In the case of Brian Thompson’s murder, there’s been a decidedly strong reaction on both sides, and that clouds the underlying issues that led to his death.

According to all reports, Thompson was a devoted and dedicated husband and family man, and a respected and well-liked colleague by those in the health insurance field. The healthcare industry is clearly stunned by the public reaction and how many people viewed his death with little or no sympathy.

But the fact is that Thompson was also a cold-eyed, analytical, profit-maximizing executive who clearly had no difficulty making decisions and implementing programs and systems that devastated thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of families in order to maintain or increase corporate profit margins. During his tenure as President of United Healthcare, Thompson raised profits from $10 billion to $16 billion, a sixty percent increase in three years. During that period, UnitedHealthcare was rated the worst of all U.S. healthcare firms in denying claims, turning down 32% of all claims, twice the industry average of 16%. For this, he was paid over $10 million last year.

What I find disturbing is the “mainstream” news media’s emphasis on Thompson the family man and nice guy persona, who was unjustly murdered. I’m not condoning the murder or the murderer, who appears to personify anti-establishment zealotry, and represents, on the other side, the same lack of humanity that Thompson represented professionally in his time with United Healthcare.

Just because Thompson was a loving devoted family man in his personal life and a good professional colleague doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a cold-blooded bastard in designing, implementing, and using methodologies designed to deny healthcare to people who had already paid for what they believed was adequate coverage.

At least one media newscaster made a comment along the lines that Thompson was just doing his job, but what was his job? Was it to effectively fund the healthcare of millions of Americans so that they could receive proper medical treatment, or was it principally to increase the profits of United Healthcare? That 32% rejection rate and 60% profit increase strongly suggest that the health of United Healthcare’s Medicare Advantage and other patients came in a distant second place to increased profits.

And the healthcare insurance industry is stunned by the reaction to his murder?

Utah state legislators are “renowned” for talking out of both sides of their mouth. One of their proudest achievements is reducing state income taxes for four straight years, by more than a billion dollars. But what they’re not telling constituents and taxpayers is how little those tax cuts really mean… and what they actually cost.

For example, the latest tax cut was estimated to reduce the tax bill of Utah taxpayers by $167 million, which sounds significant, but isn’t. The lowest quintile of taxpayers would only get a $24 tax cut. Upper middleclass taxpayers, those making $200,000, would receive $174. In addition, Utah is one of only eight states to tax Social Security income.

In the meantime, the legislature just mandated a fifteen-million-dollar budget cut for the university (SUU) where my wife works and a hiring freeze, as well as comparable cuts for all state universities. Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz, a Republican, recently stated that, in addition to that cut, the Legislature was exploring cuts of around ten percent across all sixteen of the state’s public colleges and universities in 2025.

This might make some sense if enrollment were declining, but Utah is the only state in the union where non-immigrant population is growing, almost certainly because the Mormon faith continues to emphasize large families. In response, SUU’s enrollment grew by 1,000 students this school year (up to nearly 16,000), and total public university enrollment grew by over 8,500 students, one of the largest increases in years.

Yet the legislature is mandating that universities accommodate more students and provide more services with less funding. This is at a time when an increasing percentage of teaching employees are leaving the field because of comparatively low pay and increasing bureaucratic and administrative loads having nothing to do with teaching. One of the unmentioned side effects, also, is that the legislature mandated a 3.5% tuition increase for the 2024-2025 school year, so that students and their parents pay more (roughly $300 per student just this year ) while the state funds a smaller and smaller percentage of the costs of running the universities.

But the politicians continue to trumpet near-meaningless tax cuts.

The real question facing Democrats is whether they want to be a successful political party or whether they want to emphasize an ideology that most Americans believe is excessively liberal.

From what polls show and from what I’ve observed, most Democrats don’t fall into far left/woke mindset, but the far left tends to be far more active politically and socially than the more “mainstream” Democrats, and thus tends to have influence out of proportion to its actual numbers.

Recent poll analysis by The New York Times suggests that one of the reasons Kamala Harris lost was that something like seven million Democrats who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 did not vote in 2024. That alone wouldn’t account for her loss, but that combined with more liberal voters who oppose what they see as excessive support of trans/LBTG+ initiatives very well might. Nor did ads suggesting that wives hide their votes from their husbands help, since any woman so inclined didn’t need the ads, and any woman thinking about it would likely be worried that the ad would prompt inquiries by husbands and boyfriends.

Like it or not, a majority of Americans, for whatever reason, are leery of women running for the presidency, and the combination of a woman who was perceived as liberal was also a strong factor in the campaign.

The fact that the Democrats actually made a very slight gain in their numbers in the House of Representatives (if only by one member) at a time when they lost the presidency and the Senate suggests that Democrats who addressed the issues in their districts could be very successful, but that the national ticket had too many negatives.

Not that anyone is going to change their mind based on my observations.

I recently read a reader’s comment about Overcaptain, a statement that he wasn’t about to pay trade paperback prices for an ebook. And yes, the initial publication ebook price is $15.00, but the trade paperback price in roughly eight months will likely be around $21.00, if not more, since the U.S. is the largest importer of paper in the world and most of that comes from Canada. Now that Trump has declared he’s going to impose a 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico for all imports, I suspect any such tariff will increase the price of printed books.

Inflation is hard on everyone, and it prompts recollections of the past. I can certainly remember when eight-ounce bottles of Coke were a dime and you could get a hamburger and fries at McDonalds for a quarter. But back then, the minimum wage was seventy-five cents an hour.

In the real and present world, inflation isn’t going away. So long as Americans insist on not paying enough taxes to cover the costs of what we want (collectively) while complaining about the government “stuff” the other guys and gals want and bitching about who is and who isn’t paying enough taxes, and wanting someone else to pay for it, we’re going to have inflation.

Also, just because something costs more doesn’t mean that those who provide it are getting rich. What too many readers don’t understand is that publishing is a low profit industry. Legal secretaries in New York can make 30-40% more than a senior fiction editor. One long-time very senior and successful F&SF editor (with a Ph.D. in comparative medieval literature) I knew used his expertise to find undervalued rare books and resell them in order to make ends meet. Most authors can’t make a living off their writing. I worked long hours in D.C. for nearly 20 years after first getting published (while writing on the side and selling every novel I wrote) before I could live off what I made as a writer… and I’m one of the fortunate few who’s managed to do so for an extended period of time.

So, while I can reminisce about inexpensive Cokes and hamburgers, I can also remember classmates wearing braces from polio, acquaintances with vision damaged by measles, a swimmer I knew dying from an automobile accident before seatbelts were required, and a whole host of other recollections far less pleasant, most of which kinds of unpleasantness no longer occur because of government regulations.

But nostalgia about the past, anger about the rising costs of inflation, and blaming the rest of the world and imposing tariffs on ourselves are so much easier than actually dealing with the causes of that inflation.

One of the skills my wife the professor and her colleagues attempt to develop in her voice students is the ability to learn how to sing from sheet music. It’s not easy. It requires piano skills, the ability to sight-read music, the ability to pronounce foreign words (which they’re theoretically required to develop by using the international phonetic alphabet), working out the timing and breathing to fit their own voice, and a great deal of hard work. Most students resist doing the work. Instead, they find a UTube video of the piece and sing along until they think they’ve learned the piece.

Except… they haven’t. Many of them won’t even study the lyrics, even when the words are in English, at least until prompted, because they don’t even consider how they’re going to convey emotion, particularly in a foreign language, if they don’t understand the full meaning of the words.

That’s just the beginning. Even if they find a video sung by a truly great singer, it doesn’t that mean that particular version suits the student’s voice, especially if the student is young and the recorded singer is fully mature. It also doesn’t take into account that even good singers make mistakes, or the fact that even accurate copies are less vital and accurate than the original. Add to that that “copying” a range of singers will keep the student from truly developing their own voice.

And, of course, there’s the “small” problem that the student can’t learn music that someone else hasn’t already recorded, not to mention that not all recordings, especially off UTube, aren’t that good.

But “copying” is so much easier.

Unhappily, this tendency isn’t confined to would-be classical singers. All one has to do is listen to current pop singers. Until about twenty-five or thirty years ago, listeners could identify singers within a few bars. Now, the majority all sound the same.

The “copy culture” isn’t limited to music, either. There’s rough “copying” in writing as well. The advent of the computer, combined with the internet, has spawned widespread and persistent plagiarism. At the same time, I’m seeing more and more grammatical and technical errors in commercial and semi-commercial material appearing on the internet, suggesting a lack of basic technique.

One of the reasons why I wrote the first Recluce novel [The Magic of Recluce] was because all too many fantasy novels at that time were set in pseudo-medieval cultures and the magic systems were largely based on spells or tradition folk magic, and I didn’t feel like “copying.” That’s also why each of my fantasy series has a unique magic system.

But because the “copy culture” is far cheaper than good solid originality, it’s growing and invading everywhere. And what does that say about society?