, who’s stiffed contractors who worked for him, used bankruptcy as a tool to bolster his person wealth, who tried to overthrow a fair and free election, and who now faces four criminal indictments with over a hundred separate charges – and he’s the leading candidate for president, and forty percent of the country thinks he’s wonderful.

Exactly what does that say about both the American people and politicians who back Donald Trump?

The new House Speaker, Mike Johnson, has unveiled his proposal for providing aid to Israel, and it definitely meets the far-right’s approval. The bill would provide $14.3 billion for Israel and obtain the funding by cutting $14.3 billion from funds already provided to modernize the IRS and to provide staff to go after wealthy tax evaders. It also doesn’t deal with aid to Ukraine.

The House passed this proposed legislation late on Thursday, despite opposition from the Senate and the President’s statement that he’d veto that bill if it ever reached him, because it will cost more than a clean bill and because aid to Ukraine is important.

In point of fact, aid to Ukraine is likely more critical to U.S. interests than is aid to Israel, given that Ukraine is the tipping point for stopping Russian efforts to recreate a larger Russian “empire” and one that will most certainly take over smaller nations on its periphery if not stopped in Ukraine. Failure to address Ukrainian aid in a timely and uncomplicated way will likely cost both the U.S. and Ukraine a great deal more in the future, but “Magic Mike” has already indicated he’ll tie other right-wing priorities to Ukraine aid.

Practically speaking, the proposal as Johnson has presented and as passed by the House may well be politically appealing to the far right, but it represents partisanship carried to an extreme that’s not only totally against U.S. interests, but counter to the professed goals of the far-right.

How can that be?

The far-right claims it’s against higher taxes and wants to balance the federal budget, but it’s hard to balance the budget when the people who have the most money are avoiding paying what they owe and the IRS doesn’t have the resources and the staff to pursue them.

But then, the far-right not only doesn’t understand international problems, it also can’t count, or won’t, despite Johnson’s rhetoric about fiscal soundness. Allowing tax cheating to continue and having taxpayers wait for hours or days to get answers from the IRS because of outdated equipment, inadequate funding, and overworked and insufficient staff is hardly a recipe for fiscal responsibility.

Below are a few terms consistently thrown out as Republican talking points or values. Beneath each term is the actual meaning.

Smaller Government

Up to a 30% cut in virtually all programs benefitting lower income Americans; less federal funding for infrastructure and the environment; maintaining subsidies and tax breaks for wealthy individuals and corporations; cuts in foreign aid and military aid to countries such as Ukraine and nations bordering Russia and China, except for Taiwan, because we need their computer chips.

Balanced Budget

A budget balanced on the backs of the poorest Americans, with more tax cuts for the affluent and corporations.

Reducing Federal Regulations

Only reducing those regulations that cost corporations money or require them to protect the environment.

Traditional/Family Values

Emphasis on traditional two-parent family; opposition to equal pay and equal rights for women; banning books and media that depict anything other than “traditional” values; opposition to educational courses that teach unpleasant but proven facts about American society and history; opposition to anything depicting other than heterosexual relationships or life styles; opposition to a woman’s right to choose in the matter of abortion, often even when a pregnancy could kill the mother.

Immigration/Secure Borders

No more immigrants are welcome, unless they’re multi-millionaires or billionaires.

Unconstitutional

Anything proposed by Democrats.

The Republicans in the House have elected a new Speaker – Mike Johnson. By any definition, Johnson is a far-right idealogue – election denier, extreme evangelical, anti-abortion without exception, America-firster who voted against aid to Ukraine, who opposed same-sex marriage and any LBGTQ civil rights, and who continues to back Donald Trump with bogus claims of election fraud of various sorts.

Like all idealogues, for all of his genial soft-spoken manner, he’s an absolutist. Everything is black or white. And that’s the biggest problem with absolutists in politics. Life is filled with shades of gray, and trying to force everything into black and white always results in tyranny, as well as a denial of any facts that don’t fit within the absolutists’ beliefs.

Is Johnson a true idealogue, or an ambitious politician using ideology to gain great power? Or both? In practice, it doesn’t matter. The results will be the same, because idealogues don’t compromise. That should be obvious from the voting patterns of Republicans in the U.S. House.

I don’t see Johnson compromising unless he’s forced to by the defection of moderate Republicans, but if those moderates do defect, the Republican establishment will attempt to handle them in the same fashion as they did with Liz Cheney. If Johnson can hold the House in line, he’s the type to bring the government to a halt until he gets his way, just as the far-right has paralyzed the U.S. House until they got their way.

That kind of mindset can destroy democracy under the guise of saving it, and Mike Johnson is just the type to lead such a crusade.

This past weekend, we went to a dinner party. At the adjoining table were six people, all six more than acquaintances, but less than close friends. They were talking politics, and it became clear that all were Trumpists, very firm ones at that. All six would likely fall into the income classification of upper middle class but might well deny it. The men were professionals, a CPA, a retired consumer products plant manager, and a retired senior regional executive of one of the largest big-box retail chains; the women were a retired schoolteacher, the office manager (and wife) of the CPA, and a full-time housewife.

All were talking about how much they loved Donald Trump, using exactly those words and how much they hated Joe Biden, calling him an incoherent puppet of the far left.

I was tempted to point out a few facts, but refrained because a few weeks ago, I’d had a talk with the retired regional sales executive, and I knew exactly where anything I might say to the six would go. When I earlier pointed out that Trump had been convicted of tax fraud and evasion, as well as sexual assault and defamation, and faced four indictments and 90 some criminal charges, and tried to overthrow an election, and I asked him how he could support someone like that, his answer was, “All politicians are corrupt. What about Hillary and her emails, and Hunter Biden, or Biden’s brother?”

I suggested there was a difference between hard evidence with convictions and indictments and no charges at all in the case of Hillary and charges against Hunter Biden far less damning and not involving his father, and that Hillary hadn’t tried to overthrow the election she lost, to which he replied there was no difference.

Now, I can understand someone who dislikes or despises the policies of the Democrats and who will vote for any Republican rather than a Democrat. I personally think that’s a bit extreme, but I can understand it. What I find unfathomable is LOVING a convicted criminal and proven sex offender who tried to overturn an honest election, and who currently continues to spout proven lies about people in government just doing their jobs.

And then, that night after the dinner, I had a dream, more like nightmare, about the six of our acquaintances, back in Germany in 1933, sitting at dinner and saying how much they loved Adolf Hitler because of the way he was handling the communists and the Jews.

I did wake up from that nightmare.

Societies exist because human beings fare better by cooperating in groups. Human societies have ranged from loose groupings of individuals to grand empires, but one of the distinguishing features of most, if not all, successful nations and empires is that they have adopted structures and laws that strike a balance of some sort between the rights of the individual and the need to maintain civic order while protecting their citizens from attack from without.

There are essentially two ways to hold a country/society together, either through laws based on honesty and public trust of the government or through fear and force. And even societies based on honesty and public trust use fear and force on lawbreakers and other disruptive elements to deter them from harming others.

But the greatest danger to successful societies usually results from corruption from within. Corruption can be loosely defined as breaking in some fashion social compacts or laws that maintain equal rights to personal safety, equal rights to hold and use property, equal access to public services, and equal treatment under law.

Failing to pay taxes is corruption because the evader obtains public services he did not pay for, and thus places a heavier burden on those who do. Bribing a public official for services or contracts disadvantages others (and results in unequal treatment under law) and possibly results in shoddy procurement/goods. Paying to get a government position almost invariably results in a less qualified person in that position… and also reduces faith in government. Less faith in government creates more incentives to cheat government and the mindset that “if everyone else is doing it, why shouldn’t I?”

By the same token, government policies that appear to grant special rights and privileges to certain groups or classes of people also reduce trust in government, even if such policies actually make access more equal.

Now, in practice, all societies have a degree of corruption, but history shows, rather conclusively, that comparatively more honest societies actually achieve more, have greater power, and have happier and more prosperous people.

A society that accepts corruption as a way of life deserves what it gets, and it will continue to get it, because corruption stems from the idea that whatever’s best for me and my family supersedes the rule of law, and when people don’t respect the law, corruption becomes endemic and self-perpetuating.

Over two million Palestinians live, and are effectively trapped, in the Gaza strip. Among them are thousands, if not more, members of Hamas. Most of the Palestinians now living in Gaza either left Israel for Gaza or are the descendants of those who did. Gaza was controlled by Egypt, but later occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. The Oslo Accords of 1993 provided for local control by the Palestinian Authority, and in 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza. By 2007, Hamas vanquished Fatah and taken control of local government, after which Hamas cancelled elections.

After all its difficulties with Islamic terrorists, Israel clearly doesn’t want to govern the Palestinians, or to integrate them into Israel, and neither do any of the other nations in the regions bordering Israel want to accept the Palestinians, despite the fact that all of those nations have cultures not dissimilar to that of the Palestinians.

Since it declared itself an independent nation in 1948, Israel has been under attack, at times in all-out war, and the rest of the time from terrorist attacks. As the latest incarnation of those who have attacked, Hamas has declared that Israel must be destroyed. Although Israel removed its internal military presence in Gaza more than fifteen years ago, terrorist attacks against Israel have continued, with the latest being the most devastating in years.

Yet protests against the Israelis are growing in the United States, especially among “liberals,” claiming that the sad situation in Gaza is all the fault of the Israelis and that the Israelis shouldn’t attack Gaza because of the harm that will cause to “innocent” Palestinians.

But how innocent are the Palestinians? Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see them stopping the attacks by Hamas.

It’s both a truism and a truth, that no government can stand against its people – if they truly oppose it. Of course, the problem arises when a population is divided, and a true civil war is a disaster. But in the case of the Palestinians, they don’t seem to be repudiating their support for the destruction of Israel or for Hamas. Nor does saying nothing make them innocent. Here, as in many cases, an old saying applies — all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. And that’s assuming a population that wishes to destroy Israel is “good.”

Are the Iraelis angels? Hardly, but when you’re the only Jewish nation in the world with a land area of a mere 8,000 square miles surrounded by nations that have never stopped attacking and who have advocated for your destruction for more than 75 years, being a peaceful angel will only result in another holocaust, something that the Jews cannot forget and that all the Palestinian “supporters” seem to have conveniently forgotten.

And then there’s the other question. At what point does a people or a nation have to take responsibility for the acts of their leaders? Certainly, some peoples never have. It took World War II to hold the Germans responsible for the acts of Hitler and the Nazis. It took a Civil War for the U.S. to deal with slavery, and there are still unfinished issues. No one ever held Stalin responsible, or Mao, or the Turks for the Armenian genocide.

All of that points out that most extremists have to be stopped by force, because that’s all they respect. Unfortunately, that makes whoever effectively stops them an extremist as well. And, in the case of Gaza, there’s a great deal of talk, but no one in the entire region seems to be willing to truly deal with the issues raised by Islamic extremists, except Israel, because it has no choice if it wishes to survive.

From where I sit, I’m seeing a general similarity between the situation in Gaza and the situation in the theoretically Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Both are allowing violent extremists to disrupt their workings.

The Republicans blame the Democrats for all the nation’s problems, while Hamas continues to put the blame on Israel. In the House of Representatives, Republicans have a slight majority, but they’ve allowed themselves to be bound and disrupted by an extremist minority that has, depending on the situation, blamed the former speaker for working with the Democrats and then effectively blamed the Democrats for not saving McCarthy from the extremists, after McCarthy stalled almost all legislative activity while trying to placate the extremists — most unsuccessfully.

In the Gaza situation, the Israelis pulled out of local governance fifteen years ago, and the Palestinians have accepted and allowed the existence of extremist terrorists who blame the Israelis for everything while doing their best to continue their attacks.

In both cases, the extremists are pushing ideas and ideology that, apparently, very few besides the extremists can accept.

Hamas wants the total destruction of Israel and will accept nothing less, while the Republican extremists want massive spending cuts that will fall on the poorest Americans and refuse to consider even the smallest of tax increases on the wealthiest Americans (who now possess the greatest share of national wealth ever)… and apparently will accept nothing less.

Neither situation is likely to end well.

Walgreens has 9,000 locations in the United States, and, this week, in something like 200 of them, pharmacists are walking off the job, citing stress, understaffing, changing schedules at the last moment, and inadequate training for pharmacy staff.

This couldn’t come at a worse moment for Walgreens, whose stock value has roughly dropped fifty percent over the last year, and whose earnings aren’t improving significantly., and whose CEO departed recently. The company blames some of the problem on the fallout from fewer Covid vaccinations and says that the walkouts are limited to a few stores.

But, from what little I’ve seen, the problems are far worse than the company admits, and affect more than just a few locations.

We have a single Walgreens here in Cedar City, and it’s also where my wife and I get vaccinations, as a great many people do, because there aren’t that many options in Cedar City. It’s also not one of the stores cited as having walkouts.

Two years ago, I could call the store and get an appointment for a vaccination. Last year, Walgreens implemented a mandatory national vaccination schedule. Even if the pharmacy was empty, you had to go online to get an appointment.

This year I scheduled an appointment for Covid and flu vaccines. When I arrived, I was told that the Covid vaccine hadn’t arrived and that the store hadn’t been told the vaccine would be delayed in enough time to contact people – if, indeed, they’d had enough staff to do so, which they didn’t. Now… the staff was pleasant, and apologetic. And I got the flu vaccine quickly, with little fuss … and waited to reschedule the Covid shot. I also noted that the pharmacy staff never stopped moving, except to wait on people or answer the telephone.

When my wife went to get her vaccination, after the Covid vaccine arrived, despite the advance registration, the waiting time was forty-five minutes because the pharmacy didn’t have enough staff.

I’ve thought back, and over the past three years, that Walgreens appears to have changed almost all the pharmacy staff at least three times. I’ve had a different pharmacist or pharmacy tech give me a shot each time, and yet there are never more than five or six people working in the pharmacy.

So… I’m inclined to believe the pharmacists who attribute the problem to management, and I also suspect that management needs to pay more attention to operations than to the stock price.

Americans are dissatisfied, in a wide range of areas, but particularly in their current political choices, and I’m afraid that the dissatisfaction is only going to get worse because, as a nation, we refuse to face certain realities.

The first unpleasant reality is that no society, even the U.S., can offer the higher standard of living which most Americans want to all its population (unless the society is small and relatively homogenous). In the U.S., there aren’t enough resources and energy sources to do that (not to mention the “small” problem that using that much energy would increase global warming). The second is that we’re producing twice as many college graduates for high-paying “elite” jobs than there are jobs, which means that more than half of those degree holders are unlikely to ever be able to pay back the debt they’ve incurred in pursuit of those degrees, and each year those numbers increase, and so does dissatisfaction.

Then there’s the fact that tens of millions of people outside the U.S. are more than willing to come here, because almost any form of subsistence in the U.S. is better than what they face where they are, and there’s at least some hope by coming here.

Add to that the fact that the majority of Americans are looking for a one-size-fits-all perfect solution. No system, plan, or method works perfectly all the time, and the greater the diversity of those relaying on a system and the greater the range of problems the system has to deal with, the lower the probability of agreement among the users of the system. For large systems to work, political or economic, compromise is necessary, like it or not.

On top of that, a significant percentage of Americans don’t want to compromise. Those with great wealth are piling up more wealth, and those with few or no financial resources feel their comparative situation is worsening. The wealthy have the political power and resources to avoid compromising, and the poor have comparatively less and less.

All of these facts and factors are well-known. They’re everywhere. So what are our politicians doing to address them?

In recent political debates, especially among Republicans, I’ve observed that, for the most part, the politicians who assess the current situation more realistically and also advocate at least semi-realistic changes appear to be the least popular. I see the same problem among the Democrats.

Could it be that everyone fears that any actual realistic solution will hurt them or go against what they believe? And that any politician who’s realistic faces getting thrown out of office?

It’s certainly possible, since the U.S. continues to spend far more than its revenues and the politicians appear unable to cut spending (because too many people will suffer) and unable to raise taxes on the wealthy (despite the greatest income disparity in U.S. history)… and yet they’re unwilling to work out a realistic compromise, because it’s clear that too many voters find compromise unacceptable… and are demanding the unworkable and unobtainable perfect solution.

I’d venture to say that the vast majority of Americans have encountered something written by Charles Dickens, even if it’s only one of the movie versions of A Christmas Carol, or perhaps high school English class required reading of A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, or David Copperfield.

One of the aspects of Dickens that has always bothered me about his work is the lack of loose ends. As one New York Times book reviewer wrote years ago, “Dickens seduced his readers with atmosphere and then clubbed them with coincidence. He dreaded loose ends – no one has ever tied up his literary anxieties with more circumstantial knots.”

While Dickens has been criticized for “paper” main characters, excessive sentiment, and a reliance on fortuitous circumstances, what bothered me more was the lack of loose ends. Even as a student in high school, it always seemed to me that life was filled with meaningless death and loose ends.

Over the years, I’ve seen that novelists certainly recognize and often overdo meaningless deaths, if sometimes imbuing deaths with more meaning than they actually have, but some seem to work too hard to tie up all the loose ends, even if that seldom happens in real life, which is far less tidy than fiction.

But today, as in Dickens’s time, a great many readers enjoy having all the loose ends tied up and feel that the only loose ends that shouldn’t be tied up are those that will indeed be tied up in the sequel. This is natural, given that life is indeed untidy, and one of the reasons people read novels is not only to be entertained, but also to be challenged, as well as given a sense of meaning or order in life.

As a result of my feelings about loose ends, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I leave more than a few loose ends in any novel, some of which will never be resolved, and that just might be because I have the feeling that, more often than not, the only order and meaning in life come from what individuals and their societies create, and that no one is capable of tying up all the loose ends in life.

But that also might explain, at least partly, why I don’t have a best-seller like Tale of Two Cities, which, tied-up loose ends and all, has sold more than 200 million copies and is still selling, more than a century and a half after the author’s death.

Right now, it appears as though the main objective of the right-wing Republicans in the U.S. House isn’t to improve government, or to adopt a sensible federal budget, or even to keep the government going, but to attack and try to impeach President Joe Biden because he beat Donald Trump in the last election.

To me, it also seems as though the Republicans in the House have forgotten that they live in a representative democracy where they need to consider the views of all the people, not just those in their districts who elected them. Right now, the far-right wing in the House has little or no interest in working policy matters out, despite some of their rhetoric. Even the rhetoric is totally unrealistic – just how are they going to pass eleven appropriations bills in a few days, when in nine months the Republican leadership has only been able to get one relatively non-controversial appropriations bill passed by the House?

The Republican right is far more interested in imposing their views on everyone else, just like Trump (not to mention Tommy Tuberville) wants to do, regardless of the Constitution and long-standing political processes and practices.

It apparently doesn’t matter to those of the far right that the overwhelming majority of Americans want some form of legal abortion close to what Roe v. Wade provided. It doesn’t matter that the majority of Americans doesn’t want government shutdowns, or massive cuts in Medicare or Medicaid, or the freezing of military promotions. And, of course, the far-right wants also wants to stop all investigations and prosecutions of those involved in the January 6th insurrection and attempts to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. They also want to close the U.S. southern border, but have no workable plan (and will never be able to implement one without turning the U.S. into a total autocracy, as I’ve discussed earlier).

And, ironically, despite all their efforts to run over everyone else’s rights, they persist in calling themselves the “Freedom Caucus.”