The other day, I came across a reader review of one of my books, which described it as formulaic.  And I’d agree… and I’d also call the reader who wrote the review either lazy or an idiot, if not both.  All books are formulaic, at least all books that more than a handful of people want to read.  Books require the formula of passable style and grammar, although better style and grammar are definitely a plus.  They require the formula of a plot of some sort.  They require the formula of some sort of resolution. In short, a book is an organized formula for providing entertainment or information, and possibly a great deal more.

So what do lazy idiots who use the term “formulaic” really mean?  According to A Handbook to Literature, “formulaic” is a term “applied to a work that relies excessively on set patterns of plot, character, sentiment, and language.”  The problem with this definition is that all fiction relies on patterns of plot, character, sentiment, and language, and that there is no standard for defining “excessively,” except in the mind of the reader or reviewer.

As a writer, once I’ve set the parameters of a story, I try to make the systems and the characters true to themselves, if you will.  The magic systems or technology are consistent throughout.  The characters develop more as the story progresses, but those developments are a result of who they are and what happens to them. This, frankly, creates a problem for some readers, because people behave like people.  They seldom do strange things, and when they do, it’s for very good and logical reasons, at least to the character in question, and much of what shock there is in what I write comes from characters taking situations and abilities to their logical ends in order to accomplish what they feel is necessary. Formulaic?  I don’t think so, because I don’t find it “excessive,” and most of my readers don’t seem to… or if they do, they like that kind of order and organization.

Part of determining what is “excessive” is strictly a matter of personal taste.  While technically I think George R. R. Martin is a good writer, I find his use of violence and brutality excessive, and I could claim that his best-selling series is “formulaic” on those grounds.  The same could be said of Piers Anthony and his Xanth books, given the incredible overuse of puns.  And I, or any other well-informed reader, could make a similar case for any number of well-known and even critically acclaimed writers.

As in the case in many instances of comments about books, the use of the term “formulaic” may reveal far more about the reader or reviewer who uses the term than about the book being reviewed because, as I said at the beginning of  this commentary, in the broadest sense of the word, all books are formulaic.

Last week the Utah congressional delegation all affirmed that they would be true to their principles and oppose any tax increase for anyone, rich or poor. That got me to thinking, as such sweeping generalizations often do.  Over the years, there’s been a current of approval, in commentary and even in popular song, for people who have insisted on being true to their principles.  I have a problem with this.

In 1861, the leaders of the Confederacy decided to be true to their principles, those of states’ rights embodying the idea that states had the right to hold people of color in slavery and to buy and sell them as property. Following those principles, they led their states into secession.  Earlier, the Catholic Church held to the principle that torturing and killing people to “redeem their souls,” and then officials of the Anglican Church retaliated in various ways based on various principles. Then there was this fellow by the name of Adolf Hitler, whose principles included the idea that people who weren’t of Ayran genetic heritage were inferior, especially Semitic peoples, particularly the Jews, and that ethnic cleansing and mass extermination were principled.  He was certainly true to his principles to the end, even using railroads and troops to continue killing Jews when they could have been used to fight against the allies invading the lands he had earlier conquered.

I may just be an iconoclast, but I guess I just don’t see much virtue in being true to principles that are either suspect – or wrong.  Now… I know, “wrong” is a judgment on my part, but we do have to make judgments in life.  The problem, of course, is determining a moral basis for such judgments, and that gets into a detailed discussion that has consumed much time and effort, both on this blog and throughout human history.  Still, there are some areas of consensus, such as the fact that human slavery is wrong and that killing people solely because of their religious beliefs is as well… and there are certainly others. Likewise, there are the cases where valid moral values clash – which is what makes the abortion debate so thorny [if human life is sacred, and the mother will die without having an abortion, how does one choose without destroying one “sacred life”?].

In the pending “fiscal cliff” political situation, one side’s principles state that “rich” people should pay more – or at least they shouldn’t pay lower effective tax rates – than poor and middle class families because the society in which they live has allowed them to receive more.  The other side’s principles state that, in effect, that tax rates shouldn’t be increased on just those who make more.  Both sides are insisting on being true to their principles while the country faces a possible return of recession if the issue isn’t resolved and long-term financial crises if the overhanging issue of excessive deficit spending isn’t resolved.

Perhaps I’m just being a curmudgeon, but I don’t see much moral value in either side “being true to their principles,” particularly since both sets of principles being touted are flawed.

Why do people vote the way they do… and believe what they do?  A growing number of studies show a link between attitudes linked to heredity and political beliefs.  The issue has gotten hot enough that one U.S. congressman spearheaded an amendment to the National Science Foundation budget last May to cut a billion dollars. While the amendment failed, Congressman Jeff Flake’s second amendment to the NSF budget – one that banned any NSF funding of political science research – did pass, because Flake did not want the NSF funding research into the biological roots of political behavior.

According to a recent article in the British New Scientist, “there is a substantial body of data suggesting that conservatives and liberals really are different tribes, divided not by opinions so much as by temperament and even basic biology.”  Also interesting is the fact that the article and research were written by Americans and published in a British science magazine.  The article itself is comparatively even-handed, pointing out correctly that most research in the field is conducted by liberals and that there are difficulties with some studies.  But one of the underlying problems is that, by temperament and biology, the majority of scientists in most fields, excepting those involving engineering and directly related fields, tend to be “liberal” in outlook and politics.

All that said, more than 25 years of study indicate that political attitudes have a high degree of inheritability, and such studies include identical twins raised in totally different environments, who are far more likely to share political attitudes than do fraternal twins or genetically unrelated family members.  As a rule, but not invariably, conservatives are more likely to prefer people of their own ethnic background, straight people, and high-status groups.  Liberals are more comfortable than conservatives with those of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, as well as with members of ethnic or sexual minorities. Liberals tend to be more morally offended by inequality, while conservatives tend to be more morally offended by betrayals of the in-group, by disrespect for authority, and by signs of sexual or spiritual weakness or impurity.  These characteristics have been linked to anatomical differences in the size of various brain structures.  Conservatives have a higher need for certainty, while liberals tend to revel in mental challenges.

In this regard, I’ve always had the feeling that conservatives can’t find the truth because they’ve known it all along, whether it’s true or not, and liberals will never recognize it because they’re so involved in looking for the next thing that they’ll look right past it.

What is clear about all this research is that all of us are biologically inclined in a certain direction in what might be called our social outlook, some more so than others, whether that direction be conservative or liberal.  What is also true is that each of us does have the ability to examine those predilections… and to decide whether blindly following our feelings makes sense in any given situation or whether we need to examine what we feel more closely. Obviously, both outlooks are necessary in human society… or those with one inclination or the other would have been weeded out or marginalized, and given the near equal polarization in political outlooks in the United States, that hasn’t happened… and that means, again, blind insistence on doing either just the “conservative” thing or the “liberal” thing is counterproductive.  Working out a compromise is necessary.

Unfortunately, I don’t see many signs of this happening in our political situation here in the United States at the moment… and it’s something that needs to occur.  As a society, we can’t afford to follow blindly just one of the genetic predilections that evolved to make us successful hunter-gatherers. Nor can we turn our back on what science is revealing about who and what we are. Those are recipes for disaster in a high-tech complex world.

The “business model” has triumphed again.  Last Thursday was Thanksgiving, a holiday first officially celebrated in the entire United States on the last Thursday of November as a result of a Presidential proclamation of Abraham Lincoln in 1863, and then moved to the fourth Thursday of the month by Franklin Roosevelt, in order to give the country an economic lift. Little did Roosevelt know what he started.

This year, from Wal-Mart on – or up – retailers across the United States invaded Thanksgiving with “Black Friday” specials on Thanksgiving Day itself.  Oh, there were Wal-Mart employees protesting at hundreds of stores, but the shoppers largely ignored them and surged into stores, greedily grabbing whatever specials they could find.  From my antediluvian viewpoint, the invasion of Thanksgiving by rampant commercialism signifies, in both a metaphorical and practical sense, that the majority of Americans have become totally unaware of how fortunate we are as a society.  Can we not set aside a single day out of the entire year in which to consider and reflect on those aspects of life for which we are grateful?

Last year, at this time, I cited a short story by Frederick Pohl called “Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus,” published in 1956 and set in a future where the “Christmas season” begins in September, and I wondered how long it would be before Halloween and Christmas squeezed out Thanksgiving.  Based on the blizzard of ads in my newspapers – more than fifty separate ad sections – on Thanksgiving day itself and the media hype of Black Friday beginning on Thanksgiving, it appears as though the original purpose of Thanksgiving has already been all but lost to the “ecstasy of unbridled avarice,” to steal a quote from another Christmas staple.

Then again, perhaps people who cannot maintain a Thanksgiving tradition deserve exactly what they are getting from the businesses who push Black Friday – lots of cheap goods produced all too often in third world sweatshops by people who have little to thank anyone for, fewer and fewer good American jobs…and more than a few business leaders who insist that paying lower tax rates than their underpaid employees is necessary for jobs creation.

With the so-called fiscal financial cliff facing the United States government after December 31^st, there are likely to be those in the public calling for cuts in “non-productive” federal spending, and one of the perennial candidates is federal spending on basic research in any number of fields, particularly in areas such as solar power and expensive physics research. Some advocates of such cuts claim that the private sector, and in particular, the corporate world, can take up the slack, and some cite the failures in federal research choices, such as Solyndra, the solar power company that received a $535-million federal loan guarantee as part of the $787 billion economic stimulus package… and then went bankrupt.

In point of fact, there is a real distinction between basic scientific research and the follow-on development of a new scientific breakthrough into a practical product.  While the private sector can develop new products far more effectively than government can, the private sector is seldom willing to undertake the basic research necessary to make the breakthroughs from which such developments can be made… and the reason is simple.  The vast majority of basic research fails to make such a breakthrough.  Estimates of the failure rate range from 80% to 99.99%.

What is also overlooked is that negative results of research are positive.  They show approaches that will not work and often point the way to those that will.

Thomas Edison tried over 1,000 different substances before he was able to find one that would serve as the filament for a light bulb… and some sources claim it was closer to ten thousand.  Edison is quoted as saying, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”  Octave Chanute, the forgotten mentor of the Wright Brothers, listed hundreds of failed attempts to developed powered flying machines, as well as almost 60 detailed illustrations of different major serious attempts that failed before the Wright Brothers flew. More recently, Bill Gates pointed out that funding basic research naturally has a high failure rate, and that more than 90% of the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency’s projects will likely fail.  Gates went on to note that the U.S. government’s investment in energy research was woefully underfunded and called for a government investment of $16 billion per year into basic research to deliver energy innovation.

Even the one of the most profitable areas in return on research – the pharmaceutical industry – has staggering costs. According to Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, “The average length of time from target discovery to approval of a new drug currently averages about 13 years, the failure rate exceeds 95 percent, and the cost per successful drug exceeds $1 billion, after adjusting for all of the failures.”

The truth of the matter is that, first, the future economic health and physical well-being of the United States depend on continued extensive scientific research, research that a private sector dependent on short-term profitability largely cannot and will not make, and that, if government does not fund such research [and the education of those who will make the such breakthroughs, from whatever part of the globe they come from to be educated in the United States], scientific breakthroughs will be made in countries whose governments do fund that research… or not made at all.

Yet too many penny-wise and pound foolish politicians fail to see the difference between basic research and the subsequent development and exploitation.

Because I’m a writer, I do tend to judge people, to at least a certain extent, by the way in which they employ words, either spoken or written. And because my wife is a university professor, as is another professor temporarily residing with us, the subject does come up occasionally.  In addition, because Cedar City is a university town, we all know other professors and instructors. And… given all that, there is one subject about which all those we know in this field agree:  the vast majority of students matriculating at the university in the past few years are incapable of writing an essay test – about anything.  And most aren’t that much better at writing anything of any length, even with their computer and the internet to help, although some are adept at plagiarism, which they think of as cut and paste.

In the past, while there were some students who had problems with this kind of writing, most students could at least make an attempt that resembled an essay.  In the last two to three years, however, the situation has reversed itself, to the point that, in my wife’s current class, at least so far this semester, not a single student appears capable of writing a coherent essay test… or even a three-sentence short answer.

Mind you, this is despite the fact that the university has become more selective in admitting students, and that scores on the ACT and SAT are higher than ever. Of course, that might suggest that the ACT and the SAT have been dumbed down, but I don’t believe that.  I’ve talked to many of these students, and they’re intelligent.  They just can’t organize their thoughts in written form if they don’t have access to electronic aids, and even when they do, the results are usually pathetic.

Needless to say, this scares me… more than a little.

One of the great benefits of learning to write an essay on a test, or under pressure without computer back-up, is that to be successful, a writer has to organize words, facts, and concepts into a coherent and persuasive form with an underlying structure and logic… and these young people don’t seem to be able to do that.

Part of this is that they also have either great difficulty in remembering facts or no interest in doing so — or perhaps both – and it is difficult to write anything factual that is meaningful without a mental knowledge base.  The ramifications go far beyond writing, because without such a knowledge base, individuals have no factual internal framework by which they can judge the world around them, and their judgments and decisions become governed more and more by their emotional responses to what others have said or done most recently.  This phenomenon isn’t limited to the young, of course, but it appears to be more prevalent there.  How else can one explain the wide-spread lack of understanding about the number of political candidates who flip-flopped on their positions over the course of the last year – and how many people there were who claim that the “media” made it all up?

We’ve already forgotten that electronic books can be re-written without the knowledge of their users, and with a generation that is reading fewer and fewer print sources, and doesn’t seem to want to learn facts in a permanent way, how long will it be before whatever appears in their personal-media-electronica at the moment is the only reality there is to most people?

Or… have we already reached that point?

The day after the elections, Robert Murray, the owner and CEO of Murray Energy, the largest privately owned coal company in the United States, laid off  156 employees, claiming that the Obama administration was waging a “war on coal.” Murray offered a prayer with his announcement, part of which stated:

“The American people have made their choice. They have decided that America must change its course, away from the principals [sic] of our Founders. And, away from the idea of individual freedom and individual responsibility. Away from capitalism, economic responsibility, and personal acceptance.”

What makes this statement both ironic and hypocritical is that Murray Energy is hardly a pillar of responsibility. Since 2000, the Ohio EPA has cited Murray’s American Century and Powhatan coal mines for coal slurry leaks on seven occasions, twice for leaks that lasted days and turned more than 20 miles of Captina Creek black. Murray Energy also owns the Crandall Canyon Mine in Emery County, Utah, which the U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) fined $1.8 million for violations that directly contributed to the death of six miners in 2007.  What is worse is that the company ignored MSHA warnings that the operating conditions were unsafe.

All this shouldn’t be surprising, given that Murray Energy and its subsidiaries have one of the worst safety and environmental records in the mining industry. It also shouldn’t be terribly surprising that Robert Murray has been criticized widely for coercing employees and miners to attend a Romney fundraiser – without pay – and has spent years attacking EPA, OSHA, and MSHA for “overregulating” the coal industry.

What bothers me about Murray, and the Koch Brothers, and a number of other Republican industrialists who trumpet the need for free enterprise and less federal regulation is that they’re not talking about reducing bureaucratic nit-picking and regulations that don’t make sense, of which there are more than a few, but about basic environmental and safety regulations.  Murray clearly wants to build cheap slurry ponds, despite repeated failures of those ponds that have polluted streams and sent toxic wastes into water supplies.  He opposes regulations on dangerous forms of mining as a restriction on “free enterprise.”  He’s opposed dust control measures in mines, despite the fact that coal dust causes black lung disease.

In practice, “free enterprise” advocates like Murray want to be free to make money, regardless of the health and environmental costs they impose on others.  That’s not really “free enterprise,” because taxpayers shoulder much of the burden of cleaning up waste spills; other businesses suffer; the families of dead miners suffer greatly; and the government/taxpayers end up paying Social Security disability and Medicaid costs for workers whose health is destroyed by poor working conditions.  And of all of this, Murray and others like him seem to be unaware – or they feel that imposing such costs on others is their right in a “free enterprise” society.

So-called “free enterprise” isn’t.  No business enterprise is without costs, both internal and external, and the question is who pays those costs. Murray’s lay-off of employees is just another example of an egotistical and self-centered businessman who has no understanding of the costs his actions impose on others – nor does he care, except for his profitability, for all of his pious rhetoric [and poor grammar].

So… when you cite the need for free enterprise, think carefully about how free you want it to be… and who really pays for that “freedom.”

The election is over… and the change favors, clearly but not overwhelmingly, the President’s program [and not necessarily the Democratic agenda], despite any rhetoric from the right.  What is also clear, however, is that the American people expect both parties get to work and hammer out solutions, rather than standing on extremist rhetoric.  What support for that claim is there?  For one thing, in districts or states where the demographics weren’t overwhelmingly loaded on one side or another, the majority of true extremist candidates from either party who were seeking either re-election or election were unsuccessful.  For another, there were more women and minorities elected to the Senate and the House, reflecting a wider perspective than the “rich white male” viewpoint largely represented by the current Republican Party, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.  And at a time when the Republican Party advocated massive change and when most Americans have expressed concerns about the direction of the country, the Republicans actually lost seats in both the House and the Senate. That’s anything but a mandate for continuing obstinacy.  Yet Democrats must also realize that gaining a few seats and winning the Presidency by only a few million votes is also not a mandate for pressing radical agendas.

In practice, this means, if the President and Republican leaders are serious about bringing the nation together and resolving the fiscal cliff and other problems, that each party is going to have to give up some ground.  The Democrats are going to have to stop avoiding the fact that government cannot continue deficit spending indefinitely.  They should stop insisting that professionals who make $250,000 are “rich,” and they’re going to have to broaden the tax base to make sure that more of the “47 percent” who pay no federal income tax pay at least some tax, because, like it or not, Social Security and Medicare taxes don’t pay for federal government programs. They’re also going to have to take a hard look at existing federal programs and cut back or eliminate those that are wasteful or not critical. They’ll also have to realize that because the economy is still fragile, the necessary effective increases in taxes need to be gradual and minimal… and not targeted at any one group. They also need to realize that the Republicans are not wrong about everything, that such proposals as tort reform and a rethinking of the entire corporate tax structure are in fact vital and necessary.  They also need to recognize that “wealth” is not income, and that even though a tiny minority of Americans has too great a concentration of wealth, for overall continued economic prosperity, government cannot redress that balance through immediately slapping huge higher taxes on the “rich.”

The Republicans, on the other hand, need to realize, first of all, that “no” to everything is not a viable agenda for the good of the country.  They also need to understand that when too many people have too little income, they cannot make ends meet, let alone purchase goods and services that fuel business growth and jobs expansion.  They also going to have to swallow effective increases in taxes, whether through allowing rates to rise – but gradually – or through the elimination of excessive tax breaks – such as mortgage interest deductions on mansions and multiple homes and the elimination of favorable tax treatment of classes of income available only to the truly wealthy – such as carried interest for hedge fund traders and managers.

Both sides need to come to agreement on a viable immigration policy, since the current non-policy is essentially based on “don’t look and don’t do anything,” an approach that blocks the most valuable individuals from immigrating to the United States and ignores the discrimination and abuses imposed on the children of illegal immigrants… not to mention the enormous waste of government resources and human potential.  Again… simply putting up fences won’t work, especially once the economy recovers.

I’ve scarcely touched the surface of what needs to be addressed, but the same parameters apply to the other problems – practical and workable compromises are necessary, and standing on inflexible “principled” rhetoric will only worsen the problems.  Nor will promising “compromise” with rhetoric, but failing to offer substantive concessions to the other side.

None of this will be anything but tortuous, and painful…but it is necessary. Will it happen?  I have no idea… but I can point out the necessity to everyone I can… and hope.

I’ve spent much of the last week here in Canada – at the World Fantasy Convention – and have spent some enjoyable hours with Canadian colleagues and friends I don’t see too often, which is not surprising, since I don’t live exactly near Canada, and since too much traveling means far too little writing. It’s also been quite interesting to see the Canadian perspective on the coming U.S. election, including an observation in the Globe and Mail, one of the largest newspapers in Canada, that most Canadians don’t understand why the U.S. election is even close, because most Canadians can’t fathom why there is widespread popular support for Mitt Romney.

Part of that arises, I suspect, because Canadians don’t understand the furor over Obamacare, and there are doubtless other reasons I don’t know. I also suspect those in the United States who support Romney would claim that it’s because the Canadians are all “liberals,” but Canadian politics have trended toward the more conservative in recent years, and the current Canadian prime minister is from the conservative side of Canadian politics [admittedly less radically conservative than the American right wing, but clearly not liberal in most senses of the word]. Certainly there’s no doubt that Canadian banks were and remain far more conservative than are American banks, a fact explained by a Canadian friend’s tongue-in-cheek observation that the United States got more Irish immigrants, while Canada got more of the tight-fisted Scots.

One of the aspects of the Romney campaign that appears to ironically amuse many Canadians is how Americans seem to be blind to… or just ignore… Romney’s blatant flip-flops and vehement denials of proposals and statements that he himself made just months before. That doesn’t exactly surprise me because, over the years I’ve observed that a greater percentage of Canadians I’ve met tend to consider ethical questions somewhat more deeply than do the Americans I know who share similar backgrounds to their Canadian counterparts. You could also say that perhaps it’s because Canadians lag in “adjusting” to the “realities” of the twenty-first century, since their culture isn’t, at least yet, so highly permeated with reality shows, graphic violence, and endless tweets and twitters… and thus, they don’t seem to understand the necessity of continually changing their self-presentation to meet each new situation in the way in which Romney and all too many other American business and political leaders clearly excel.

Whatever the reason, there’s definitely a different outlook from north of the border.

Today, it appears that the schism between science and religion is greater than it’s ever been.  But why should this be so? Historically, a great many of the Founding Fathers were religious, yet believed that science and the pursuit of facts were not only in accord with a belief in a higher power, but were necessary elements of that belief.

Let’s start with the basics.  There either is a higher power – call that power God for lack of a better term – or there is not.  If God exists and created the universe, then that universe was created with a set of rules, because without consistent principles, all of the ordered matter we observe and measure, including us, would not exist. Since we and the universe do exist, there is an organizational pattern behind that creation. One of the goals of science is to discover that pattern, and at times, to replicate it.

As a matter of fact, that scientific search for the nature of God was the underlying theme of Robert Sawyer’s 2000 novel, Calculating God, in which scientifically advanced aliens visit Earth and attempt to enlist Earth scientists in their efforts to search out and verify the existence of God.  For true believers in a deity, wouldn’t this make sense?

Yet, in today’s United States, when scientific discovery goes against theology, the reaction from most religious bodies seems to reject the science rather than the theology.  Why?  Wouldn’t affirming a better understanding of God’s universe bring true believers closer to understanding and affirming their deity?  And wouldn’t denying what has been proven be in effect a denial of that deity?

If there is no God, isn’t believing in tenets put forth on behalf of that deity misguided at best, dishonest and hypocritical at worst, especially when those tenets go against physical evidence?  If there is “only” a “clockwork God,” as postulated by some, a higher power that created the universe and left it to its and our own devices, effectively the same issues still apply. In all three cases – God exists and remains involved in human affairs; God is only a clockwork God; and there is no God – insisting on a religious doctrine about the world and the universe which conflicts with what science has discovered and proved is unethical, and if God does indeed exist, denying science and what it has discovered is in fact denying God.

Any scientist worth the title will admit that there are things science cannot explain, or cannot fully explain, but there are many things which science has determined that are in conflict with some religious doctrines or the beliefs of some true believers.  Evolution does exist; the world and the universe are far older than 4400 B.C.;  human-caused global warming does exist; all the human population of the world except those on the ark was not destroyed by a global flood [although scientific inquiries do suggest that the Black Sea – not all that far from Mount Ararat – was created by a massive flood when the Mediterranean Sea broke through what is now the Hellespont].

Now… those of you who are believers and who deny any science that conflicts with those beliefs… just pray to your God… and explain to Him why you deny the way in which He has built the universe. Just tell Him that you reject those who are trying to understand the universe better – the scientists.  Go ahead… it shouldn’t be that hard.  You’ve been telling the rest of us that for years… Go on…tell God you deny the principles of His universe.

According to the latest issue of Scientific American, science has created high-paying and productive jobs in the United States, and science is the only way to create them in the future.  Certainly, both candidates for President seem to agree with the need for high-paying jobs… or at least pay lip service to the idea. And the Republicans, especially, are pounding on the need for more high-paying and productive jobs.

So why are so many Republicans so anti-science? Why do they deny evolution, global climate change, vaccination, the seriousness of air pollution, and other findings?  Early in 2011, Mitt  Romney made a speech in which indicated that it appeared global warming was human-caused, then quickly made an about-face after Rush Limbaugh blasted him.  John Huntsman, on the other hand, said that the Republican Party couldn’t “run from science,” and not quite coincidentally came in last among all the Republican candidates.

Science was one of the guiding principles of the Founding Fathers.  Benjamin Franklin was one of the world’s leading scientists of his time, although this aspect of his accomplishments often tends to be downplayed.  Thomas Jefferson believed deeply in scientific endeavor and even created his own inventions.  John Adams extolled the scientific method and the verification and use of facts.

So why has there been such a surge in anti-science sentiment in recent years?  And why especially among Republicans [not that Democrats are immune]?

Part of the anti-science movement may be based on the desire for quick and simple answers, and science doesn’t work that way.  Scientists set forth theories, and other scientists try to disprove them… and often they do… or often they discover that one theory is an approximation of the way something works, and a later theory gives a better explanation.  Science is, if you will, methodically messy, and this century’s “truth” often is later discredited.

For all of its messiness, science has a far better record in explaining both the world and how things work than does religion, and yet Republicans in ever-greater percentages are choosing religious rationales and explanations over science. Perhaps it’s the fact that a conservative mind-set values “certainty” in beliefs over something that changes… or maybe religion is more comforting.  Yet these same Republicans certainly wouldn’t turn in their car for a horse and buggy.  Nor would they prefer the medicine of 1850 to that of today, no matter how much they complain about the costs.  They embrace all the physical advantages of science while rejecting the methodology… and anything in science that conflicts with their religion or beliefs.

Not only is this philosophically hypocritical, but it’s a fundamental threat to the future of the United States. Interestingly enough, both candidates are campaigning for better education in the science-based disciplines of engineering, mathematics, and other hard sciences… and yet in state after state Republican lawmakers are passing anti-science laws… on the grounds, largely, that impartial science education undermines religious freedom.  John Adams would be appalled to discover that religious freedom requires the suppression of unpleasant facts and theories and that “religious” theories with no basis in fact must be given “equal time.”  He’d also be appalled to find that politicians are attempting to insert religious beliefs into law under the guise of freedom of religion.

And so should every American.

It’s more than fair, and accurate, to say that the coming Presidential election is about leadership, about who can best lead the United States out of the current less than favorable economic conditions and who can best deal with the myriad of international challenges facing the country.

That said, what exactly is leadership?  What shows leadership?  Is effective political campaigning and debating a good indication of leadership?

My wife made the intriguing but obvious observation that being the challenger in difficult times is far easier than being the incumbent, because all the challenger has to do is declare that times are hard and that they’re not getting any better quickly, and it’s the incumbent’s fault, and that the challenger can do better.  In essence, that was Obama’s advantage against McCain in the last election, especially since President Bush had just presided over the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, and since McCain was the Republican candidate and a long-time Republican officeholder. Now, Obama is no longer the challenger, but an incumbent who has come to realize, painfully, that inspiring words are not enough to get a divided Congress to act, and possibly that nothing is, and yet he is being held fully accountable.  That’s the nature of incumbency, even when the problems were not of the incumbent’s making, just as the financial meltdown was not totally of President Bush’s making.

What disturbed me about Obama’s first campaign and Romney’s and Obama’s present campaigns is the lack of substance and specifics.  Admittedly, Obama sticks closer to the facts, and he’s tied by his actions to more substance, not all of it good, but, as I’ve discussed earlier, and as Paul Ryan once again demonstrated in the Vice Presidential debate, and Romney has in all three debates so far, the Republicans are playing looser and faster with the facts than in any campaign I’ve witnessed [and that goes back some fifty years] and offer few if any specifics. Oh… I fully understand why this is so, and so does Obama, who avoids unpleasant specifics when he can.  Every single substantive proposal will create more opposition than support, because those who support it will be outweighed by the violence of those who oppose it.  In addition, substance takes time to present, and the media and the American mindset is geared to sound-bites, and almost no one wants to listen for very long.  So simple and practical sounding slogans trump substance.

The thirst for simplicity is also because we have the most complex government and technologically-based society in the history of the world, and simple and easy proposals invariably don’t work in practice in such a society, no matter what anyone claims.  Even when simple slogans are absolutely correct – such as, we can’t keep spending more than we have – no one really wants to look at the details, and the most successful candidate is almost invariably the one who manages to avoid dealing with details in a campaign.

So leadership appears to be measured by popular appeal, and popular appeal is determined by what people can understand and support – except that the vast majority doesn’t want to take the time to learn anything in depth about the problems and consider whether a candidate’s proposals actually make sense… or even whether a candidate has flip-flopped or contradicted himself or denied what he’s on the record as having said or done.  It all appears to be based on how impressive the man is compared to his opponent…and it helps to be taller as well.  Shorter candidates seldom win.

But does mastery of political campaigning translate into leadership? If you look at Warren Harding, Jimmy Carter, and the second President Bush, it doesn’t.  On the other hand, if you take Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan, it does.

Maybe a coin flip would be just as accurate.  It would certainly be cheaper, and it might remind the candidates that they don’t have a mandate to try to run roughshod over those who don’t agree with their simplistic slogans. Then again…

Charges have been flying back and forth between the Romney and Obama camps and their partisans, each charging the other with lying, while the most anyone might admit is to a “slight” exaggeration.  So how are we to tell who is “merely” exaggerating for political effect and who is the bald-faced liar?

That’s easy.  My candidate exaggerates just a little; yours is a bald-faced liar.

An exaggeration, perhaps?  From what I’ve heard and seen, not at all.

Romney denies that he said what he said, and his campaign calls it political maneuvering. Romney’s lying. On the other hand, Obama keeps declaring that he’s only going to tax the wealthy, when the specifics of both Obamacare tax increases and his own proposals will definitely have a significant impact on a significant share of the middle class, since some of those taxes kick in at incomes above $100,000, and a family making $100,000 may be “wealthy” in Plano, Texas, or Richfield, Utah, but that’s barely mid-middle class in New York, San Francisco, Honolulu and most of Hawaii, Los Angeles, the Washington, D.C., area, and a number of other places across the United States, totalling tens of millions of Americans. Now, none of those directly affected by his tax plans are in poverty, but to call them wealthy is not only inaccurate, but an out-and-out lie.  I could go on and attack both sides with more specifics, but that’s not the point.

Now, I could say “a pox on both your houses,” because both candidates are guilty of lying, and the only question is which one is the greater liar.  Unhappily, that’s really almost secondary to another question.

I’ve heard die-hard Republicans claim that Obama will destroy religious freedom, annihilate the free-enterprise system, gut our national defense, destroy American womanhood, make abortion free and legal at any time in a pregnancy, and, oh, yes, increase taxes on everyone. They’re right about the last one, because, regardless of Romney’s rhetoric, eventually taxes will have to increase no matter who is President.

Die-hard Democrats aren’t much better, claiming that Romney will create a nation ruled by the ultra-wealthy with wages and incomes falling for everyone else, that he’ll outsource as many jobs as possible to China to keep wages and costs low in the USA to profit the few and the wealthy, a charge not helped at all by David Siegel and the Koch brothers, raise healthcare costs for everyone, but especially to the poor and elderly to the point where few of them will be able to afford medical care, totally destroy a woman’s right to choose by making her carry any pregnancy to term, even if she was raped or the pregnancy will kill her, and, of course, cut taxes on the wealthy while eliminating most deductions to raise taxes on the middle class.

There are grains of truth in both sets of charges, and sometimes even more than that, but this campaign of either lies or reckless exaggeration – take your pick – is more than likely to leave a residue of anger and bitterness that will make actual solutions even more difficult than they’ve been in the past – and we know how few solutions have been considered in Congress, let alone enacted.  No matter who wins the Presidency, it’s highly unlikely that either political party is going to have a sufficient majority in both the House and the Senate to push through its agenda… or anything close.

That means, as I’ve said before, solutions will require compromise, but who will be willing to compromise after all the lies and scorched earth rhetoric?

Unless things change, this election may be the political equivalent for the winner of “the operation was successful… and the patient died”… the patient being the American semi-bipartisan representative democratic experiment created by the Founding Fathers.

Recently, there was yet another hullabaloo here in Utah over “cronyism,” this time in the administration of the state prison system, with charges and countercharges and the head of the prison system resolutely declaring that there was no favoritism, while the rank-and-file claim that standards of performance and conduct for the top administrators are far more lax than for most employees. That’s on top of continuing charges that the Republicans support “crony capitalism,” while they deny it and claim that free enterprise rewards the best and that Democrats who attack any form of capitalism are socialists or communists… or something like that.

The plain fact of the matter is that, in some form or another, cronyism exists everywhere in society, from rich Republicans to LGBT activists, from country clubs to welfare mothers.  It exists because human beings like to form groups and most groups are formed from people with at least one overriding shared interest, if not many.  The individuals in most such groups tend to think in the same fashion and the more insulated a group is, the more likely this is to occur.  As one example, a recent study whose results were noted in the Christian Science Monitor found that wealthy individuals who lived and interacted primarily with other wealthy individuals gave far less to charitable causes than did wealthy individuals who interacted with and had daily contact with those of poor and modest means.  In fact, the more insulated wealthy, on average, contributed 50% less as a percentage of their income than did the less “insulated” wealthy.  Another study found that men who had more than one daughter were markedly more sympathetic to so-called women’s issues, such as equal pay and equal employment opportunity, than were men with only a single daughter or no daughters.

None of this should be surprising.  Many groups follow their unspoken group consensus… and then are surprised to find, or even deny vehemently, that they are practicing cronyism.  They’ve never considered it.  It’s just the way they operate.

Generally, for example, here in Utah, the vast majority of politicians are members of the LDS faith, and they tend to pass laws which reflect the patriarchal nature of the culture.  There are continual charges of cronyism, some of which are definitely founded, such as the recent appointment of the director of the Board of Regents.  One of the finalist candidates, the director of the commission on higher education in a midwestern state, was asked to apply.  He had a Ph.D., had received his undergraduate degree and master’s degree from a state university in Utah and had taught at a Utah university for a number of years, then gone on to high level administrative positions in other states, where he served with distinction for some fifteen years.   When he arrived for his interview, one of the first questions he was asked was whether he’d ever been in Utah before – and he’d been requested to apply and had sent a complete resume which listed his Utah connections!  The legislature selected the former director of public affairs for the board, who has never taught full-time, never actually run any organization, and does not have an advanced degree.  From the news releases surrounding the appointment, it was fairly clear that these politicians weren’t even conscious of their cronyism.  They picked someone with whom they were comfortable, and seemed unaware of the fact that other qualifications just might have been better and/or more appropriate.

I’ve also seen the same sort of group-think on the other side, when the upper administration of a university in an eastern state was controlled by extraordinarily left-wing women, who seemed honestly to believe that no man under any circumstances could possibly be interested in anything but finding a way to dominate and oppress women and minorities.  While the male historical track record in dealing with women and minorities is nothing to brag about, this attitude seemed a bit excessive to me… and the result of the attitude was that, for a time, essentially no men were considered for higher positions and even women who didn’t buy into the mindset were marginalized… the result being what amounted to feminist cronyism.

From what I’ve seen, as illustrated by these two examples, a great deal of cronyism arises from people being uncomfortable with people who have different backgrounds and viewpoints, and, often, a lack of awareness that, at times, no unbiased interpretation of the facts would support their views.  The problem we as a nation face is that high technology allows groups greater self-selection, and that greater self-selection promotes a more monolithic view in each group, with the result that the groups operate as though their view is the only one that has any validity.

Might this just be another factor in the growing political and economic polarization in the United States?

Earlier this week, the Salt Lake Tribune published a story featuring a memorandum that David Siegel sent to all his employees, including those in Utah.  In that letter/memorandum, Siegel declared that, if income taxes and corporate taxes were raised by those elected to the Presidency and the Congress in the forthcoming election, he would be laying off employees.  Siegel is the owner of a number of resort oriented businesses in Utah, as well as the founder and chief executive of Westgate Resorts, the largest privately owned time-share company in the world.  He and his wife are also building the largest home in the United States, a 90,000 square foot edifice called Versailles.

In follow-up interviews, Siegel declared that his letters were not a threat, but a fact based on the economics of business.  Of course, speaking as someone who’s had a little training and experience in economics, politics, and business, the economics of business aren’t exactly that clear-cut. Some business owners might consider other factors besides having enough profit to build and operate the largest private home in America.  Warren Buffet, for example, one of the wealthiest men in the world, still lives in a very modest two-story house.  Bill Gates’ generosity with stock and stock options for his employees made those who worked for him in the beginning very well off.  And there are many other founders of businesses who don’t glory in saying, “You’re fired!”

Obviously, any business that loses money over a period of time [unless it’s subsidized in some fashion, either in the way in which Amazon subsidized its predatory ebook pricing or some other fashion] will eventually have to close, but as any honest accountant can tell you, there are innumerable ways to make a profitable business look unprofitable, as those in the movie industry well know. It’s one thing to claim that increased taxes will have a harmful effect on very small businesses – those, for example, with ten or fewer employees. But in a business with thousands of employees and millions, if not more, in profits?

Like it or not, all too many businesses treat employees solely as a necessary cost, rather than as a source of revenue and more business.  The Darden restaurant group, for example, is “experimenting” with requiring more employees to be part-time so that it won’t have to provide health benefits.  If this “experiment” is successful, other restaurant chains will follow in order to keep their profit levels up, but no one seems to ask what the overall economic cost will be.  When people have to spend more money on health care out of pocket or get sick or have the government and hospitals pick up the tab through unpaid emergency room visits, all this does is shift costs from the restaurants to everyone else.  It may be good “business economics,” but it’s lousy societal and national economics.

What all these “sharp” business economists are talking about, whether it’s complaining about environmental regulations restricting their pollution, being required to provide healthcare insurance, or paying corporate taxes, is essentially an effort to shift costs from their operations to everyone else in order to increase their bottom line… and what bothers me is that so many Americans seem ready to buy it.

In the end, everything costs.  The only question is who pays and how.  In a “truly” fair system, everyone would pay their share.  The problem is that those who are poor often cannot, and that means that, if they are to eat and have health care, for example, someone else must help.  In addition, many lower-paid employees don’t make enough to afford health insurance if it’s not provided in some fashion through their employer.  How such burdens are distributed, assuming the poor are not to be left to suffer and die, requires government intervention, since human history clearly indicates that not enough individuals will do so, or can do so, on their own initiative.  I don’t have a problem with that, provided the distribution of that burden has some semblance of thought and fairness.  What I do have a problem with is businesses and corporations who have negative impacts — financially, environmentally, and in other ways – citing “economics” as a justification for not even carrying their own weight, especially in cases where it’s clear that their founders and CEOs are living the extraordinarily high life.  Like David Siegel.

The other day, I overheard a news story extolling the virtues of yoga in combating stress.  That was fine.  Yoga has proved to be of great value for people in high stress conditions. What absolutely floored me was the section on elementary and secondary schoolchildren.  This is far from the first time I’ve run across the issue of stress in schools.  In fact, most of the college students at my wife’s university complain about how stressed they are.  One of the most common phrases is:  “I’m so stressed out.”

What I want to know is why they think their lives are so stressful. Are their lives really filled with that much stress?  Have they created that stress themselves because they’ve filled so much of their lives with the time-consuming trivialities, such as texting, Facebook, and video games, that they’ve left no time for the necessary?  Or have they been so coddled that any pressure on them to perform and meet any type of reasonable standards creates stress?

I know I’ll sound like an old fogy, but… the generation represented by their great grandparents faced the worst economic conditions in more than a century and the largest world-wide conflict in human history. The generations before that faced the First World War and, before that, the Civil War, the bloodiest war in U.S. history. In all these cases, most young men faced the pressure of being drafted and dying in battle.  Their grandparents faced the Vietnam conflict, largely fought by conscripted forces, plus wide-spread civil unrest with bloody riots across the nation… and far wider racial and cultural discrimination, not to mention gender/sexual discrimination,  than any of today’s young people can possibly imagine. 

In the past, although the youngsters of today don’t believe it or understand it, academic standards were either far more rigorous… or the local schools were truly terrible.  Until the 1950s, polio was an ever-present threat, and I still recall contemporaries of mine in wheelchairs and braces. Academic curricula were rigid and unyielding, and woe betide the student who was different, or ADHD, or developmentally challenged.  First year students in college faced opening assemblies where they were told that a large percentage of entering students would fail academically within a year.

Today’s students are told how wonderful they are.  They have extraordinarily high grade point averages, and almost none of them are failed.  College students today spend less than half the time studying  as students of their parents’ generation did, but there are more scholarships and far more financial aid than was available a generation earlier. Even if they drop out of school, they don’t face being drafted into a war where tens of thousands of conscripts die.   And yet… huge numbers of them have little motivation and no goals.  

And  they’re stressed out.

 Stress is and has always been the human condition.  Welcome to the real world.

Perhaps because I was always the boy who had trouble convincing anyone of anything, even when facts and events proved I was right, I’ve always been skeptical of the glib, polished, and oh-so-convincing fast talkers who also seemed so earnest.  Then, it might be because I lost more than one girl-friend to the type… or because I saw so many of them in politics over the twenty years I spent in Washington.

I’d be among the first to admit that Mitt Romney was smooth, polished, carefully passionate, and superficially convincing… and he scared the hell out of me.  President Obama showed the not-quite-controlled frustration of a man who understands that absolutely nothing under discussion was as simple as Romney made it sound, a man who knows that trying to point out the details that would undermine Romney would merely make Obama himself seem like a quibbler, especially given the insatiable American appetite for the easy and simplistic.

The problem with really good politicians – and psychopaths – is that they have no problem shedding inconvenient facts or even saying that they didn’t say what they did, and doing it so convincingly that most people believe them.  This first Presidential debate showed that Romney is a master of this, and Obama is not.  Obama can shade the truth with the best of them, but it’s clear that he’s uneasy in totally denying it.  Romney shows no such hesitation.

Before this debate, I gave Mitt the benefit of the doubt.  I thought that, even if I didn’t agree with him, he honestly believed in what he was saying, but when a man who has spent months pushing a five trillion dollar tax cut and cutting tax rates for everyone blatantly denies having done so on national television, he certainly disabused me of the notion that he was a true believer in magic tax cuts.  Then, yesterday, he denied what he said about the 47% of Americans, which, while unpopular, actually had some truth in it… and people are buying everything he says now, because, all of a sudden, he “looks and sounds Presidential.”   All this tells me that Mitt’s just like all the smooth talkers I’ve encountered over the years, and it’s pretty clear that the only true belief he has is that he’s so fitted for the job of President that he’ll say anything that will convince anyone.

Is Obama any better?  All I can say is that he was trying harder to stick closer to the truth, and that’s also what all the political fact-checkers have been saying and writing.

As for me… I still have trouble with those oh-so-earnest types who are so convincing… and care so little for the facts… all the facts, and not just those that support their view of the world.

What is it with young American men… or maybe with young men across the world? Everywhere I look – from on the street, to some businesses, to glimpses of television shows and movies, since I’ve been traveling recently – I see young men with what amounts to a two-to-three-day scruffy shadow beard.  I don’t have anything against mustaches or beards, especially if they’re sported by men on whom they look good, but facial hair on men is like extraordinarily long hair on women, and neither looks good on most members of both genders. And I do know, because I once had a handlebar mustache that, in pictures and in retrospect, looked truly awful. Still,,, if that’s what people want, that’s their choice.  

 But the scruffy look… what’s the point?  It’s not a beard.  It’s not a mustache, and on 99% of all men it just looks dirty.  Is it to prove that you’re a he-man?  Or that you don’t have to conform to social norms, or that you’re following the trends?  Or is it because you have sensitive skin and are too cheap to buy sensitive skin aftershave balm?

 Or is it a subconscious desire to be sort-of Middle East macho, but clean-shaven enough to still be identified as western? Or are you too lazy to shave regularly, but not willing to go for a full beard?  Or could it be that a beard wouldn’t look good on you, but you want the world to know that you actually could grow one?

 Or maybe I’m all wet and just missing the fact that three-day beards are irresistible aphrodesiacs?

Several days ago, poor Mitt Romney committed the unforgivable. He said something so obvious, so accurate, and so to the point that people, especially Obama and the leftists, are jumping all over him.  Now… as must be clear to most of my readers, I’m generally appalled at the Republican positions on many issues, but what I find ironic is when someone whose positions I dislike says something that is absolutely obvious… and gets roundly criticized.  I fully admit that I supported Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter, but I applauded when Carter made the obvious statement that, “Life is not fair,” for which the media and everyone condemned him.

What was it that Mitt said?  In effect, he was saying that he was never going to reach 47% of the population because they were getting benefits from the government for which they weren’t paying.  And he’s absolutely right.  When only 53% of Americans pay federal income taxes, then the 47% who don’t are getting all the federal programs paid for by those taxes for nothing.  Should they get such benefits?  Of course, some certainly should – such as the truly deserving poor, hungry children, and others that have a true need.

Some of the liberals have made the point that many of the “47%” do pay taxes, such as Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes, and they’re right. Many do pay those taxes.  But what the left wing ignores is that those taxes do not fund most government programs, and for all the hullabaloo about deficits, Medicare and Social Security are not yet contributing to those deficits.  The deficits are caused by outlays in programs funded by federal income taxes.

But the larger questions raised by Mitt’s offhand, if honest, comment, go beyond that. As some courageous Republicans and many Democrats have noted, Americans now pay the lowest percentage of their income in federal taxes in more than 70 years… and yet the Republicans, the Tea Party, and the Libertarians are all demanding that taxes be lowered more.  Given the current deficit, this isn’t possible without literally eliminating not only a wide range of existing federal programs, but also ALL tax deductions, and that includes the cherished mortgage interest tax deduction, the earned income tax credit, credit for college and education expenses, and certainly various subsidies and business tax deductions.

All that isn’t going to happen, not in the current political climate of “I deserve it and someone else should pay for it.”  Why not?  Because it would destroy too many people.  For example, although “only” about a quarter of U.S. homeowner mortgages are technically underwater [owing more than the house is worth], close to 50% are realistically underwater and unsalable in the current market because of the other additional costs required in selling a house and moving.  If Congress were to remove the mortgage interest tax break, that would make the situation even worse, because the vast majority of homeowners would have even less income to make mortgage payments.  Similar problems would arise with the elimination of the earned income credit, and others… and what politician is really going to have the nerve to eliminate deductions that will make things worse for their constituents… and the immediate economy, regardless of the possible long-term impact?

How did it come to this? That’s a chicken and egg question, but one thing is very clear.  Americans, both rich and poor, have a lot more “things” than they did sixty years ago. The average new house being built is almost three times the size of those built in 1950, even while family size has declined since the 1960s.  In 1950, the average family had one car; by 1995, the average family had more than two cars… again with a smaller number of people in the family.  Almost every statistic – except for food consumed at home – dealing with personal consumption shows a significant real increase over the last 60 years – at all levels of income.  Likewise, government programs have grown enormously since 1950.  The one thing that hasn’t kept pace on a per capita or per family basis is the amount of federal tax revenue, and, as I’ve pointed out time and time again, while the taxes of the wealthiest individuals – and to a lesser degree those of the working poor – have decreased proportionately far more than those of other groups, even massive increases in taxes on the wealthy won’t close that revenue gap.  And, remember, that “wealth” isn’t the same as income, so that under our current income tax system, income taxes can’t reach the huge amount of assets already held by the extraordinarily wealthy.

In essence, Americans as a whole have come to expect a combination of personal and government benefits greater that we are willing to pay for, and many of those increased personal benefits have come through deficit spending at the cost of more money in our pockets and less going to government. Even though most people will protest violently that this isn’t so… it is, and simple arithmetic proves it time after time.

So… whether I like Mitt Romney and his proposed policies or not, he was right about who’s paying for what [even if I disagree, which I do, with how much who should pay]… and especially who’s not.

But then, regardless of political party, no one likes embarrassing accurate facts.

What just about everyone loves about the Internet is its speed and convenience, and what’s not to like about instant messaging, near-instant email, Tweets and Twitter, and instant on-line shopping?  Yet there is a high and hidden cost… one far greater than most people realize or consider – and a number of these costs were detailed in a front-page story in The New York Times on September 23^rd, which outlined the results of a year-long study.

For example, on a world-wide basis, internet data centers, now numbering more than three million world-wide, “use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants.”   The United States alone accounts for about thirty percent of that.  One of the most staggering figures revealed by the study was that actual computer/server computations and data processing only took six to twelve percent of that electrical load.  The rest was merely to keep all systems “on alert” to handle intermittent peak loads and information surges.

It’s not that the technology to make data centers more efficient doesn’t exist.  It does.  The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center has refined its systems to achieve more than 90% efficiency, and a company called Power Assure markets a technology that enables commercial data centers to safely power down servers in off-peak periods.  Yet Silicon Valley Power – the utility that serves Santa Clara and Silicon Valley – has not been able to entice a single data center to adopt such energy saving programs.

Not only is the internet energy wasteful, but these data centers are significant sources of air pollution. In just the states of Virginia and Illinois more than a dozen data centers have been cited for violations of air quality standings.  In northern Virginia alone, Amazon – one of the larger operators of data centers – was cited with 24 violations over three years, including running diesel generators without a permit, and was fined over a quarter of a million dollars.

So why is there so much waste and unnecessary pollution caused by internet data centers?

One reason is that companies that live by the “instant” fear that failure to always have instant access will have an adverse impact on sales.  A corollary of that is that data center managers aren’t rewarded for saving on the electrical bill or reducing air pollution.  They’re rewarded for having data centers on-line and able to handle anything 99.999% of the time.  That’s another reason why Northern Virginia’s data centers together have back-up diesel generators with a combined output almost equal to a standard nuclear power plant… with air emissions far greater than most conventional power plants.

Another aspect of the problem, and one not touched by the Times’ investigation, is that this increasing electrical usage created by the internet puts additional strain on the national and regional power grids, an infrastructure that is already overstrained in many areas… and this is getting worse. For example, data centers in Northern Virginia now draw over 500 million watts of electricity and plans on the drawing boards suggest that load will double in five years.

Instant access… it’s wonderful… but can we really keep this up?