So many of the news headlines today reflect both — another aid worker beheaded; hundreds of villagers of a different faith beheaded; kidnapped schoolgirls forced into marriage because women shouldn’t be educated; Republicans decry President’s amnesty executive orders, but refuse to pass legislation that isn’t 100% of what they want; and pretty much the vast majority of elected officials ignore anything they don’t want to believe, regardless of the amount of evidence to the contrary.

The sad part of this is that so little of it is new. Five hundred years ago, in England and across Europe Catholics were burning Protestants as heretics, and Protestants were killing Catholics in various ways because each was absolutely certain of the supremacy of its faith, and the evil of the other guy’s faith, and it was guys, because women didn’t count for much back then.

Not only that, but all of the various religious beliefs, past and present, are based on the teachings of men, and one woman, who have attempted to assure their followers that they knew, absolutely, the will of the Deity… and that in all too many cases, the will of that Deity was to slaughter and/or enslave all who did not share their beliefs. Despite the fact that there is no empirical evidence of such a Deity, and the fact that a great number of beliefs based on such teachings have been found to be totally inaccurate, if not completely baseless, tens of millions of people are ruled by such absolutist believers, and U.S. history has its share of such.

Four hundred years ago, European colonists began a two-century campaign to conquer North America, and in the process to displace the native American peoples because they were “inferior.” Slightly more than a hundred and fifty years ago, the leaders of the Confederacy began a civil war because they believed their way of life, based on slavery and “states’ rights,” was superior to a federal government had the temerity to suggest that perhaps enslaving other people might not be such a good idea – and at that time the federal government had only restricted the extension of slavery to new states. We still have those people who believe in the unlimited right to have and bear arms, despite the fact that the United States has one of the highest rates of civilian deaths by firearms – and certainly the greatest absolute number of such deaths.

The consequences of such absolutist beliefs have always been deadly, and usually terrifying, and that hasn’t changed, either. That was a lesson the Founding Fathers understood, and understood well. Because they didn’t want an absolutist government, they did their best to come up with a system that required a certain amount of compromise to work.

Well… now no one wants to compromise, and guess what… the system doesn’t work. What about that, exactly, is so hard to understand?

Recent archaeological discoveries in Central America have revealed a great deal about the fall of the great Mayan culture. That culture flourished in an area where the rains only fell from May to October. To keep the gods happy and the rains coming, the Mayans offered human sacrifices to the gods. Then in the late ninth century, the weather changed, and there was almost no rain – anytime. The Mayans began to increase their sacrifices, but the rains still didn’t return. Then came the wars… and more sacrifices… and finally the collapse. Sad to say, all that true belief didn’t matter at all, but the mindset of true believers is to claim that that is because the other guy believed in the wrong god and faith. That’s the all-too-human reaction – the other guy is wrong. Add to that the problem that very seldom do most people understand that following a belief that doesn’t have a grounding in facts is likely to cause problems, if not lead to disaster.

Americans have progressed… slightly. We now follow politicians whose views comfort us the most and give us the reassurance that the other guys and gals are wrong… and we can’t really understand how people can kill for religion… even as close to seventy thousand Americans die every year because of our belief in the freedom to drive automobiles at high speeds even while drinking, distracted, and texting and for virtually everyone to bear firearms, regardless of their capacity to use them wisely.

Apparently, Missouri governor Jay Nixon has declared a state of emergency and alerted the National Guard in preparation for possible violence in Ferguson, Missouri, because the grand jury is close to a decision on whether to indict policeman Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown.

Heaven knows that the Ferguson Police Department is not up there with the best of police departments. Reports from everywhere seem to suggest that, while the department is better than it was years ago, it has a long ways to go. And some analyses of the way Darren Wilson handled the beginning of the confrontation with Michael Brown suggest that there might have been better ways to approach Brown.

That said, let’s be honest. No matter what Brown’s friends, family, and supporters say, Brown was not the innocent near-angel portrayed by his supporters. Minutes before the fatal confrontation Brown stole cigars from a local convenience story and brutally shoved the clerk and owner out of the way. This was caught on the store surveillance camera. The owner reported the theft immediately and described Brown. Police were looking for him. No one knows for certain what happened in detail after Wilson stopped Brown, except that Wilson did suffer injuries, that a quantity of his own blood was found in his squad car, and that Brown was fatally shot.

Some sort of confrontation occurred; Wilson was injured enough to bleed and have minor injuries; Wilson shot Brown. An autopsy performed by the former chief medical examiner for the city of New York, at the request of Brown’s family, found that the shots had all been fired at a distance of from one to four feet; this finding was consistent with the other medical examinations.

Now…for a moment, forget about the race card. A six foot four inch young man weighing 292 pounds who has been identified as a robbery suspect strikes a policeman… for whatever reason. The policeman shoots him at short range. This is not a violation of civil rights. It may have been an unwise split-second decision by a panicked policeman facing a giant of a young man who had just committed a crime, and that decision resulted in a fatal shooting. Or it may have been self-defense on Wilson’s part. In any case, Michael Brown was no innocent. Most likely, Darren Wilson wasn’t either.

But, however the grand jury rules, this shouldn’t be a case for rioting and great clamor over civil rights. And by the way, what about the civil rights of the shopkeeper who was robbed and assaulted by Michael Brown? I haven’t heard a word about his rights… anywhere.

No… I’m not talking about discrimination, at least not racial or gender discrimination, but about the growing inability of younger Americans, say a huge percentage of those under fifty, to integrate information and knowledge into their studies, lives, and social and economic behavior.

This is scarcely just my personal evaluation. Since my wife is a university professor, and one daughter a secondary school teacher, and two others graduate school professors [one in law and the other in medicine], and all of them interact with others in their fields, the data-base from which I’m drawing is both broad geographically and in terms of fields. And all of them, and the vast majority of their colleagues, all agree on one point – the majority of U.S. students cannot integrate information. They cannot offer a coherent, fact-based oral or written presentation that is both organized and logically supported.

This deficiency goes well beyond education. We have far too high an unemployment rate, and an especially high underemployment rate, in this country, yet we have business after business claiming that they cannot find skilled employees and, often, not even potential employees who can be trained. Why not? Because pretty much every job above the basest form of manual labor requires a degree of information integration.

In the case of students, the majority of them are not stupid, nor are they inherently slow. They couldn’t be with the speed at which they text. But they’ve never been taught how to take discrete bits of information, to evaluate them, and then to integrate that information into their world-view, or even just into their work-view or school-view.

Not only is this lack of information integration prevalent in schools and universities, but it’s now pervading everything, from politics to business to entertainment.

What is overlooked so often today are some very simple points. Without facts to back it up, any viewpoint is just prejudiced opinion. Without knowledge of how a tool works and what its limitations are, the worker who uses it is an accident waiting to occur.

According to poll after poll, around 90% of all Americans are displeased, if not furious, with the American Congress. Yet in the last election, over 96% of all incumbents were re-elected. A little bit of cognitive dissonance there? If you’re that displeased with Congress, why did you reelect the same folks you’re so displeased with? Take your choice – (a) people are incredibly stupid, (b) they can’t put the facts together, i.e., they can’t integrate information, (c) party loyalty supersedes factual information, i.e., most people are illogical, or (D) some combination of the above.

Now, polls show that the majority of voters in any given district/state have a favorable view of their own representative or senator, even when that elected official continually votes against the voter’s declared interests.

As I’ve noted more than a few times, all too many businesses seem unable or unwilling to integrate data and events that indicate that the insistence on higher short-term profits puts them on a long-term course for disaster and lower profits. GM’s faulty starter switch was a perfect example. Saving less than a dollar a car by installing substandard switches in roughly 30 million cars for more than ten years “saved” GM something like $30 million. GM has already paid the National Highway Transportation Board more than $35 million in fines and faces more than one billion dollars in costs, not including additional lawsuits by almost a thousand claimants.

The last thing the United States needs is another generation that is even less adept at integrating and analyzing information, but with schools clearly not being able to teach such skills and the instant-media-communication thirty-second news bite and the growing popularity of Twitter and texting, I’m getting the distinct feeling that information integration and analysis is falling even further behind in the list of skills valued by Americans.

Last week the New York Times book section led off with a review of a book whose title I’m not about to name, for reasons that will become obvious. The book in question was a “science fiction” novel by a “mainstream” author and was highly praised. The reviewer opens by stating that just as the Apollo missions showed the beauty of our planet, in the same fashion a “comparable journey takes place in the best works of science fiction – an imaginative visit to speculative realms that returns the reader more forcibly to the sad and beautiful facts of human existence.” So far, so good.

But then, even as the reviewer admits, the author breaks no new ground with his tale of a missionary’s trip and experiences on an alien world [with no reference to The Sparrow or A Case of Conscience, I might add], but praises him as “a master of the weird” and, after summarizing the plot of the novel, concludes by comparing the author to Hilary Mantel [whom he declares has made the historical novel “newly respectable”] and saying he hopes the author “can do something similar for speculative writing.” The author is, of course, an international seller with several movies based on his books.

All of this gave me the almost insane desire to borrow weapons – as many as I could – from Larry Correia and go on my own monster hunt against the so-called mainstream literati, such as the reviewer, who clearly feels that no existing F&SF writer, no matter how good, can possibly do what this author, as an outsider, may be able to do. The sad part is that the reviewer just might be right, not because there is not a great deal of highly literate and well-written F&SF, but because there seems to be a view among literary reviewers that such literature does not exist.

In the case of such “mainstream” reviewers, I just can’t forgive ignorance and/or total disregard of an entire long-standing genre, particularly when that ignorance has existed so long and so willfully. Praising a novel that clearly examines issues and tropes that have been examined in detail in F&SF for years, if not longer, often brilliantly, as if no one has ever done it before, in the hopes that a talented outsider can bring more readers and “enlighten” them to the fact that within &SF exist a great many brilliant works of literature, seems to me to reveal that the so-called mainstream literati continue to exhibit either ignorance beyond ignorance, or ignorance compounded by arrogance.

And for those reasons, I’m not about to give ink or mention to either the reviewer or the author,

… and the test results are in. Utah high school students just received the results of a new test that measures achievement in language, mathematics, and science… and on average, less than half the students met the standards in any of the test areas. Two things about the new test were especially interesting, first that the standards and what was being measured didn’t change and, second, that half of the new test required answers from the student – no guessing from choices provided. While there were schools whose overall student mastery levels reached or exceeded 90% mastery, there were also schools where the mastery levels averaged in the 10%-20% range.

What to me is so obvious, but what has been overlooked for years by both parents and educational bureaucrats, is that multiple choice tests don’t accurately show student subject mastery – they’re far more likely to reward speed readers with moderate subject mastery and great test-taking ability. And multiple choice testing certainly doesn’t measure the ability to reason out a mathematical concept or to write an accurate and grammatically correct paragraph.Those students who excel at multiple-choice testing are generally those who (1) have learned the material and can regurgitate or recall it quickly; (2) those able to read and process the questions quickly, (3) those with a comprehensive understanding of common and standard language and society, and (4) those with higher levels of self-discipline. Not surprisingly, those abilities tend to be associated with families with higher incomes and with students from more demanding schools [most of which are either schools in high income areas or charter schools with extraordinarily dedicated and highly professional staff, as well as generally better resources. There are exceptions, of course, but exceptions, as the saying goes, often prove the rule.

The other long-standing problem with multiple choice tests is that they provide an unrealistic view of the choices in life outside and after schooling. Sometimes, usually very infrequently, life presents you with clear and multiple choices. Most of the time, your choices either aren’t obvious, tend to be between less obnoxious alternatives, or you don’t have a real choice at all. Even when choices seem obvious, they often aren’t, because the most appealing one in the short run may turn into a long-range disaster.

The “advantages” to multiple-choice tests are that (1) they’re theoretically more objective, since whether one adequately written paragraph is better than another can result in subjective grading; (2) theytake far fewer resources and are far easier to grade; (3) they allow theoretically more objective comparisons of teachers, schools, and school systems [except most really don’t measure how much a given teacher has improved the skills of a particular student or set of students].

The fact that Utah test scores dropped drastically across the board when open-ended questions were added underscores dramatically just how limited multiple choice tests are – as almost any veteran classroom teacher can explain.

But then, since multiple choice tests are graded on the immediate answer, and we have two generations in a row raised on multiple choice tests, is it any wonder that we’ve become a society dominated by instant gratification and superficial knowledge, with a continuing decline in true critical thinking?

Last week, just a week before the election, two candidates for an open Utah congressional seat got into a “contest” of sorts in which each claimed to hold the most “Mormon/LDS” views, although the assertions weren’t quite that boldly stated… but enough so that the headline from the Salt Lake Tribune played it that way. The idea of claiming “values superiority” isn’t something unique to Utah, unhappily. I’ve seen more than a few elections over the years in which candidates vied to prove who held the more “Christian values.” And for that matter, isn’t the primary cause of ISIS in the Middle East to create a land governed by the most “Islamic” values? Didn’t England suffer through centuries of internal conflict over which church’s values would be predominant? Not to mention the bloody conflicts that wracked Europe immediately after the Reformation?

Just what do people really mean by such assertions? Let’s see. “Most Christian” — today is that code for right-to-life, anti-feminist, pro-gun rights, anti-minority, and thoroughly patriarchal? If it is, that’s rather at variance with the doctrines of that carpenter on whose name and deeds Christianity is theoretically based. On the other hand, Joseph Smith was a patriarchal polygamist who was definitely a right-to-life type, but is that what those two candidates meant?

Or were they just trying to claim, “I’m just like most of you.” But… if most of their constituents want a supremacy of religious values in government, where does that leave all those who don’t share those values?

Like the Founding Fathers, I’m rather skeptical of putting religious values ahead of everything because one immediate question arises – whose religious values? And the second question is of even greater concern – to what degree will a candidate or incumbent attempt to use government to strengthen or impose those values on those who do not share them? All of which brings up a third question – if a candidate doesn’t intend to strengthen or impose those religious values he or she is trumpeting, exactly why bring them up except to gain an advantage. And if that’s the case, what does that reveal about how far the politician or candidate will go to obtain or maintain power.

As for me, I tend to vote against candidates who trumpet religious values – unless their opponents have even greater flaws, which, these days, is more often the case than I can ever recall… and that’s a sad commentary as well.

Amid all the political posturing and smears and counter-smears, one underlying aspect of American politics that is accepted without question by most Americans is the practice of lobbying, although a great many Americans rage against lobbyists for views they don’t believe in or for government programs they oppose. That is, lobbying for the “right” causes is fine, just not for the “wrong” ones, but lobbying itself tends to be accepted as a necessary evil.

Should it be?

James Madison worried greatly about “factions” marshalling votes and influence to shape government unwisely, but felt that restricting the “petitioning” of government allowed by the Constitution was a remedy worse than the illness, and felt that the competition of interests would restrict the influence of any one faction. In a sense, for most of the history of the United States, he was largely correct.

Except… reported annual expenditures for lobbying the federal government have gone from less than $200 million in 1975 to almost $4 billion last year, and the actual numbers are far higher, as I can personally attest, since I spent time as a “consultant” in Washington. D.C., where my earnings were not counted as lobbying because I was merely “analyzing” the effect of potential laws and regulations on business and the economy. Nor were most of the other consultants with whom I worked then classed as lobbyists.

If Madison were correct, lobbying wouldn’t be the problem it’s become. The problem is that it takes money, big money, to analyze and determine the impact of policy and laws… and to package and present such analyses in easily understandable format to legislators and federal bureaucrats. The result is that close to three quarters of all lobbying expenditures are made by large businesses and business organizations. It also takes a continual presence, which requires more money, and the most effective lobbyists are those who know the system – such as former bureaucrats, former staffers, and former members of Congress, all of whom have greater access.

When I left my position as a Congressional staff director to become Director of Legislation at the U.S. EPA, I was thirty-seven years old, with ten years’ experience in politics, and I was one of the older Congressional staff directors. Legislative aides were usually far younger and paid much less. From what I’ve been able to determine, this situation hasn’t changed, and isn’t likely to, not when staff directors’ pay is statutorily capped at far below that of lobbyists and consultants and when most senior Congressional staffers work 60-80 hour weeks, and sometimes longer, with no overtime, and can be dismissed literally instantly [I saw this happen personally several times].

The Congressional staff workload is incredibly heavy; most staffers are young and with little experience, especially compared to the lobbyists, and they don’t have enough time to research anything in depth, while the lobbyists do and can also rely on long experience.

The result is a foregone conclusion, and exactly what we see today, a legally permitted lobbying system heavily slanted toward those interests with the most resources, predominantly but not exclusively those of business. Unhappily, there’s another aspect that Madison and the Founding Fathers didn’t and probably couldn’t have foreseen. It’s simple enough. Because society has become incredibly more complex since 1789, the federal government has expanded into regulating and influencing almost every aspect of American society, and while “purists” insist much of this is not necessary, in fact much of it is, unhappily.

Before we had food and drug safety laws, buying food and medicines was often the equivalent of Russian roulette, especially in cities. The growth of industry meant that state laws were inadequate to deal with trade and industrial problems, and legal conflicts required resolution. Before there were environmental laws, rivers literally caught fire and swimming in some could literally kill you. Before finance legislation, bank failures were a common occurrence, and borrowers neither had access to information on which to make decisions nor recourse if a bank failed.

The upshot of all this is that there are a multiplicity of individual interests as the result of an expanded government and an economy with international impacts, and each individual interest competes with every other interest for getting the attention of government. Those interests representing the most money or the most votes generally are those pushed most successfully by lobbyists, and the overriding problem is that the sum total of those “noticed” private interests doesn’t equate to the overall public interest.

Over time, while there are times when governments need to run deficits, public revenues, i.e., taxes, need to come close to the level of public expenditures. That’s a definite overall public interest. Breathing clean air and having clean water to drink is an overall public interest. Not having mine wastes spill into drinking water is a public interest. Having a taxation system that doesn’t give special breaks to some industries and not to others might also be considered an overall good. But we’re running massive deficits and have for years; we still have air unfit to breathe in many parts of the country; and we’ve had massive drinking water pollution from failures of mine tailings impoundments and from agricultural impoundments. We have a crumbling transportation infrastructure, an increasingly fragile electric power distribution system, and municipal water systems that leak and waste incredible amounts of water… and those are just a fraction of the real problems out there.

But comparatively few lobbyists are out there pushing the public good, and all too often those “public interest” lobbyists are attacked and ridiculed for being anti-business, or opposed to someone’s “rights” to run an organization or as business as they choose. Even the “go-gooders” apparently pushing for public interests tend to focus on the popular causes, and there’s nothing new about this. Some twenty years ago, the U.S. EPA did a study on funding for environmental causes, and discovered that the environmental problems that caused the most deaths and health problems were far down the list, while high profile problems that actually affected comparatively far fewer people topped both federal appropriations and public concerns.

In the end, lobbying costs money, and businesses have more of it than anyone else, and that means they most often have most of the best hired guns, access to the best information, and the best systems for presenting their cases. That doesn’t even account for the impact of campaign contributions.

The real wonder is that there are as many cases where government actually tries to promote the overall public good as there are, but those instances are becomingly increasingly rarer… because most lobbyists aren’t interested in the public good, only in pushing for favorable treatment for their private good… and as the increasing welter of special interest provisions in law and regulations indicates, private interests are increasingly trumping public good.

Recently, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman published a column critical of Amazon, further fanning the flames over Amazon’s tactics in dealing with its suppliers, including the furor over the current Hachette-Amazon conflict.

Amazon’s actions, however, don’t appear to be confined to just the United States. More than 1,000 authors from Germany, Austria and Switzerland have signed a similar open letter to Amazon which accuses Amazon of improper tactics in setting e‐book prices with Bonnier AB, a German publishing trade group. Last June, Bonnier filed a complaint with German authorities stating Amazon delayed delivery of its books to force Bonnier to accept lower prices for ebooks.

The issue of buyer control of suppliers, i.e., monopsony, isn’t all that new, although the height of the controversy is and there are legal texts on the subject dating back more than twenty years. In a more recent 2008 article in the Utah Law Review [“Predatory Buying and the Antitrust Laws”], Roger D. Blair and John E. Lopatka summarized the issue just raised again by Amazon’s efforts to force Hachette to lower ebook prices below ten dollars:

“The fact that an increase in monopsony power may have little impact on consumers does not mitigate the antitrust concern, because the negative impact on sellers by itself warrants equal antitrust concern, a point oddly unacknowledged by the Supreme Court in its Weyerhauser decision. Just as monopsony and monopoly are economically symmetrical, predatory buying and predatory pricing are legally symmetrical…”

Or as several other legal scholars have pointed out, an illegally obtained monopsony might well violate U.S. antitrust law, but, to date, no U.S. court has ever found a single company guilty of an illegal monopsony. Or put more bluntly, so far, the U.S. legal system and the Department of Justice seem to believe that any action resulting in lower prices for consumers is socially beneficial, regardless of how those prices are obtained, and what economic damage is wreaked on the suppliers and producers.

The problem with the “lower prices are always better” argument is that it focuses solely on one aspect of economic social good. Both Walmart and Amazon exert monopsony power, and both arguably keep total compensation for employees low, while also forcing supplier prices lower. Both do so in markets where profit margins are narrow. This requires cuts in expenses by suppliers, and that means, in turn, that the suppliers can pay their employees and suppliers less.

Overall, despite stories of individual writers and suppliers who benefit from Amazon and/or Walmart, the emphasis on low prices regardless of the consequences translates into lower incomes for millions of people, ranging from minimum wage workers through struggling writers all the way to best-selling authors. Best-selling authors can obviously take a hit in earnings, even if they don’t much care for it, but for every best-selling author there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lower-compensated individuals whose earnings are reduced by this sort of illegal market manipulation. And monopsonies that depress supplier earnings below a free-market level are in fact illegal under U.S. law.

So… what’s the ethical difference between Amazon and Walmart, who use monopoly/monopsony market power to keep prices down, and thus wages and payments to suppliers artificially low, and all those companies who outsource manufacturing to low-paid workers in third world countries?

After all, aren’t low prices and high profits the great American dream?

I guess I’m old-fashioned, or perhaps, an old fogey… or worse, because, when I pay for a good or service, I expect the good to be without defects and the service to be accomplished correctly and in time frame agreed upon.

Last month I had to buy new hoses for my washing machine. I had to take back the first set, and they were the most expensive set, because they leaked… right out of the packaging. Last week, I bought a 13 gallon plastic storage bin, and when I brought it home and set it down, empty, on the floor, the seam split.

We live in a small town with two furniture stores, and when we wanted to replace some furniture that we’d had for more than twenty years, we couldn’t find anything at either store… or in their catalogues… that remotely resembled anything we wanted. Everything was overlarge, overstuffed, and oppressively dark. So, on a business trip to North Carolina, the heartland of American furniture making and outlets, my wife found what we wanted, and the company agreed to ship it, at our expense, of course. The company stated that it would take three to five weeks to arrive. It still hasn’t arrived, and it’s seven weeks and counting. I’ve been talking to the company almost daily, and I finally pried out that the furniture hasn’t even left North Carolina, and the latest estimate is another three weeks before it gets here, and no other freight forwarder can do it in less than three to six weeks. Further investigation revealed that the freight company didn’t even pick up the furniture until two weeks after the date I was told it had shipped. Whether all this is incompetence or indifference, or some combination of both, I really don’t care. What I do care about is that I’ve been lied to and that no one seems able or willing to do anything about it, except say that, in effect, that’s the way it is.

I have a friend who’s a contractor, and a very good one. He has a small team of employees who can do many of the tasks, such as framing, finish carpentry, moderate earth-moving, tiling, etc., and anything his team can do is done well and on time. Anything that he has to subcontract is another story – and about half the subcontractors in the area he won’t use, because they’re even worse. He also admits he’s racist at times, because the only reliable and truly professional drywall firm is Latino, and the best painters are also.

Along those lines, we decided that a pull-down ladder was a better way of getting into the storage space above the garage than standing on a step-ladder. The company sent three wrong ladders with the incorrect dimensions before finally sending the correct size.

After twenty years, we bought a new refrigerator. The new refrigerator arrived right out of the packaging – unpackaged in our kitchen – with a noticeable dent in the front door. The warranty/service covered this, and just this past Wednesday, a month after the refrigerator was first delivered, a new door arrived – except when it came out of the four layers of packaging, it had a bigger dent than the door it was supposed to replace.

I am not making up any of this, and I could have given several more examples, as well. That’s why I’m more than a little concerned about the future of the United States. I certainly don’t recall as much incompetence in as many areas as I’m seeing now, and I don’t think it’s entirely that I’ve become more of a perfectionist as I’ve aged… or a prematurely aged old fogey.

Anita Sarkeesian was scheduled to speak at Utah State University last Wednesday. Then USU received an email that threatened “the deadliest school shooting in American history” if the school did not cancel the lecture by the feminist writer and video game critic. The email, which contained graphic descriptions of what would happen with what types of weapons, was also sent to quite a number of USU and local officials as well.

While Sarkeesian has shown up for speaking engagements despite terror threats before, she did request firearms screening of those attending the lecture. University officials declined her request, citing a 2004 Utah law that expressly allows the carriage of weapons, including concealed weapons, in all public spaces at state universities. Sarkeesian, who created and maintains a feminist video blog and a video series on misogyny in video games, then canceled her appearance. Following that, USU officials went on to claim that freedom of speech was alive and well at USU.

There has been some controversy in Utah over the incident, but one letter to the Salt Lake Tribune made an “interesting” point with the claim that the second amendment should trump the first amendment, and more than a few comments followed that line.

As I’ve said before, I don’t believe in “absolute rights” under all conditions, and the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed on far more than one occasion that the rights under the Constitution are not absolute under all conditions. So far as I’m aware, the constitutionality of the Utah law to carry weapons, concealed or otherwise, into any “public area” has not been litigated, but I truly don’t see how “rights” under the second amendment would be infringed by allowing one woman to speak about video game violence against women in a university auditorium that banned guns for those attending. No one is being compelled to attend a voluntary lecture, and no one’s rights to carry a weapon elsewhere are being threatened.

If this precedent of allowing guns everywhere under all conditions is extended elsewhere, then free speech becomes imperiled, and I admit that I don’t think someone speaking in public should have to worry about being shot for speaking about a controversial subject. As for “free speech” getting out of hand, the Supreme Court has ruled, again, on more than a few occasions, that not all “free speech” is protected.

In my book, neither the first nor the second amendment should be absolute… but it’s pretty clear that those who love guns more than any other freedom don’t see it that way… or perhaps they feel that they need the security of a gun to say what they want… and to keep others from saying that with which they disagree.

In all of my fantasy books, the magic systems are logical, and, if you will, as some readers have put it, “have rules.” And I think it’s fair to say that I was among the first of U.S. fantasy writers to develop and carry out such an approach through an entire series, as well as three different series that followed. But I didn’t do it just because it was a “neat” or nifty idea. I did it because, simply put, anything in nature, science, technology, and civilized human societies that works has rules or, if you will, underlying frameworks.

“Laws of nature” tend to be rather inflexible. If one jumps or falls off a cliff here on earth [excluding those in the ocean depths], the result is always going to be a rapid descent, the results of which will range from painful to fatal. Likewise, all human technological progress has resulted from gaining understanding of how the universe works and actively applying that understanding in an organized fashion. If magic were “real,” as I postulate in my fantasy series, any real advancement in its use would come from disciplined study of magic and application of that study.

The problem with human-made laws, as well as with the commandments reputedly handed down from various deities, is that breaking them often affords the rule-breaker an advantage or momentary gratification of some sort, again often an advantage or gratification that costs others, which is why all societies have penalties for rule-breakers. Problems with societal rules usually happen under several circumstances. The most obvious is when someone with great power does so and gets away with it because of that wealth and power, but those transgressions are usually comparatively infrequent – until you get a society such as U.S. society today, where there are over 400 billionaires. The second problem, common to almost all societies, is when society, government, and/or religion mandates or forbids certain behaviors and practices more because those particular rules are more to maintain power – political, religious, or both – than to enhance law and order. Denying women, minorities, or those of other faiths civil rights extended normally to the majority is far more about control and power than anything else. This problem is compounded when the “rules” don’t make sense to a significant segment of society or conflict with the “rules” of as different set of believers.

The “believer-believer” conflict was one reason why the Founding Fathers wanted to separate church and state. It’s also one of the best reasons for a nation’s laws to be based on those basic principles on which all “believers” and non-believers agree, and not to attempt to use laws to impose religious practices.

There have certainly been working societies with no formal “laws,” but they have tended to be either very tightly socially controlled or the equivalent of absolute rule by the most powerful. And all that brings me back to the point that to presume that an organized society exists without rules and that magic has no structure is a fantasy too unrealistic for me.

I happened to glance at a recent issue of Forbes [yes, I read both Forbes and The New York Times, not to mention The Economist, New Scientist, Scientific American, and even occasionally those left wing publications like Sierra and Mother Jones] and ran across a poll that asked fifty billionaires to what factor(s) they most attributed their success. While a number mentioned more than one factor, the leading factor given was “discipline and hard work” (cited by 35), followed by “willingness to take risks” (24); education and intelligence (20), and, oh, yes, “luck” (14).

The funny thing is that I know and have known quite a few people who are intelligent, educated, disciplined, and work hard, and out of several hundred I’ve met well enough to make some personal observations, only two of them are multi-millionaires. And in fact, the idea that all it takes to become a multimillionaire, let alone a billionaire, is intelligence, drive, and persistence is in fact an American myth, and a rather damaging one at that. Now, I don’t deny that the overwhelming majority of multi-millionaires are reasonably intelligent, work hard, and persist in a disciplined fashion. They’d have to have those characteristics to succeed, but what I strenuously doubt is that any single factor, or even one or two, can make someone that successful. It takes a whole constellation of factors, including but not limited to having good ideas, being in the right place at the right time, having or making the right contacts, being able to raise the necessary investment, and a certain amount of luck. And a great number of those factors are environmental, and so obvious that they’re taken for granted, such as a stable home life and decent schools while growing up. A single factor just doesn’t cut it.

The same principle applies to other situations as well. Most industrial accidents, especially major ones, aren’t the result of a single factor going wrong, but a combination of at least two, if not more, problems. The same thing is definitely true in aviation accidents, and even though the NSTB often cites pilot error, it’s almost always a mechanical or weather problem, or something else, combined with pilot error. Most automobile accidents involve two factors, if not more.

So why do we persist as a society in trying to identify the single factor, or the “key” factor, when life is so much more like a jigsaw puzzle, where every piece plays a part? Are we trying to make things too simple? Or is it just intellectual laziness?

One of the reasons I don’t write books that have overt and graphic horror in them is that they remind me too much of the state of the world. Admittedly, the world has been filled with horror since the first carnivore arrived, consumed another creature, and then was flattened by a tsunami or fried by lava exploding from a volcano… or something like that.

In dealing with horror, I much prefer the quiet kind, the kind most people don’t see or from which they avert their eyes, pretending that it doesn’t exist, or that it will go away if they don’t dwell on it, but these days, the world seems awash in crude violent horror, perhaps symptomatic of the age of excess which we appear to be living.

The excesses are everywhere. There are those that make the headlines day in and day out, such as the growing income inequality between the richest and the poorest, and contrary to popular American opinion, that inequality is almost everywhere, except paradoxically, Scandinavia [which, interestingly enough, was the font of excess some thousand years or so ago]. Or the excesses in faith/religion, with rampant fundamentalism on one side and the greatest percentage of atheism measured in history on the other. This religious extremism sees Christian fundamentalists insisting violently on “the right to life” and unlimited human birth, while largely ignoring all the poor and starving children created by unlimited birth once they’ve been born. The Islamic fundamentalists are even worse, beheading infidels, insisting on the right to essentially enslave and deny education and rights to women, and justifying the right to execute anyone who “leaves the faith”… or draws cartoons of Muhammad. Then there are the apolitical excesses of various governments that will not hesitate to stoop to anything to maintain their power.

One of the greatest excesses, especially here in the United States, is that continuously perpetrated by the media – trumpeting anything that will make headlines to titillate the jaded American masses (which include all too many theoretically educated Americans who still cannot stop watching the media parade of daily horrors). What makes all this so pathetically and ironically amusing is that American society today is far, far safer than it has ever been. I’m not turning my eyes from the current injustices, or excusing them, but today’s discrimination against blacks, immigrants, and others, or the current gender inequalities, is nothing compared to the true horrors of a century and a half ago. And this media excess creates almost a carnival atmosphere that keeps telling people how horrible things are while, at the same time, fueling the anger and resentment on both sides of every issue… and the ignorance. How can the approval rating of Congress be less than ten percent, when over half the voters in almost every Congressional district think that their representative is doing a good job?

I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the HBO series, Game of Thrones, is doing so well. It typifies exactly how the media represents current society, if thinly disguised as a “War of the Roses” fantasy knock-off. What tends to get overlooked, in the nature of quiet horror, is that such a depiction is effectively creating horror that is far less quiet…

… such as a political/governmental system that is becoming almost completely dysfunctional, such as an instant gratification culture that hasn’t the patience to work out problems, such as a culture so obsessed with wealth and celebrity that it rewards and glorifies those who reach the top, regardless of how such wealth and fame are achieved, such as….

But detailing more would delve too deeply into overt horror, and I’ve already exceeded my horror tolerance for the moment.

One of the ostensible reasons why the Federal Reserve has been pumping money into the economy through its quantitative easing program has been to ward off the possibility of deflation, which, according to most economists and policy-makers, would be far worse for most people than the current on-going recession – and no matter what any economist says, for most people, the economy is still in a recession.

In deflation, the value of all non-monetary assets drop. Effectively, that means the value of your house drops, but not the money owed on your mortgage. The worth, and thus the price, of goods drops, and that means that the people who produce and sell those goods make less… and so it goes.

The problem with the Great Recession has been that it combined some aspects of deflation with some aspects of inflation. In almost all of the country, housing values went down, but mortgage payments didn’t, while family earnings stagnated for those fortunate enough to keep a job, and for those who lost jobs, many of them lost everything. In addition, with the amount of money the Fed pumped into the economy, interest rates on money invested in savings accounts, CDs, bonds, and money market mutual funds dropped through the floor, effectively reducing earnings of anyone invested in those areas, the vast majority of whom were people on limited and fixed incomes. The reaction of many – those who could afford to — was to invest in the stock market, which is more risky. In turn, this pushed the rate of return on dividend-bearing stocks down, again reducing earnings while propelling the stock market indices to record highs… which, at least initially, meant significant gains for those with the funds who were already invested in stocks, or who invested shortly after the Wall Street crash, and far less in gains, if any, for those who delayed.

Supposedly, now that unemployment percentages have dropped, the Federal Reserve is planning to reduce the amount of money it’s pumping into the economy, which should mean that interest rates ought to increase very slightly. Personally, I have some doubts about that. I suspect that very little will change soon. Wages and salaries aren’t increasing for most people, and that means no significant increase in overall demand.

Effectively, a goodly portion of Americans are still trapped in their own personal version of deflation, with mortgages greater than the value of their homes, many with significant student debt, and with marginal, if any real increases in earnings.

From a politician’s or policy-maker’s view, the last thing the United States needs is deflation, but at present, because of the labor situation, any significant amount of inflation will paradoxically have deflationary impacts on a considerable number of Americans. And given that government isn’t the best at managing the economy, and the banking and finance sectors haven’t shown much concern or interest in the welfare of the majority of Americans, the next year or so could be very interesting… and that reminds me that the exhortation, “May you live in interesting times,” is a curse, not a blessing.

I don’t know who’s computing the Consumer Price Index that shows the U.S. has low inflation, but their computations don’t square with my real-life experience. The filing cabinets brought it home to me, once again. Somewhere around ten years ago, I bought a legal size, two drawer, black steel filing cabinet. Last week I brought one almost identical to it, from the same big box office supply company from which I’d bought the last one – except for the price, which was almost exactly double what I paid for the one I purchased ten years earlier.

According to the U.S. Consumer Price Index, the inflation rate over the past ten years has been 25.5%, or just a shade less than 2.0% annually. The change in the price of the filing cabinet represents a rate of inflation at 8% annually, or four times the official rate. The majority of that increase is likely due to the fact that the cost of iron has almost quintupled since 2004, but by that logic, anything manufactured out of steel or iron should have increased markedly over the last ten years – far more than the 2% per year official inflation rate. Interestingly enough, over the same period the price of copper has tripled, while lead and tin are 2 ½ times what they were in 2004.

Housing prices are, overall, about the same as they were in 2004, although in some areas they’re still below 2004 levels and in others, such as Denver and Honolulu, they’re more than 20% higher. This year, one of the biggest factors holding down inflation has been the decrease in gasoline prices – except that’s just for the first nine months of this year – and gas prices are still almost double the average of ten years ago.

Then, too, the CPI has the price of men’s shirts as going down. If that’s so, why do my shirts, bought largely at sales or discount houses, but the same modest brands as I’ve worn for at least fifteen years, cost twice as much as they did ten years ago?

As for milk, its price has almost tripled since 2004, but I will admit that the cost of computer printers has definitely gone down – as has their service life – while the cost of ink and toner have gone up, again roughly double what they were ten years ago. A ream of paper now costs more than twice what it did ten years ago. My work boots have increased more modestly; they cost only 53% more than they did ten years ago.

Now, one of the ways economist discount/minimize increased prices is by factoring in “product improvement,” which definitely makes sense in some areas. There’s no doubt that cars are safer than ever before, but that improvement comes at the much higher cost for repairs of dents and dings. Several years ago, my daughter’s thick-skulled canine Woofie [short for Beowoof (intentional name pun)] side-swiped the front quarter-panel of an almost parked Volvo moving at perhaps 2 mph. Woofie got a headache and lived happily on for several more years. The damage he inflicted on the nearly new Volvo was close to $1500. Crumple zones don’t care what hits them. I also seriously doubt that this kind of cost, which certainly drives up the costs of maintaining a vehicle – and the cost of insurance – is accurately factored into inflation calculations.

While I really can’t discern any “improvements” in paper, shirts, boots, and filing cabinets, as a former economist, I can certainly note, while not exactly appreciating, the ingenuity of government economists in measuring inflation rates, in what I personally believe is a statistical con game.

Apparently the FBI has just released a report on mass shootings, covering the last fourteen years. According to the news reports I’ve seen, for the first seven years, “mass” shooting incidents in the United States hovered around and averaged six per year, while over the last seven, they’ve averaged sixteen per year. While correlation does not prove causation, it is interesting to note that the increase in mass shootings does track rather closely the Great Recession from which we have not yet fully emerged. That is, business profits, dividends, and executive compensation have more than recovered, but employment and the salaries and earnings of everyone else have not. Theoretically, inflation has only increased by something like 18% over the last seven years, but for a large percentage of American workers, wages and salaries have not kept pace, and many are making far less than they did seven years ago. Many of those fortunate enough to hold their income levels or even get modest increases are faced with far heavier workloads… with no apparent relief in sight.

Another source of frustration, or pressure, if not both, is our “everyone-is-available-all-the-time” electronic communications system, where bosses and colleagues seem to want continual answers and updates.

Then there are the feelings of discrimination… and, no matter what anyone claims, racial, sexual, gender, and economic discrimination do exist. Add to that the feeling that the discrimination has gone on long enough, and that fuels anger even more.

There’s also another form of discrimination that is on the rise – and that’s the preference by employers for credentials, such as degrees, rather than experience or actual ability to do the job. Credentials don’t always mean ability, but any employer who picks greater ability with lower official credentials over “higher” credentials risks a lawsuit… and that’s frustration for both those with greater real-world ability and for perceptive employers.

Another source of frustration, I’m convinced, is the increasing tendency of American society, and perhaps many other more societies, to focus on instant gratification. The problem there is that some things cannot be obtained “instantly.” Fast food, instant internet access to entertainment of choice, overnight deliveries of goods – those are possible. Obtaining the skills to be a successful doctor, engineer, classical singer or pianist, or even a professional athlete takes time and a great deal of just plain hard work. Too many young people have never had the experience of learning through hard work, especially for any length of time… and all too many get frustrated when finally confronted with that necessity and they’re told that their efforts and their level of achievement are not yet acceptable. A significant percentage get angry, as if it’s the fault of the employer or the college professor that they can’t instantly master the skill in question… and some actually place all the blame on employer or professor.

Then add the growing and often crushing burden of student debt for recent college and professional graduates, some of whom can’t find jobs with enough pay to cover their loan payments.

Now…obviously, most people who feel these sorts of frustrations, and others I haven’t even touched on, don’t go out and shoot people, but I suspect that there are hundreds, if not thousands who’ve wished they could.

Meanwhile…

Over the last several weeks, my wife the university professor has been deluged with various new and additional academic requirements, touted by the administration as “improvements.” From my past, if limited, three years of teaching at the collegiate level and having watched my wife do it for almost twenty-five years, I’m convinced that absolutely none of these improvements have anything to do with improving teaching.

First was the requirement for rubrics in student syllabi. For those unfamiliar with rubrics, while the dictionary definition states that a rubric is a traditionally a heading or brief direction usually printed in red, in education a rubric has become an explanation for why something is required. At the collegiate level student syllabi used to be fairly short documents stating the course objectives, the assignments required to be read and by when; the dates for tests, and when papers, projects, performances were due; the grading policies and on what the grades were based. Now, the typical student syllabus runs fifteen to thirty pages. A sample “new” syllabus, incorporating the recommended rubrics, developed by the associate provost last year ran to almost sixty pages. Some students don’t even read that much in assigned readings, and many don’t even read the current syllabi. Exactly how is this near-contractual, rubric-laden syllabus, filled with the required extensive legalese, going to improve teaching or learning? It’s certainly going to require scores of additional hours on the part of professors, hours having little to do with improving the course or their teaching. What it does do is attempt to reduce the university’s legal exposure and shift it, as much as possible, to the individual teacher, especially if he or she doesn’t have a “contractual” syllabus.

The next bureaucratic assignment was to revamp all course descriptions and to modify all syllabi to incorporate ELOs, otherwise known as “educational learning outcomes,” in a format consistent with a pilot computer assessment program not yet used by any other university in the state. The format must be consistent in all fields of study, whether hard sciences, languages, art, music, physical education, business, pre-med, or economics, essentially attempting to shoehorn all disciplines into the same format and standards.

The latest pronouncement was that all documentation for professional evaluation will begin to be required in electronic format, PDF to be precise, in order to create greater efficiencies and reduce paper use. In addition, all job applications and supporting documentation must be electronic. Even as a tenured full professor, my wife is required to provide extensive documentation of her achievements annually, but the problem here is two-fold. First, most of that documentation exists in paper format and much of it will for years to come. This requires scanning and file conversion, plus learning additional computer programming skills, which is far more cumbersome and time consuming than making a simple paper copy. Second, since most senior faculty are also on tenure and promotion committees, when they review junior faculty for tenure and promotion, they have to read literally hundreds if not thousands of pages of documentation, documents that are virtually unintelligible on anything but either hard-copy paper or a full-sized computer screen. In the past, most professors would take the then-paper portfolios home and read them there, rather than stay late into the evening at their offices. Now, they’ll definitely have to stay, or print out paper copies for convenience. Even with the internet and WI-FI, trying to access the university computer system from off-campus is a tiresome and often frustrating experience.

From what I’ve observed, all of this, along with dozens of other smaller bureaucratic changes, has little to do with improving teaching, but more with bureaucratic ass-covering for the administrators. It’s all about making things easier and more efficient for the administrators. All of this paperwork – or the digital equivalent – does little to improve teaching, and just puts more work on the professors.

Interestingly enough, at least theoretically, administrators are supposed to facilitate making teaching better and to remove those barriers to better teaching, instead of imposing more non-teaching duties and requirements. Also, again theoretically, universities are supposed to be about teaching. So why are there more administrators, clerical staff, and athletic staff [some 57% of the total] among the 750 full-time employees than there are professors and full-time lecturers [43%]? Or, as my wife puts it, what does filling out endless forms about what she does and how she does it have to do with excellence in teaching? Especially when these bureaucratic requirements take so much time from preparation and teaching?

Or am I missing something?

Perhaps one of the most infuriating responses, especially when repeated day after day by students, subordinates, or someone hired to do a job, is “I know.” When a contractor tells a subcontractor that a line of bricks has been mortared in place crookedly, and the mason says, “I know,” the initial response of any contractor is probably, “If you know that, why in hell didn’t you fix it?” So, most likely is the reaction of a supervisor or employer when an employee responds to a correction with those same words.

My wife the professor, who teaches classical voice at the university, must hear that phrase a dozen times a day, because, almost uniformly, when she tells a student that the student has mispronounced a word [and no, in most classical singing, you don’t get to choose your pronunciation; there is just one correct pronunciation], failed to sing in rhythm, or sung off the pitch, the student almost invariably replies, “I know.”

Do people use that phrase because they don’t want to admit their ignorance? Don’t they understand that, if they admit that they know better, they’re really saying “I know I’m doing it wrong, but I didn’t want to put in the effort to do it right.”? Or that they don’t have the skill to do it right?

The bottom line is that if you “know” it, fix it… or ask for help fixing it.

There are any number of statements about numbers, including those that cite “lies, damned lies, and statistics,” which was a statement Mark Twain attributed to Disraeli, but which appears in none of Disraeli’s written statements. And then, there are statistics that are accurate, but which misrepresent when applied to smaller segments of whatever’s being characterized by those statistics.

Several weeks ago I was talking to my editor, who read me something from some publishing statistics that indicated that ebooks now represent about thirty percent of all book sales, but the rate of increase in ebook sales has supposedly slowed. After thinking about this for a while, I decided to analyze my own royalty statement [and given the way the figures are presented, it does take a certain amount of raw mathematical number crunching before one can analyze, because the figures are broken down book by book]. If I’m at all remotely representative of the F&SF field, that thirty percent number is way off for fantasy and science fiction books, since for my last royalty statement, sixty-five percent of my sales were in ebook format, and if one eliminates new releases the percentage is even higher.

In terms of revenue, especially for new releases, however, the story isn’t quite so clear. For new releases my sales in the first year are around sixty percent hardcover, and forty percent ebook. In addition, on average, I receive about sixty percent more for a hardcover than for an ebook – and that’s for the initial $14.99 ebook. So while ebooks are a good deal for buyers, even at the higher initial price, they’re anything but a good deal for the author in terms of new hardcover releases.

In the case of backlist books, though, the calculus reverses, especially in my case, because my backlist is so extensive that no bookstore, even the F&SF specialty stores, carries anywhere close to a significant percentage of my backlist, which means that readers can easily purchase ebook versions of books that are difficult, if not impossible, to obtain in print versions.

Generalizing from a sample of one is extremely risky, fraught with danger, and often highly inaccurate. Even a sample of seventy books [roughly the number of separate titles of mine in print – including omnibus editions] is an incredibly small sample, given the millions of books out there. And, on top of that, I have to admit that I’m probably not the average F&SF writer in terms of sales, because I have a pretty substantial backlist, and quite a few books on that backlist are hard to obtain in print format, which will pump up the ebook numbers to some degree. But other authors also have titles that are hard to find in print, and when my numbers come out at twice the supposed industry average, I have to suspect that what’s happening is that the sheer volume of cookbooks, how-to books, and other “genre” books that don’t lend themselves to ebook format or whose readers aren’t as interested in ebooks, for whatever reasons, are overwhelming fiction numbers, and especially F&SF numbers.

I don’t doubt the statistics, but I do doubt their applicability to fiction, and especially to F&SF, and that illustrates the danger of applying “industry-wide” statistics to a sub-set of an industry, because using correct, but misrepresentative statistics… well, that tends to fall into the category of statistics that Twain was describing.

Nonetheless, the numbers I’m seeing personally suggest that brick and mortar bookstores specializing in fiction are facing a very uphill struggle to survive… unless the present trends slow or change rather dramatically… or unless I’m incredibly unrepresentative.

One of the greatest addictions that’s ever struck a nation has engulfed the United States, and it’s making great inroads elsewhere in the world. It’s an addiction so powerful that it’s caused mothers to ignore and or neglect infants and small children, as well as fathers, if to a lesser degree, resulting in thousands of deaths, if not more. It costs businesses billions of dollars annually in lost work and pyramiding inefficiencies. It’s responsible for thousands of pedestrian and automobile accidents, and thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of injuries.

What is the cause of this addiction? The common everyday cellphone. In its addictive powers, it’s very similar to alcohol. Just as many people can do without alcohol or limit themselves to a few drinks, so can many cellphone users. But a significant proportion of American cellphone users can’t. They’re on the cellphone every moment that they can manage, either talking or texting.

You don’t think it’s an addiction? Just look at the faces of those are addicts. There are two kinds. One kind gets a rush when the cellphone rings or indicates a text. You can see their faces light up in pleasure, and they can’t wait. The other kind is the hard-core addict. Their faces don’t light up in pleasure when their cell rings because it so seldom rings or buzzes or tweets or barks – because they’re never off it. The worst cases clutch their electronic heroin in a death-grip, never letting go of it. They text all the time, in meetings, in concerts, in the car, on the bus, on the sidewalk or in hallways, so wrapped up in their electronic world that the real world around them ceases to exist, except as an inconvenience through which they must negotiate in order to experience their electronic communications fix. They’re not all that far from inhabiting the virtual world postulated by James Gunn in The Hedonist – first published back in 1955.

Not only does this addiction cause deaths, but it’s also eroding the structure of human society, or at the very least, changing it drastically as electronic connections take precedence over physical and familial connections. College students no longer talk to classmates they see in classes or on campus. They don’t even see them because they’re so wrapped up in their cellphones. Last year, my wife directed the western U.S. premiere of an opera by Michael Chang [Speed Dating Tonight] which featured a scene in which a dating couple never talk to each other, but communicate by texting even when they’re sitting across the table from each other. The older members of the audience were amused and appalled. The younger members were amused, but scarcely surprised. But when electronic addiction makes it into an opera, it’s a pretty good indication that it’s anything but rare.

And yet, for all of the evidence and all of the addictive behaviors produced by the cellphone, very few people seem to recognize or want to acknowledge that cellphones do create addictive behavior in a significant percentage of users. And that’s denial on a societal scale.