Now that bin Laden is dead, commentators, agitators, and even people of conscience have raised the question of whether the means of his death was “justice.”  Before rushing to judgment on this question, I’d like to raise another question: What exactly is justice?

There are more than just a few definitions of justice, but here are the ones most commonly cited: (1) the quality of being fair, even-handed, and impartial; (2) the rendering of what is due or merited; (3) conformity with the law; (4) the administration of the law; (5) the means by which the law is administered; (6) a judge; (7) the abstract principle by which right and wrong are determined.

Setting aside the definitions for a moment, what are the facts, in brief?  Bin Laden was the mastermind behind the Twin Towers bombing, the Pentagon bombing, as well as who truly knows how many other terrorist acts.  In his various speeches and communications, he fully acknowledged that.  So… there was no question of his guilt. By his acts he caused the deaths of well over 3,000 civilians in the United States who were not in any way threatening him.  Over the years, he continued to agitate and plan other activities in which hundreds if not thousands of Muslims were also killed.

Now… from what I’ve seen so far, those who are questioning whether his death was an act of justice and who are suggesting it was murder, since it appears that he was not holding a firearm at the time he was shot, are saying that he should have been captured and held for trial, claiming that under the laws of the United States such a trial would constitute justice.

Such claims certainly have a certain appeal and, shall we say, technical legal merit, but they carry with them an assumption that justice can only be meted out in one way and in one form, i.e., through the U.S. court system.  As a former Naval officer who had to once serve as the presiding officer in a special courts martial, I can attest that, as a nation, we have at least two accepted forms legal jurisprudence, with very different presumptions behind some of the proceedings.  French jurisprudence dates from the Napoleonic Code and also has different presumptions, as do justice systems in other nations.

The idea underlying all such systems is that “justice” is determined under a set of laws and proceedings meant to determine guilt or innocence and to mete out an appropriate punishment, under the authority of law, in the case of those found guilty. But such legal systems are only a mechanism for assuring that “justice” is done, and when the focus is placed strictly on the means, rather than the outcome of the process, as many Americans already know, often “justice” is not achieved.  If the “means” are always supreme, then justice is often unserved; but if the end is the only goal, any means can be justified.  How then does one determine exactly what is justice?

In the case of Osama bin Laden, there is absolutely no doubt that he was guilty of causing thousands of deaths.  The penalty for such scope of murders is usually death.  Bin Laden’s death was accomplished, either advertently or inadvertently, by Navy SEALS under the orders of the President of the United States, dutifully elected, and thus was accomplished by an authorized government agency, in general accord with the punishments meted out for murderers and serial killers by U.S. courts or military tribunal or courts martial.

Was this an “ideal” solution? No, it wasn’t.  But there are times when an emphasis on process and procedure are not necessarily possible. In this case, no one is hiding what was done, or generally how it was done, and the President has acknowledged that it was done under his orders. 

So… was bin Laden’s death justice?  Or does justice only occur when an exact set of procedures and processes are followed, regardless of the outcome?

One of the commenters on this blog actually raised this question, if not quite so bluntly, and the more I thought about it, the more it made sense, although there’s far more to the issue than mere labeling.

But I’ll start with politics and the question of why there are so few women in the U.S. Congress.  As I’ve noted in several earlier blogs, men, as do virtually all male primates, are more inclined and, in general, more interested and more skilled in political networking.  I suspect this has to do with genetics and natural selection, in that men operate in a constantly changing socio-political structure for single-minded goals, usually power and sex.  And if you don’t think political power isn’t related to sex for men, you have no idea of how politics operates.  Henry Kissinger once observed that power was the greatest aphrodisiac of all, and the exploits of more than a few U.S. Presidents tend to confirm that.  The American two-party system, in turn, is geared to simplify both networking and power-seeking; that wasn’t its original design or purpose, but its evolution from that design which tended to reflect early American society.

Women, on the other hand, tend to operate on two entirely different net-working styles, one a shallow communications network predominantly with other women and the other a far smaller and deeper network, primarily with women who are relatives and close friends.  Neither networking “style” is suited to the changing alliances and power plays of the kind of networking politics employed and enjoyed by the majority of men.  Women, once they’re mature, also tend to have a longer focus, most likely in part because child-rearing has historically and genetically been their role for almost all of human history, and politics, particularly at present, is incompatible with a longer focus.  It’s all about immediate gain, which is representative of male sexuality as well – get as many women as possible as much and as quickly as possible.

Female-oriented institutions, such as the nuclear family [and there is more than one variety of nuclear family], are “designed” for longer term stability, which is necessary if one wants children to survive, especially under optimal conditions.

Now… I’m not preaching here, or advocating, merely expanding the issue and question, and asking if there is a democratic/representative political structure that would be less structurally biased toward either gender.  I’m certainly not the first to make such a suggestion or observation.  Both Ursula K. LeGuin, in The Left Hand of Darkness, and Sherri Tepper, in a number of her books, have made similar observations, both directly and indirectly.  I will say that, outside of some feminist rhetoric, I haven’t seen anything that approaches a scholarly analysis of the issue [not that such may not exist, but if it does, I doubt if it’s been widely circulated].

Any thoughts?

Last week a poll revealed that 75% of the American people are dissatisfied with the U.S. Congress, and that’s one of the lowest figures for Congressional popularity in some time, if ever.  On the surface, one might conclude that, to improve its standing, all Congress has to do is to reverse course.  Alas, that would result in close to the same figures, I suspect.

Why?  Because, if you’ve been reading about all the Congressional shenanigans, you know that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Republican senators aren’t happy with the Democrat-controlled Senate or the President, and the Democrat-controlled Senate and Democratic representatives are close to furious with the Republican-controlled House. 

For all these ideological differences, there’s one absolute similarity between both sides in Congress.  Neither they, nor their supporters, really want to deal with the facts of the situation they face.  In reality, if they did, most of them feel they’d soon be voted out of office.  Both sides are wrong, and neither side can afford to admit it… or to compromise.

Everyone agrees in principle that the U.S. government can’t keep spending more than we collect in various tax revenues.  What they’re vigorously opposed on is where to make up the difference, either through spending cuts or increasing revenues.

We can’t keep increasing the amount the federal government spends on health care unless we increase taxes, and if we cut federal health care expenditures to avoid raising taxes, the cuts will be so deep that the poor, the lower middle class and working classes will suffer when they reach retirement age, if not before. The same problem exists in dealing with Social Security – unless future retirement ages are increased, but that will likely result in effective benefit cuts because, for a variety of reasons, many older workers retire before they’re eligible for full benefits.

There are other funding sources, of course, but one or another entrenched interest opposes them, and thus, so do the legislators beholden to those interests.  We’ve all seen the disasters, for example, created by the speculation in all sorts of financial transactions.  So what about a federal tax on securities and stock market transactions?  Not just on capital gains, but on the transaction itself, paid not by the investor but by the entity handling the trade.  Do you really think Goldman-Sachs would let Congress anywhere near that? Most agriculture subsidies go to corporate farmers?  Do we really need them?  Especially when the ethanol tax credit raises food prices?  Just try to cut those subsidies and revenue losses.

Over forty percent of all Americans pay no federal income taxes.  Just see what happens if any legislator suggests that they should.  What about getting rid of mortgage interest payment deductions for second homes?  Not first homes, but second homes, vacation homes, etc.?  Why should taxpayers get a tax deduction for a vacation home?  Suggest this, and the realtors and the bankers will be after any Congressman who does.

The list of possible fixes is long, and many of them would indeed work, but one thing is clear.  Everyone knows the system needs fixing, and no one wants to pay for it.  Each interest wants someone else to pay for it, and because that’s so, Congress can’t come up with a solution… and everyone’s mad at Congress, because each representative and Senator is indeed representing the interests of those who either elected them or contributed the funds that elected them.  But, for all the talk about reaching a solution, woe betide any representative who thinks about compromising with the other side.

Just ask former Senator Bob Bennett what a single vote toward a compromise does to a senator’s career.

Let me say from the onset that I am not the biggest fan or supporter of Barack Obama, and I certainly think he’s made more than his share of mistakes, both in leadership and in the tactics he’s used or failed to use in attempting to set and carry out his policies.  That said, I am absolutely and totally appalled by the continuing furor over whether he is a U.S. citizen and the fact that he felt compelled to use his own discretionary funds to send an attorney to Hawaii to obtain an official birth certificate from the state government there. 

Copies of his birth certification have been available online for years.  There are newspaper stories in the original Honolulu papers from fifty years ago announcing his birth in Hawaii.  Come on… those couldn’t have been planted fifty years ago.  Who back then even knew that the son of an 18 year old Kansas girl and a black Kenyan graduate student would be president of the United States? 

Now, I realize that such rational arguments will not suffice against the blind fanaticism of the most rabid “birther” types, because nothing penetrates fanaticism, whether that fanaticism is of the far right or the far left, or of Islamic fundamentalists or of hard-core IRA members or of the extreme Northern Ireland protestants.

But why do the rest of us buy into this “debate”?  Why do the supposedly “reputable” members of the press keep fanning the issue to keep it alive?  Why do theoretically intelligent politicians and candidates harp on it?  Because there’s nothing too low and base they won’t do to garner votes from the most ignorant and prejudiced of Americans?  And why is it even being discussed when the United States is involved in two or more wars, when the financial and economic future of the United States is on the line, and when the Congress will have to decide the future of what our government will be like in what it funds and what it does not, and who gets taxed how much and who doesn’t? 

Is it because no one wants to face the hard issues, including the issue of global warming, which was certainly a factor in the formation of the terrible tornadoes that just devastated Alabama?  Is it because all too many Americans don’t understand much of anything beyond their daily focus… or that they just don’t care? Because the press is incompetent in conveying what is at stake?  Or because most Americans don’t want to know that they can’t keep having all the programs that now exist without raising taxes and that they and their elected representatives must choose between fewer and less comprehensive programs and comparatively lower taxation [but likely some more taxes] and continuing all current programs with much  higher taxes, particularly on the middle class [since, as I’ve pointed out time and time again, taxing just the richest of the rich won’t raise the necessary revenue]?

Both the Republicans and the Democrats are effectively avoiding dealing with these issues and threatening, implicitly, if not explicitly, to shut down government and to destroy the credit-worthiness of the United States rather than back down – and the lead item in the news is that the president has been forced by media and popular pressure to provide – once again – an “official” copy of his birth certificate?  And now some of Obama’s black supporters are outraged that he did provide the certificate, while our “bread and circus” media hypes the whole situation.

If we aren’t the laughing stock of the world over this “birther” nonsense… we deserve to be.

Last week I read a review of the new Robert Redford movie, The Conspirator, and ran across the following: “It should be tense and thrilling, full of rich, powerful performances; instead it will make you feel like you should be taking notes in preparation for a high school exam.  And like the last film Redford directed, the terrorism drama Lions for Lambs, it’s painfully preachy and sanctimonious.”

Since I haven’t yet seen the film, I can’t comment on the first part of the above excerpt, but the second part suggests I might like the film, possibly because I thought Lions for Lambs was a good film.  I understand why many people didn’t like it, because it hits perilously close to all too many American illusions and self-deceptions, and given Redford’s choice of topic in The Conspirator [the trial of the boarding house owner who was suspected of helping Lincoln’s assassin], I suspect his latest movie is likely to do the same, if in a historical context.

The review, however, raises a legitimate question about all forms of “entertainment,” a question I’ll put in a satiric form, given my views of most of the most popular entertainment available today.  Does entertainment have to be largely, if not totally, devoid of meaningful content, depth, and questioning to be entertaining to the majority of today’s audiences and readers? 

Obviously, this question and the answer affect me personally and professionally, but they affect all writers, directors, and producers as well.  For years I’ve been criticized, as have Redford and a few others, by some readers for being “preachy,” and it’s no secret that books and movies that raise the kinds of questions we offer seldom, if ever, reach the top of the sales charts.  That’s understandable, and by itself, not a problem.  We all know the risks involved in attempting to make something deeper and more intellectually provocative. But what I’ve also noted is that more and more reviews are defining good entertainment in terms of, if you will, total detachment from depth or reality, and the movie producers are obliging them, such as with new releases that feature almost exclusively car chases, crashes, mayhem, sex, and violence.

Details of actual history, as are likely to be brought up in The Conspirator, can’t possibly compete in terms of instant visual appeal, but do all movies have to have the same kind of appeal, and do movies that don’t have such appeal have to be denigrated because they don’t?

One of the things [among many] that bothers me about the kind of reviews such as the one I’ve quoted above is the implication that anything with detail can’t be entertaining or engrossing, and that anything serious has to be “thrilling” to compensate for the seriousness, as if a quietly taut drama can’t be entertaining.  One of the most “sinister” movies I’ve ever seen shows no violence and contains no direct threats and yet reveals total social control of a family and a society where everyone is perfectly behaved.  It’s called The Age of Innocence.  Of course, just how sinister it appears to viewers depends entirely on their understanding of history and how societies work.

If you want dark and sinister, truly dark and sinister, review the backroom deals leading to the last financial meltdown – no car chases, no shootings, no bombs, no speeches, and no rabble-rousing.  Just men at desks pursuing profit and destroying millions of jobs, thousands of businesses, and creating uncounted suicides and broken homes.  But those details aren’t entertaining… and showing them in a movie would be far too preachy, and definitely not entertaining, or even exciting.

Give us zombies, the living dead, vampires, or car chases any day.  We just want pretend thrilling, not the truly sinister… and that’s fine, but enough of running down movies and books that deal with aspects of reality.  If reviewers don’t like them, they should just say that they’ll bore most people because they’ll make them think too much… that’s if they’ve got the nerve to say so.

As a result of a blog earlier this month and the paperback publication of Arms-Commander, I’ve received inquiries about and statements declaring that I’m a man-hater and pushing “feminist propaganda.”  Now, I’d be the first to admit that I’m fond of women. More than fond, in fact, but then, after having been married three times, if far more years to the lady whose companionship I now enjoy and appreciate than either of the other two, and having six daughters as well as two sons, it would be strange if I didn’t have a great interest in and appreciation of women.

That appreciation, however, has little to do with the facts of the situation on this planet and in the United States.  As I noted earlier, even in the relatively more “advantaged” United States, on average, working women make about 25% less than working men do.  The differential between men and women doing the same jobs ranges from almost nothing to as much as 40% at the higher corporate executive levels, but women’s pay remains, on average, significantly below that of men in the same or similar positions, as documented rather clearly in the current lawsuit against WalMart currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Although a recent article in the Wall Street Journal declared that working single men and women between ages 22 and 30 earned roughly the same amount, that purported equality doesn’t address the fact that there’s still a huge discrepancy between genders among married men and women and among older age groups. Despite the fact that women have had the ability to vote and run for public office in the United States for roughly a century, less than twenty percent of members of Congress are women. 

The situation was far worse in the past, and still is in many other nations across the world.  People tend to forget that less than two centuries ago, in the good old USA, married women could own no property, and all a woman’s clothes and her jewelry, even if provided by her family or earned or made by her, belonged to her husband.

Yet… when I write a book, such as The Soprano Sorceress or Arms-Commander, which depicts a woman in a fantasy world fighting against situations such as this, it’s called by some feminist propaganda or ultra-feminist. 

Come again?  I’ve depicted conditions similar to those which have existed for the majority of the time that human culture has existed on Earth… and I’ve had the nerve to suggest that, first, such conditions aren’t exactly fair to women, and, second, that a talented woman might just do better than a bunch of chauvinistic men. It’s not exactly my imagination that the three British rulers with the longest time on the throne were all women – Elizabeth I, Victoria, and Elizabeth II – and two of those three lived and ruled in a time when ruling wasn’t just ceremonial, and the times that they ruled were among those when Britain’s power was at a zenith.

It’s considered “realistic” when a novelist depicts sword-play and blood and gore in visceral detail, but unrealistic or propagandistic when he or she depicts sexual politics and traditional and historic gender roles in equally accurate detail?  But then, those who complain may really be suggesting that I’m pushing propaganda by suggesting that a woman can and would do better. 

As women take their places in more and more critical and important occupations, it’s becoming all too clear that very often they can do better than many of their male predecessors and peers, as incidentally that Wall Street Journal points out, and perhaps the fact that I occasionally depict that [as well as occasionally depict some truly competent and villainous women] troubles those readers who seem to think that the past gender roles of men and women were as matters should be and that I should not even attempt to suggest otherwise, either in science fiction or fantasy.

That’s feminist propaganda?

As described in the April 2^nd issue of The Economist, human beings are highly influenced, in fact, excessively over-influenced by designer labels.  Researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands did extensive research on the impact of designer labels on people and discovered, among other things, that people’s perceptions of others varied widely depending in the label/logo of the clothes they wore – even when the clothes were absolutely identical except for that label/logo. 

This influence ranged far beyond merely “rating” people.  When soliciting for charity, for example, volunteer solicitors were again clad in clothing identical except for logos, and those wearing “labeled” clothing received almost twice as much as those wearing garments without logos.  In various transaction games, those participants who wore designer labeled clothing were trusted with more than a third more in funds than those wearing unlabeled clothing.

Over the years, I’ve occasionally asked people why they’ll pay so much more for a “designer” outfit, and, invariably the response has been that they want the quality.  Yet I can recall, years ago, when Ralph Lauren created several items where the logo was not easily visible to others or in at least one case, not visible at all.  Those items were produced for less than a year because sales were so poor, even though the quality was the same as that of other Lauren clothing.  One customer even complained to my son, who was working at a Lauren outlet during his college years, that he didn’t want to buy any Lauren clothing if the label didn’t happen to be visible.

While there are people who can tell the difference between various styles and makes of clothes at a glance, studies have shown that the vast majority cannot – which may explain where the label/logo comes in. In fact, they even have trouble in discerning bad fake logos and labels. In the animal kingdom, such displays as the peacock’s tail essentially can’t be faked.  The healthier and stronger the peacock, the larger, brighter, and shinier the tail. An unhealthy peacock just can’t present a splendid tail. And the pea hens and other peacocks can tell the difference.

Humans clearly don’t have that ability.  According to the researchers, while people can pick up on human bodily physical clues fairly readily, they’re far less discerning when it comes to judging artifacts and clothing – which are stand-ins for wealth and power in a more affluent and technological society.

Could it just be that, in that inimitable human fashion, once again, humans are looking for the shortcut to making a decision?  Or is it a calculated decision because we know, deep down, that most others can’t really tell the difference between a good shirt and a great one, between a good one without a logo and a poorer one with a logo? 

That might mean, again, that we’re all about making decisions on superficialities.  And that we don’t want to admit it, even to ourselves.  But then, is that really anything new?

Over the past eighteen years, I’ve humorously noted that I live in the semi-sovereign theocracy of Deseret… and over the past week or so events in Utah have reminded me of that even more. The first of those events was the pronouncement by the LDS Prophet and Revelator that young men, particularly returned missionaries, needed to immediately settle down and get married, rather than enjoying the life of a single male.  Now… considering that something like 98% of these young men are 20 or 21 years old with either no college education at all or a year or so at most, and considering that almost all men anywhere marry someone their own age or younger, this pronouncement struck me  as a commandment with the direct impact of keeping women effectively barefoot and pregnant, since I’ve observed that, in the vast majority of young married couples in Utah, the woman forgoes or postpones education in order to support and educate her husband.

The Prophet also stated that men should treat their wives as equals, but no one seems to have remarked on the incredible condescension buried in this statement, because it carries the implication that women are not equal, but should be treated as such.

Interestingly enough, several other recent events and reports reinforce and illustrate this problem.  First, the Utah State Department of Education just sent a letter to a number of high schools declaring that a slide show that the state had developed on birth control methods “must not be used.”  Even more interesting was the fact that the slide show, in accord with Utah law, did not advocate using any form of birth control, but only factually presented various methods and emphasized that abstinence was the only 100% effective form of birth control and that condoms were not fully protective against many forms of sexually transmitted diseases.  That wasn’t enough for lawmakers and various activists, who successfully pressured the State Department of Education into withdrawing the presentation.

Third, in the wake of Equal Pay Day, figures from the Utah Department of Workforce Services revealed that Utah has: (1) one of the worst wage gaps between men and women’s wages; (2) the greatest gap between the wages of college-educated men and women of any state; and (3) is the only state in the union where the percentage of women graduating from college has declined compared to all other states.  Nationally, women earn 77% of what men earn; in Utah, the figure is 68%.   Nationally, men with bachelor’s degrees earn 1.3% more than women do.  In Utah, men with undergraduate degrees earn 6% more than do women with the same degrees; the state with the next worst discrepancy is Idaho, where men with a bachelor’s degree earn 2.7% more than do women with the same degree.  In 1980, Utah women graduated from college at a higher rate than women in all other states.  Although the graduation rate has increased somewhat, the increase has been so small that women in other states now graduate at a higher rate.

Another interesting fact is that Utah, for all of its cultural emphasis on marriage for life and eternity, actually has a divorce rate higher than the national average, and two-thirds of all Utah women with children work.  So… it’s not exactly as though all that support of husbands actually relieves Utah women of any financial burden or requirement to work.

And the Utah reaction to this?  Well… Senator Orrin Hatch opposed the Paycheck Fairness Act, designed to close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act, because civil penalties on employers who discriminated in paying women less were too high.  Also, the vast majority of the Utah legislature, as I noted in a previous blog, attempted to gut the Utah open records law and to remove references to the names and genders of state employees – which would have effectively made disclosure of pay discrepancies by gender impossible.

Now… if I have this all straight… young Utah men are supposed to get married before they finish their education, requiring their wives to support them and delay and forgo their education, and schools are not supposed to offer factual information to those young women about birth control, and… by the way, Utah has the highest birth rate in the nation and the greatest wage discrepancies between college-educated men and women… and the majority of Utah law-makers oppose both dissemination of birth control information and measures that would reduce pay discrimination against women.

Reporting straight from the semi-sovereign theocracy of Deseret…

The other day I read a technical article about music, a subject in which I have great interest, but less talent, except for appreciating it. According to the article in the May 2011 issue of Discover, a scientist investigating the structure of music used the technique of lossless compression [“which exploits repetition and redundancies in music to encode audio data in fewer bits without losing content”] to analyze the structure of musical compositions.  He discovered, amazingly, that pop music was far more complex than classical music.

Although no one has yet pointed it out, so far as I can tell, he was wrong.

His rationale was that when he used the lossless compression technique, popular compositions only shrank to sixty to seventy percent of their original volume, while compositions by Beethoven shrank to forty percent of their original volume.  From this, he deduced that, underneath the apparent complexity, classical music must be composed of simpler patterns,

Duhh!

All music is composed of, or built up from, simpler patterns, including pop music and rap.

What he apparently isn’t considering is that classical music pieces are far, far longer than pop pieces, and incorporate a complex structure that contains repetitions of motifs, restatement and re-orchestrations, etc., all of which can be encoded in such a way as to compress the music to a greater percentage than can be done with a simpler and shorter work of music.

By way of analogy, take the statement, “Mary had a little lamb.”  There’s no way to reduce that statement more without losing clarity or meaning.  You might be able to remove the “a,” and get a reduction to 94%.  Then take something like, “Sheep (Ovis aries) are quadrupedal, ruminant mammals typically kept as livestock. Like all ruminants, sheep are members of the order Artiodactyla, the even-toed ungulates. Although the name “sheep” applies to many species in the genus Ovis, in everyday usage it almost always refers to Ovis aries. Numbering a little over one billion, domestic sheep are also the most numerous species of sheep.”  The second passage can indeed be reduced in volume without losing meaning, possibly by twenty to thirty percent, but because it can be reduced in size more than the first statement does not mean it is simpler.

The scientist is question appears to be drawing the wrong conclusion from correct data, or using accurate but incomplete data.  This is, of course, an age-old human failing, which includes the Ptolemaic astronomers who created elaborate models of the solar system with the earth at the center.  When I was an economic market research analyst I saw this happen more than a few times, where senior executives would look at the data, which was as accurate as we could make it, and then draw unsupportable conclusions, like the senior executive who used reliability findings to support developing a technically superior compoment that no one would buy because the customers didn’t need a component that was reliable for 30 years when the product to which it was attached had a useful life of five years.

In the first case, that of the compression of music, long classical pieces can be compressed more than shorter popular pieces.  That’s a fact, but it’s not because the popular pieces are more unique, but because they’re shorter and simpler, another bit of data not considered by the scientist in question… and a reason why some scientists end up in trouble, because they don’t think beyond the scope of the problem they’ve addressed.

And… most likely, the fettered simplicity of pop music is exactly why it’s popular… because listeners don’t have to work out all the patterns.

They oppose openness in financial transactions, whether consciously or subconsciously, because such openness is the only way to stop financial cheating and the shenanigans that so drastically boosted their income… and still do. A recent article in New Scientist by Mark Buchanan [March 19, 2011] cites several studies on the matter, including one from the Quarterly Journal of Economics that makes the point that every possible regulatory “fix” can be gamed or evaded so long as the details of transactions are kept secret.  In short, the key factor that enabled investment banks to extort over a trillion dollars from the American people and the government and to pay and keep paying multi-million dollar bonuses to thousands of employees was not primarily inadequate regulation but secrecy.

In short, secrecy enables criminality. We all know this, I suspect, in our heart of hearts, because, except for psychopaths, we all behave far better when we’re under observation… or know that we could be.  It’s amazing how traffic slows to the speed limit when a highway patrol cruiser is sighted.

So why do we continue to insist on the details of our lives, particularly the financial details, being kept secret?  How long would discriminatory hiring and salary practices exist if everyone’s salary in a company happened to be public?  Is it any wonder that less wage discrimination tends to occur in the federal government, where salaries are pegged to known scales that are public?

And could all of those strange and discriminatory loans that fueled the last boom and bust have been made to the same extent and degree if the details would have had to have been made public?  I have my doubts.

Yet, for all this, I have no doubts that most people would cringe, if not do worse, if more openness were required by law – at least openness for them.  I recently mentioned the action of the Utah state legislature to effectively gut the Utah open records law, and I can now report, for those who have not followed this, that the public outcry was so great that the legislature repealed the very law they had passed the month before, a law which would have, in practical terms, exempted all electronic communications from the provisions of the open records law, among other things.  So it was very clear that the public believes that legislators should be publicly accountable.  Yet if such provisions were suggested for individuals, or for corporations, the howling would deafen everyone. 

Currently, the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a wage-discrimination case filed against WalMart, as a class action suit on behalf of female employees.  The suit alleges that WalMart systematically paid women less than men in exactly the same jobs with the same duties.  In their questions at the hearing, a number of justices raised the question about how difficult implementing any decision would be, suggesting that even the Supreme Court doesn’t want to get involved in making such records public, let alone making a ruling that could indeed lead to more openness for all corporations.

So often we talk about not wanting everyone to know our business, our income, etc., but the problem with this is that while our neighbors and our friends may not know… the government already knows, as do most corporations.

Perhaps it’s time that we know the same about them.

Is it my imagination, or are there more and more movies and books, not to mention television series, dealing with what I’d call either disasterism or grandiose triumphalism?  What I mean by disasterism is obvious – great and awful cataclysms, either natural or man-made, that threaten nations or the entire world or what the world is like in the wake of such disasters. Grandiose triumphalism – those are the stories whereby the single hero or the small band of heroes saves the world or the nation from evil aliens, or “bad guys” or cosmic disasters.

If you go back thirty years or longer, such movies were far fewer in number, and they generally were relegated to Saturday serials or grade B or below low-budget films. Now… they’re everywhere.

One possibility is, of course, that the incredible improvement in special effects and computer generated graphics allows film to capture/create events that simply couldn’t be filmed before, and that the appeal of such epics was always there, but could never be exploited because the industry lacked the ability to portray them in any even semi-realistic fashion.

Another possibility is that the audience has changed.  Certainly, immediately after WWII many Americans, indeed many across the world, had just experienced the greatest single global conflict the world had ever seen… and it just could be that they really didn’t want to see another, even in futuristic cinema, whereas today a comparatively small percentage of movie-goers in the western world has ever personally experienced that sort of disaster, and a cinematic disaster doesn’t recall past personal experiences. 

A third possibility is that the growth of disaster books and movies and their popularity in the U.S. is occurring because we don’t want to face the disasters we’ve already created – the ones that will take years and years of discipline and drudgery – and rather than consider them, we escape into the vast and unreal disasters and challenges, in essence saying, “What we’re facing isn’t as bad as what’s in this movie.”

But… for whatever reason, doesn’t the growth of all the disaster flicks and one man/one group against the aliens/world/nature/galaxy seem just a little creepy?

 There are times when I’d like to torture every geek product developer who has a great idea for “enhancing” an existing product, particularly if the enhancement consists of cramming more features into an existing product to the point where any errant keystroke or movement results in some form of disaster.

Over the past year, I’d been vaguely amused when my wife complained that documents that she’d typed on her office system vanished, leaving her with a blank page.  Surely, she had been exaggerating.  Still… there was a nagging feeling there… because she doesn’t invent things like that.

Last week, I was trying to write a story on my laptop, which features the latest [at least it was the latest when I bought the laptop some five months ago] version of Word.  I was happily typing along, occasionally swearing under my breath when somehow I brushed some key when I was typing an “h” or some such and found myself with a “search and replace” screen.  That was merely annoying, but I really got angry when… suddenly… I discovered that the entire story had vanished and I had somehow “saved” a blank page with exactly the same file name, effectively erasing many hours work.  After several minutes, I did find a previous “autosaved” version, minus the several hundred words I’d written in the past half hour.  I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what combination of keystroke shortcuts had created that disaster, but couldn’t.  So I went back to work on the story. But… the same replacement/erasure problem occurred twice more… and twice more I lost work and time.  I also suffered an extreme rise in blood pressure and a reinforcement of my existing prejudice against product developers who have adopted the “churn and burn” tactics of sleazy stockbrokers and investment bankers by coming out with newer and newer versions of basic software that only gets more expensive and more costly with few real improvements.

As I’ve noted in previous blogs, enhancements aren’t “enhancements” when they create more problems than they solve.  I shouldn’t have to be an absolutely perfect touch typist in order to avoid having such “handy enhancements” distracting me and destroying my work.  This sort of thing is exactly what happens when the perceived “need” for more “features” overwhelms functionality.  It’s also why I do my writing on older and more functional word processing platforms – when I can.

I’m certain some geek expert can probably explain why such features are good or even how I can disable them.  BUT… I shouldn’t have to disable features that can create such havoc.  Nor should I have to dig through autosaved files to reclaim something that vanished because an idiot developer wanted to add another enhancement to an already over-enhanced product.

Enough is enough… but that’s another old maxim that seems to have been forgotten or ignored in the social/cultural rush for “more” and “more.”

The other day I received an inquiry from a reader who wanted to know why all of the protagonists of my series had “special” talents.  The immediate answer that came to mind was a question: Aren’t all protagonists special in some way or another?  Then… I got to thinking about that question… and came to a different realization… which I’ll get to in a moment.

But… first, and no, this won’t be a bad commercial, there’s a related development occurring across the Atlantic where Stephen Hunt, the author of The Court of the Air and other books, is taking on the venerable BBC for slighting fantasy and science fiction, because the BBC refused even to mention it in a special on genre fiction – after already suggesting by example that it wasn’t literary fiction, either. 

What does this have to do with characters with special talents?  Everything.  The question my reader raised underlies a basic difference, in general terms, between what is called “genre” fiction and “literary” fiction. Certainly in every “genre” I’ve read, the protagonists, and usually the villains, have some skill or skills superior to the average person.  Holmes, as an obvious example, has superior deductive skills, and in virtually every mystery novel, the mystery gets solved.  In the vast majority of thrillers, the good guys triumph, usually through superior skills. 

In most fantasy, the protagonists also have superior skills or talents, whether it’s the ability with magic, weapons, tactics, foresight, etc.  In my own writing, I don’t make a distinction between magical talents and other skills, nor do any of my protagonists have skills that others in their worlds do not have.  I will grant that some of my protagonists have honed their skills to a greater degree than most others, but that’s true of every skill in every world.  There’s always someone who’s better than the others, and whoever that someone may be, that person is usually the one who’s worked the hardest at it. Of course, in everyday life, the best don’t always win, for various reasons, but, as writer, I prefer not to write, generally, about the skilled “good guys” who are overcome by the greater number of idiots [although I have].

Several years ago, there was a heated discussion about whether Michael Crichton wrote science fiction, and one writer [I don’t remember who] made the observation that Crichton didn’t, because in SF science can be used for good or evil, and Crichton only posits its use in his books as evil or destructive.  And that is predominantly the case in a high percentage of so-called literary or “mainstream” [which is anything but, if sales numbers are considered] fiction.  In fact, so-called literary fiction has a high percentage of novels about people who are not skilled and who fail in some ways, if not spectacularly in many ways. 

While F&SF does have novels like that, and I’m certain a number of them are good, the majority of F&SF still offers characters with special skills or talents and at least a crumb or two of hope.  As an author, I certainly fall into that category, since I’d rather offer my characters – and readers – the hope of success through hard work, trials, and skill.  More to the point of the question my reader raised, so do most F&SF writers, and from what I’ve read in other genres, so do the majority of “genre” fiction authors.  There’s no question that this aspect of genre fiction could be called “unrealistic,” at least by the numbers, because in real life there are far more “failures” than successes, but what the “literary realists” seem to overlook is that often those numerous small failures are the basis for longer-term great success.  Even if they aren’t, exactly what is the point of focusing on and dissecting failure time and time again?  People generally don’t learn from other people’s failures, and most people, again given the sales figures, prefer more optimistic entertainment.

The more optimistic outlook might be one of the biggest differences between “mainstream/literary” fiction and genre fiction… and why genre fiction outsells so-called literary fiction by a considerable amount… except for the literary fiction that wins prizes, but most of those sales come because of the prize and not because of the fiction.

The other day, for various reasons, I was sent on an errand to find some hard candy – something like sour balls.  So… I went to the WalMart.  Not a single form of hard candy except cinnamon disks, Life-Savers, and lemon drops.  I tried the grocery stores, as well as the convenience stores.  No better luck there.  I did find a range of old-fashioned hard candies – if not sour balls – in the local ranch supply store.

But this search got me to thinking.  When I was younger you could find a range of hard sugar candies in every grocery store… and not just Life-Savers and lemon drops.  Now… it’s as though every form of hard candy except lemon drops is an endangered species of confectionery. WalMart and the supermarkets have an entire double aisle of candies, ranging from a vast array of chocolate in some form or another to an even greater array of “soft” candies, such as “gummi” candies, chewy worms and animals of all sorts, gourmet jelly beans… I couldn’t even begin to describe all the varieties.  What they all have in common is that they’re soft, sweet, if also sometimes sour or hot, and easily chewed and swallowed in large numbers. 

After considering this considerable amplitude of soft confectioneries, I realized that, at least in some ways, the growing emphasis on softness and ease of consumption reflects to a large degree changes in the American life-style… as well as provides a supplementary reason for the increasing percentage of overweight and obese Americans.

Candies aren’t the only area where this has occurred.  When I was a boy, a Coke was a treat, and the small glass bottle was considered more than large enough. Although recently, some soft drink companies are offering small cans and bottles, the majority of soft drinks, both regular and diet, come in at least 12 ounce cans, if not 16 ounce bottles and larger.  The same is true of beer

As for candy, though, consider this.  It takes more time and effort to suck – or crunch – a hard sugar candy.  Sour balls and other hard sugar candies were designed to last. Hard candies are, I fear, a remnant of a time when sweets were not so common, and, for many in economic times that were harder than now [no matter what the media analysts say], they were a small luxury to be savored, not to be gulped down one right after the other in rapid succession.

And like our candies, we’ve gone from being hard and tough to softer and squishier… and a lot larger.

In the past, I’ve commented about the lack of appreciation and gratitude that permeates our society today, but there’s another factor behind that lack of appreciation that, frankly, I hadn’t considered.  What is it?  The magic mouse, of course… and I’m not talking about Disney creations.

The biggest unforeseen and unanticipated aspect of the computer and high-tech society is, I believe, the way in which it conceals the amount of work required to accomplish anything, not to mention the way in which it has shifted work. What exactly am I talking about?  Take a modern animated film, for example.  In the days before computer graphics, artists literally drew each cell, each slightly different from the previous cell, to show motion when filmed at the proper number of cells per minute.  The amount of physical work required was prodigious, even for a short film.  Today, a handful of people do the same amount of creation in a fraction of the time, and everyone takes it for granted, and dismisses it.  Except… there’s still a great deal of work being done, but much of it is behind the scenes, lying in the work in designing and building the computer hardware and software… and this is work that is seldom discussed, understood, or even appreciated. 

Once upon a time, I did economic analysis work, back before computers could crunch the numbers instantly and print out all the data, analyzed and presented under different scenarios.  Yet, more and more I find that too many “analysts” don’t even truly know what the numbers are or what they might portend… because they haven’t “worked” with those numbers.  They have no “feel” for the numbers, and because they don’t, they have no appreciation for those analysts who do… and have worked to understand what the numbers really mean.

Students, as I’ve noted more than once, more and more equate the ability to find information with the ability to understand what it means, and when asked what it means generally simply repeat what someone else, online, says what it means.  This has two negative impacts, first, the denigration of the effort needed to find and present information, because it’s available to them with a few clicks of the magic mouse, and, second, the reluctance/inability to think about that information in any deep way because of the myriad of interpretations already available.  Instead of thinking, they resort to magic mouse multiple choice among the options available on the internet.

Instead of appreciation for all these technological miracles, more and more there’s a range of feeling from acceptance to dissatisfaction, and, more important, it bleeds over into everything else.  There used to be employers who appreciated good work;  now employees are viewed more like computer aps and software – disposable and replaceable with the latest version.  Students and parents used to appreciate teachers; and teachers got notes of appreciation from students and parents.  Now all the teachers get is complaints. 

While there are many factors behind this change, the one that I don’t see being addressed is that of the “magic mouse,”  the idea that anything just takes a click of a mouse or a finger across a smart-phone to get the job done.  When everything is perceived as easy or almost effortless, there’s little reason to appreciate anything – and all too many Americans don’t.

Some time back, I came across an article buried in one of the journals I take.  I don’t even remember the title, but it was an analysis of why women haven’t made the strides that many expected in U.S. business, especially since we’re now entering the third generation since it’s been at least technically possible for a large number of women to be considered for corporate executive positions. The author(s) discovered that, in general, women were superior to their male counterparts in every aspect of business – except one, and that one “lack” made all the difference.  What was that “lack?”  The inability to build and maintain wide-spread and growing networks and alliances.  Further, the authors also noted that this lack was prevalent even when there were enough women in an organization to do exactly that.

In a way, considering the history of the species, none of this should come as a shock.  How else could a bunch of semi-intelligent monkeys end up as the top species in a world that featured, on an individual basis, species that were tougher, stronger, faster, and more deadly?

In more recent history, say the last 6,000 years or so, more than a few examples tend to support the “male groupie” theory.  With the possible exception of Christian Science, virtually every religion that has transcended “local cult” status has been launched and networked into prominence by men.  The vast majority, if not all cultures, feature interlocked male networks, beginning in early adolescence. And failure to go along with the group, especially those groups that function as gangs, can be anything from painful to deadly, as human history has demonstrated.  What seems to get overlooked about these group dynamics, however, is that they remain predominantly if not overwhelmingly male, and that personal and physical power rather than overall ability determines the group dynamics, whether it’s a local gang or an investment bank.  Study after study has shown that tall men get more respect and more money than shorter men who are more able, and even short men get more money than more able women.  The tall guys are also generally able to build and control wider networks.

As far as business goes, there are other trends.  One is setting up structures and office politics where, somehow, especially when there are few women, they almost invariably end up being positioned [by men] in a way that they’re competing against each other, or against the only man who’s on the outs. After more than thirty years in government, business, and academia, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this scenario.

Here in Utah, we’ve just witnessed another graphic example of what happens, even when you’re male, and you go against the group, or the good ol’ boys.  Late in 2008, the Bush Administration directed the Bureau of Land Management to make 149,000 acres in Utah available for oil and gas leasing, with an auction set on December 18^th, despite wide-spread environmental protests that the land was environmentally protected.  A 29 year old student, Tim DeChistopher, unable to even witness the auction unless he registered as a bidder, did in fact register as a bidder.  As a protest, he bid for parcels of land for which he could not pay, effectively keeping the lands from being auctioned off.  He was charged with fraud and disrupting the auction.  Subsequently, federal judges declared that the Bush Administration’s actions were illegal, and the Secretary of Interior withdrew the land from consideration on environmental grounds.  Even so, for two years, the federal prosecutors pursued the case, and last week the student was convicted of two felony counts for disrupting an auction declared illegal by the courts two years earlier.  Interestingly, enough, since the courts made the auction moot, in effect, Tim DeChristopher defrauded no one.  But he didn’t go along with the good ol’ boys, and he made them look bad.  That means he may go to jail, and he won’t be accompanied by any of the Bush Administration officials who also effectively violated federal law.

My favorite case along these lines was the conviction of Martha Stewart for inside trading.  She went to jail for using inside information in trying to make some extra cash on stock trades of her own stock of her own company paid for with her own money.  Should she have been convicted?  Absolutely – but why should she have gone to prison, when her offense involved mere thousands of dollars and when virtually no men convicted of the same type of offense, often involving far larger dollar sums, got much more than fines, probation, or slaps on the wrist?  And recently, more to the point, not a single man involved in all the offenses that caused the financial melt-down of the economy has been even charged, let alone convicted, or sent to prison.  Have any of the thousands who created fraudulent securities, based on fraudulent mortgages, with fraudulent ratings seen the inside of a courtroom?  No… the good ol’ boys of finance, with their interlocking networks, have sold the world a bill of goods that the financial crash was somehow an act of God [also male, in most theologies].

So Tim DeChristopher and Martha Stewart get convicted, and the executives of Goldman-Sachs get billions in bonuses.

In the end, little has changed in the last thirty years.  Despite the fact that women, according to the study, do everything better than men – except gang-mentality bullying of a slightly more refined nature, charitably called networking – they still only represent three percent of the chief executives of the thousand largest companies in the U.S., despite the fact women-run companies tend to perform better.

As for that study… I haven’t seen a single follow-up, or another mention of it or other studies along that line.  I can’t imagine why.

Over the past month, particularly in Wisconsin and a few other states, and on the federal level, there’s been a surfeit of political rhetoric about the need for fiscal responsibility, affordable public services, and the need to cut back on unnecessary government/public spending.  On the surface, and indeed on the balance sheets of many states and the federal government, this looks to be an accurate picture of the fiscal status of the United States, or at least of the governmental entities of the United States.

But just how accurate is that “picture,” especially if examined in a larger context?  And how did the states get into that predicament?

I can’t speak to all the states, but here in Utah, when times were flush, the state legislature cut tax rates, reducing revenue by more than 10 percent as well as cutting sales taxes rates on food.  Of course, once the economy turned sour, so did tax receipts, but it’s rather duplicitous to blame government for “wasteful” spending, especially when Utah has the lowest per capita spending on education of any state in the union.

Similar patterns seemed to have occurred in other states as well, and yet no one seems to be talking about returning tax rates to previous levels.

According to BLS statistics, the average American household spends about as much on entertainment, tobacco and alcohol as it spends on education [through its share of state and local taxes].  And if you add in fast food, the average household spends 60% more on  entertainment, tobacco, alcohol, and fast food than it does on public education [through state and local taxes].

In general, more than 90% of public primary and secondary education costs are paid through state and local taxes, including sales taxes.  And, on average, these taxes run 8-9% of family income. While much has been made of the fact that 47% of all U.S. households owe no federal income taxes, I’d be among the first to admit that figure is misleading.  The problem is that it’s so misleading that it clouds the issues.  In fact, less than 10% of all households pay no federal taxes, and the average federal tax rate for the “47 percent” runs about 14 percent, taking into account federal payroll taxes, federal gas and excise taxes, and other indirect federal taxes.

The problem here is that the same math applies to those in higher tax brackets as well, so that someone in the 30% federal tax bracket may well be paying 50% in taxes, after one factors in state, local, and sales taxes.  In practice, this tends to suggest that additional funds can’t be obtained easily from trying to hike taxes significantly from supposedly more affluent families who are “undertaxed.”

Yet…less than a one percent increase in state income tax receipts would resolve the budget problems of all but a handful of states [such as California, Arizona, and Nevada], and the monthly increase in state taxes would range from $20- $60 a month for most families, which, by the way, is about 10% of the average family’s monthly fast food bill.

So… is the question really about “affordability”… or is it about politics, and the fact that both politicians and Americans value fast food, entertainment, and other items they view as necessities more than they do education?

Once upon a time, there was an author who wrote a near-future science fiction thriller about a former military officer who had pioneered a technique for evaluating product placement in entertainment.  In case, you haven’t guessed, I was that author, and the book was Flash, which was published in September 2004.  Well… last week, Entertainment Weekly [on EW.com] published a story on the Brandcameo Product Placement Award Winners for 2010.  Yes, there’s actually a series of awards about the effectiveness of product placement in movies.

At the time I wrote Flash, product placement was just taking off, and I thought that, once various devices that let viewers flash past commercials on television become more common, product placement would be the advertising of the future… and it still is, because people are still watching television commercials, and, in fact, commercials are becoming a form of entertainment, at least for some viewers.  Where product placement has really taken off is in the movies.

The movie Iron Man 2 won the award for the most commercial placements, with 64 different placements, while Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps won the dubious award for the worse product placement.  And Apple won an award for the most appearances in hit films, with Apple products showing up in ten (or 30%) of the 33 films that were number one U.S. box office films in 2010, outstripping any other single brand for the year.  Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.

Obviously, I wasn’t as far ahead of events as I thought I was.  In fact, I was behind the times in some ways, because when I checked into the product placement awards, I discovered that they’ve been awarding them since 2001, three years before Flash was published, and two before I even wrote it – and I’d never even heard of the awards until this year.

On the other hand, I’m still ahead of the times in terms of what I postulated, because product placements haven’t yet replaced commercials on television and… so far, unlike my hero Jonat deVrai, no one has yet figured out the effectiveness of a given product placement.

Still… I’ll take being partly right any day, especially in regard to television and its commercialism.

Over the past few weeks, there have been two news stories whose juxtaposition has fascinated me, and I suspect they’re not the ones most readers would think of – the Wisconsin teachers’ protests [along with associated demonstrations across the country] and the hoopla surrounding the movie The Social Network, which claimed four Oscars at the recent Academy Awards ceremony.

What is so intriguing, horrifying to me, in fact, about this juxtaposition is the values behind each and the way they’re playing out in the press and politics.  The Social Network is “only” a movie, but it portrays how an egocentric and brilliant young man, with few ethics and less scruples forged a multi-billion dollar corporation by pandering to the need of Americans to essentially be recognized at any cost and by creating the social media structure that so many Americans, especially young Americans, seem unable to function without.  In practice, it’s about the glorification of self and the exaltation of emptiness within those who seem unable to function without continual affirmation by others.  What’s also disturbing about the film is the support it has received from the “younger” generation, who seem oblivious to the issues behind both Facebook and its creator.

The Wisconsin teachers’ protest is about a Republican governor who wants to remove rights and benefits from public school teachers because the state and the body politic cannot “afford” to continue to fund those benefits.  This is happening at a time when almost every public figure is talking about, or giving lip service to, the idea that the future of the United States depends on education. And yet, across the nation, as I’ve noted more than a few times, teachers get little recognition for what so many do right, and whenever budgets are tight, education gets cut.

So… on the one hand, our great media structure is suggesting even more rewards for the monument to self-promotion and inner emptiness represented by Facebook and other social networks and on the other a branch of our political structure is punishing those individuals who are supposed to be the ones on whom our future depends.

To me, this appears to be paradoxical and sends the message that Facebook is great, despite the fact that its social benefits are dubious and those who created it are even more so, and have made billions off such pandering, while a self-serving governor in Wisconsin and politicians, generally but not exclusively Republicans, across the nation are making political capital by castigating teachers for benefits and salaries they negotiated in legal and proper ways over generations… and firing thousands of them along the way.  Are all teachers and public employees perfect?  Heavens no!  But to glorify those who made money by capitalizing on vanity and by setting ethics aside while penalizing those who earn far, far less under far more onerous conditions certainly sends a message as to what we as a nation really think is important.

And yet, I haven’t seen anyone else point out this juxtaposition.  I wonder why not.

The other day, my wife, the opera singer and professor of voice was lamenting an all too common student problem – the fact that when singers, particularly young or inexperienced singers, get stressed, they tend to revert to their old bad habits and ways of singing. Most every voice teacher has to deal with this problem at one time or another, but I realized, perhaps far later than I should have, that it’s not just a problem for singers.  It’s a problem for societies and civilization.

It’s no accident that most social and legal progress tends to happen in times of prosperity, and that in times of economic and cultural stress, societies and individuals tend to regress.  For example, in World War II, the land of the free, the good old USA, got so fearful that the vast majority of individuals of Japanese descent on the west coast of the United States were packed off to relocation camps, their lands and property seized, much of it never restored.  Fear and stress made a hash out of the Bill of Rights and due process.  Under the fear of communism, Joe McCarthy ruined the lives of thousands of law-abiding Americans who made the mistake of believing in free speech during the early cold war.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, most Jews believed Germany was one of the most progressive countries and one that granted them the most freedom, but thirty years later, in the depths of the greatest depression, stress and fear gave rise to the Third Reich, and we all know where that led.

Under stress, most people revert to old habits we thought we’d left behind, and those habits usually aren’t the best, because the habits we’ve worked to leave behind are the ones we’re usually not too proud of… or the ones that have worked against us in school or in whatever occupation we’re involved in.  Unhappily, that also seems to be the case in societies as well.  Under stress, dictators and rulers who’ve been showing a softer side, revert to weapons and violence.  Under stress, Americans who’ve been talking about the need for better education collectively decide to cut billions from education, but not from farm and industry subsidies.  Under stress, political and religious discussions get uglier and less compromising and understanding.  Under stress…

I hope you get the idea.

The problem with all this is that the old bad habits of societies and individuals are even less productive and useful in poor political and economic times… and yet, time after time, generation after generation, this pattern repeats itself.

It’s not surprising, I suppose, given that my wife has trouble with students in this.  They can hear that they sing better with their new techniques.  They know it, and they can hear it… but when they get stressed, most of them subconsciously retreat to the “comfort” of their old poorer technique, and then they don’t do as well in recitals and competitions.  It’s only the very best who can surmount their fears and stresses.

So… which will we be?  The ones who surmount fear and stress and progress… or those who collapse under it and revert?