Let’s see. For the moment, Trump’s latest dictator-like act is to rip the east wing off the White House, supposedly the “people’s house,” without any authorization from Congress in order to add a palatial ballroom that may well dwarf the rest of the White House complex.

At roughly the same time, Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth attempted to require news reporters to sign an agreement not to print anything he hadn’t approved or to lose their Pentagon access. Virtually, all the reporters refused, turned in their press badges, and left the Pentagon. In return, Hegseth then issued an order to all military that no military personnel could speak to or provide any information to the press, Congress, or apparently anyone else that the Pentagon Office of Legislative Affairs had not approved.

The Trump Administration is citing a 1956 law as the basis by which the Secretary of State can unilaterally deport virtually anyone who the Secretary finds poses any danger to the U.S., without any recourse for an individual so cited, even if they’re a citizen or a legal immigrant.

Hegseth is ordering the Navy to attack and sink “suspicious” boats in the Caribbean before ascertaining what they really might be transporting.

Trump is still pressing for the Supreme Court to allow him to federalize state national guard units and to approve his “declaring war” on cities he doesn’t like, without the vote of the Congress.

ICE continues to round up large bodies of people, including U.S. citizens, on the slightest provocation.

Trump continues to fire federal employees that he doesn’t like, with little or no legal basis, to selectively defund federal activities he dislikes, while shifting funds, again illegally, to programs of which he approves.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is choosing which recently-elected members of the House he’ll swear in immediately and which he won’t – and all the Republicans were sworn in expeditiously, and the sole Democrat is still waiting – possibly because she represents the vote that would require Johnson to call a vote on a measure to immediately release all the Epstein files.

That’s just what I know, but even that sounds an awful lot like what goes on in a dictatorship, and what I want to know is why so many Americans don’t even seem to care.

The last time there was a possibility of a government shutdown, the Democrats gave in and attempted to work out something. The result?

The Republicans pushed through Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” with the result that less affluent families will get stuck with less (and in some cases no) healthcare, or much higher health insurance premiums, while the wealthiest of Americans got massive tax cuts, and the poorest essentially got none.

Now the Republicans are saying, “Stop the shutdown, and only then will we negotiate.”

The last time the Democrats agreed to that, they got rolled – badly. The Republicans have no real desire to negotiate, and the odds are that, even if they do, they’ll screw the Democrats.

In a special election in late September, Arizona elected Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat, as a replacement representative from Arizona. That was almost a month ago. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, refuses to swear her in until he reconvenes the full House, but he’s already sworn in three Republican replacement representatives this year, immediately after their election without bringing the House into session. Yet Johnson has vowed not to seat Grijalva until the shutdown is over.

So why on earth would the Democrats want to give up the only power they have right now and trust Johnson and the Republicans?

Often, history is written by the victor. More often it’s written by the survivors, who may or may not be the victors. More often than that, it’s written decades or generations later by someone with an agenda.

As a result, it’s wise to be skeptical of the “lessons of history” and to pay more attention to verifiable facts and a wider range of views. “History” also changes, depending on who’s presenting it, as one can easily see by looking at the versions of U.S. history presented today by those with different views and agendas.

This has been the case throughout history. The battle at Kadesh in 1274 BCE, between the Egyptians and the Hittites, was a bloody and brutal draw, but Ramses II had celebratory inscriptions of victory chiseled into stone all over Egypt. It wasn’t until the last 50 years or so, with the discovery of the massive clay tablet library in the ruins of the Hittite capital of Hattusas, that historians were able to sort out what really happened.

For generations, there was a widely held view that Europe suffered the “dark ages” from the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE until roughly the Renaissance. Except… it didn’t. What it did suffer was a massive fragmentation of governance. Later, the term “Middle Ages” was adopted, but there was still a perception of darkness and plagues, even though the Roman Empire also suffered darkness, anarchy, and plagues.

Recent archeological studies have shown, for example, that after the Romans withdrew from England, very little changed in people’s everyday lives over the next few centuries. The same was true in France under the Merovingian kings. Fewer massive buildings and roads were constructed, most likely because smaller kingdoms couldn’t muster the resources, especially when there was more local warfare.

In the United States, as everywhere, history has often been distorted or “revised.” Historical revisionists have persistently claimed that the Civil War was not about slavery. This persistent myth claimed the war was fought over states’ rights or economic differences, but in reality, the protection and expansion of slavery was the central cause of the Confederacy because the entire economy of the south was based on slavery. After reconstruction, a set of lies permeated the south portraying the Confederacy as a noble and heroic cause and whitewashing the history of slavery and elevating Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee to undeserved heroic status.

In the mid-1930s Hitler and other right-wing German nationalists propagated the false claim that the army had not been defeated on the battlefield, but that it was betrayed by enemies on the home front – specifically Jews, Marxists, and other leftists, who undermined the war effort and forced the military to surrender, an agenda designed to shift blame away from the military and the politicians.

History is messy and multifaceted, and to come close to understanding any period takes a great deal of study, which is why most people go with generalizations that often bear more resemblance to what they want to believe than to what actually occurred.

I haven’t posted anything for a while for various reasons, but largely because others had said/written what I had in mind or because I had the feeling that no one was interested in listening, only spouting their pat “solutions.”

Right now, too many Americans are demanding instant solutions for problems created by cumulative actions and inactions taken by politicians over the past several decades. They’re angry, and they want instant solutions here and now. Nothing else will do.

Trump fills that need, helped in large measure by the inability of Democrats to understand the depth of festering anger with the inability and or unwillingness of government to address the larger concerns of the majority of Americans. He came up with simplistic slogans and has pushed violent “solutions” that not only go against the spirit of the Constitution, but in far too many cases also are patently illegal. In some cases, he’s also been aided by a compliant Supreme Court, which has, upon occasion, even indicated, if indirectly, that it is making decisions because Congress will not or cannot do so.

In any form of government, instant solutions are seldom possible, not without persistent and often severe adverse impacts, and that is what is already occurring with ICE, the Department of Defense/War, and the unilateral and likely unconstitutional reductions in government services and work forces. U.S. citizens are being locked up until they can prove they’re citizens. Small children are being zip-tied and detained, at times left without parents. What about the old idea of being considered innocent until proven guilty? Or is guilt being assigned by skin color and/or speech? Armed troops are being forced upon cities, based on the political leanings of local government.

Bizarre and unreasoned tariffs are hampering all manner of U.S. industry. Alternative energy facilities under construction are being defunded willy-nilly. Exactly how does that reduce the deficit or cope with skyrocketing demand for more energy?

All this is, understandably and unfortunately, the result of anger and frustration, leavened by a significant amount of hatred, but simplistic and ill-thought-out instant solutions will only make matters worse over time. If unchecked, they’ll also destroy democracy.

Right now, neither party appears interested in well thought out solutions that address the situation, only soundbites that inflame and exacerbate, and from what I see, few are listening to voices of moderation and reason, who are being drowned out by a tide of frustration and anger that is more interested in revenge and punishing the other side than actually addressing these problems in a practical and humane way.

It’s past time to dump all the efforts to use government to enforce ideology (of any sort) and to get back to a real, practical, workable, common sense approach to government, while we still can.

And yes, for all the quibblers, “practical” can also be taken to extremes.

So… President Trump can say, “The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible,” but those on the left can’t say that Trump and conservatives want a dictatorship that forbids criticism and limits free speech?”

Now, I’ve certainly criticized the “speech police” of the far left, and their mandated pronouns, and I’ll continue to do so. But I believe they have the right to advocate for their pronouns; they just shouldn’t have the right to fire people who don’t use those pronouns.

Ultra-conservatives have the right to eulogize the late Charlie Kirk, but they shouldn’t have the right to fire commentators and others who think that Kirk was the devil’s tool or worse.

In the United States we already have libel laws which allow someone to sue for damages if another person publishes a statement about an individual, either in written form or by broadcast over media platforms such as radio, television, or the Internet, that is untrue and threatens to harm the reputation and/or livelihood of the targeted person.

In past practice, the “tests” of allowable speech have limited speech advocating the violent overthrow of the government but have allowed speech advocating peaceful change and criticizing public officials for the way they carry out their duties – provided that criticism is factually based.

Currently, Donald Trump is suing The New York Times for $15 billion because the Times has criticized him. He also threatened ABC with a lawsuit and effectively extorted $16 million as a settlement, which most likely encouraged him to sue the Times as a way to stop press criticism. His actions there illustrate the dangers of appeasement. Trump only backs down to superior force, and too many politicians and businesses either can’t muster that force or are unwilling to do so, even when Trump is now stating that anyone who says anything negative about him or his policies should be removed from the media.

But allowing the President to use his powers to destroy or to attempt to destroy or mute his critics is yet another step toward a dictatorship, something that the Republicans in Congress either refuse to face or believe is necessary to enact their policies.

And those very same Republicans ignore past examples by saying, “This time is different.” Of course it is, but as Mark Twain observed, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes, and, unchecked, that rhyming will lead to an authoritarian government or a dictatorship.

With all the furor about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and all the rhetoric about how political violence needs to stop, and how we’re a “better people” than that, I thought a little perspective might be helpful.

To begin with, political violence has been, if not common, certainly prevalent in the United
States over the last 175 years. We fought a Civil War over differences in basic political views. Following that, we had well over a century of violence and civil unrest over civil rights, complete with shootings, hangings, and lynchings, not to mention rampant vigilantes, certainly a political issue if ever there was.

On the political level, we’ve had four Presidents assassinated, and four others attacked with lethal force.

Former President Theodore Roosevelt was shot and wounded in 1912 while running for President on the “Bull Moose” ticket. President Gerald Ford was attacked twice in 1975. In one case, the shooter mischambered the pistol and in the second, the shooter fired twice and missed. President Ronald Reagan was shot and came close to dying in 1981, and five others were wounded, several seriously. President Trump has suffered two attempts on his life but only had a minor gash on his ear from the first, while the would-be assassin was caught before he could act in the second attempt.

I don’t know about you, but to me, eight out of forty-seven Presidents seems rather high, and that doesn’t include Presidential candidates.

Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed while running for President in 1968, and Governor George Wallace was shot and partially paralyzed in 1972 while seeking the Democratic Presidential nomination.

Over 28 recognized U.S. civil rights crusaders have been shot and killed, most notably Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers.

Just recently, two Minesota Democratic lawmakers and their families were targeted: one was killed, and several judges have been attacked as well.

Now we’re having what can only be called an epidemic of school shootings, and we’ve always had a problem with violent domestic abuse, which is why experienced police officers always worry about being summoned for domestic abuse calls.

So all the rhetoric about our being a better people than that is exaggerated. The facts are clear. We haven’t got that good a record when it comes to violence.

One of the key questions is whether, as a nation, we’ll be willing to admit that we have a fairly high level of violence. Or will we continue to deny the facts and cling to the illusion that we’re peace-loving, while we continue to attack and shoot those who don’t agree with us.

Yesterday, an eloquent but hard right political influencer – Charlie Kirk – was assassinated, and almost immediately everyone, particularly Republicans, began to talk about the need to stop political violence.

That’s all well and good, but it’s also hypocritical and worse.

Assassination has no rightful place in a democracy, but neither does sending troops and ICE agents into Home Depots, churches, and schools and arresting and carting off people based on their color, speech, or dress, all too often sweeping up people who are American citizens in the furor of activity to deport as many people as quickly as possible, while trying to “flood the zone,” i.e., to overload the courts and local government to the point where they can’t stop illegal and quasi-legal deportations.

That sort of behavior by the federal government is also political violence, no matter how Republicans rationalize and cover it with the quasi-legal veneer of Executive Orders. Even undocumented individuals who have committed no crimes, other than being here, deserve the protection of the law.

Violence begets violence. It always has.

The way to stop violence isn’t to commit violent acts, but to follow the law – and the Constitution – in enforcing the law.

Right now, in the frenzy to deport, Trump and his allies are stirring up more unrest, fear, and violent reactions. Equally important, too many of these measures aren’t getting rid of immigrant violent criminals. That takes patient, deliberate, long, hard effort. It also takes spending money on preventive measures proven to work.

The fifty-thousand-dollar bonuses for joining ICE are turning immigration enforcement into often-violent bounty-hunting, with the greatest appeal to would-be thugs and toughs.

More empty rhetoric and more forceful measures applied indiscriminately won’t stop or even reduce social, criminal, and political violence, except momentarily where the force is being applied, and if all that force is applied continuously, it will cost far more than funding local law enforcement and community support structures efficiently.

But then, Trump’s never been interested in building strong and effective local government; he’s only interested in building a national power base to become a de facto dictator, and over time that can only increase the violence.

I listened to Robert F. Kennedy’s testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, but could only bear to listen a short time, largely because what I heard revealed that the majority of the Senators and RFK appeared either to suffer from near-complete innumeracy, or were so locked into policy positions that they appeared to suffer terminal innumeracy.

The discussion over national life-expectancy data was more than a little revealing. The life-expectancy for Americans is lower than all other western industrial countries, yet the U.S. spends more than twice as much on health care per capita.

There are several reasons for these figures. First, one of the factors lowering average lifespans of a population is high infant mortality, i.e., the death of a child before his or her first birthday. Compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. infant mortality rate is fifty-fifth, and is at least twice as high as all other first-world nations. Add to that that the U.S. maternal death rate is close to five times that of all other major industrial countries and is continuing to rise.

The second factor lowering average lifespans is the percentage of the population lacking basic health care. In the U.S., roughly 25 million Americans lack health care insurance and over 100 million do not have a regular health care provider. Yet of those uninsured Americans, 74% have a full-time worker, and another 11% are working part-time. While 62% of uninsured American adults have health care debts, as might be expected, 44% of Americans with health insurance also reported health care debts.

When roughly a third of the U.S. population does not have a regular health care provider and almost half the population cannot afford even routine health care without going into debt, one might think these factors just possibly might contribute to a lower life expectancy for Americans, but for some reason, so far as I could tell, the only factor that was touched on was the high cost of medical care for those who can afford it, when the reason for lagging life expectancy lies in those who cannot afford or obtain adequate medical care.

In addition, there’s been no significant increase in the number of MDs graduating from U.S. medical schools over the past five years, despite an estimated population increase of nearly five percent.

So why don’t Senators and Representatives know these numbers… or is it that they don’t care?

Donald Trump, in various ways, has indicated that he believes the American people want – and need – a dictator, and that he’s the right man for the job.

For all of his many and terrible faults, Trump’s greatest political skill is identifying and weaponizing the problems that most concern people – and then finding the worst possible way to address each problem, usually in a fashion that appears superficially acceptable to a great many people, especially his base, but which will lead to far greater difficulties in the future.

As for being dictator… the real and very basic problem he’s attempting to address is the fact that American government in so many areas is no longer working very well, and even where and when it is, too many politicians decry the situation because whatever is being done doesn’t fit their preconceptions of the way issues and problems should be addressed.

As a result, all too often, problem after problem either doesn’t get addressed or is addressed in a way that offends a significant percentage of the population.

And people are tired of problems not being addressed and solved.

Trump didn’t create this situation. The idealogues of both political parties did by inserting extreme religious and social ideologies into the political dialogue and campaigns, and the rank and file in those parties allowed them to do so.

The result is that people are becoming more and more disillusioned with what they perceive as a barely functioning democracy and are more and more willing to accept a dictator whom they see as willing to act.

And Trump and his ever-growing legions of sycophants glory in his filling that position.

Protests against his high-handed and increasingly marginally legal (and sometimes illegal) actions won’t stop him. The only thing that will is better government getting things done, rather than getting in the way of getting things done.

And very few of Trump’s opponents seem to understand that…or perhaps they just can’t abandon ideology in favor of moderate, practical compromise. Equally unfortunately, neither can his supporters.

I have a moderately well-behaved dachshund. By moderately well-behaved, I mean that he only barks when another dog invades his territory, i.e., our property, or when he feels threatened. This isn’t a problem for me because when he’s outside, he’s always on leash.

We take a walk almost every morning, and he’s the third dog I’ve walked over the years here. Sometimes we encounter other dogs. Because Cedar City has leash laws and most people here are law-abiding, the other dogs are always on leash as well. I’ve encountered unleashed dogs less than ten times in over thirty years, and most either wanted to play or were merely curious.

The other day, however, we ran across an inexperienced dog walker with a golden doodle and another dog, which I’m fairly certain was an Italian greyhound or something similar. Knowing that Buddy Mozart is wary of strange dogs, I attempted to create a little more space.

The other dog-walker declared his dogs were friendly and proceeded to steer them directly toward us. Buddy Mozart does not like to be crowded, and he barked and backed off. I reined him in and away from the other dogs, at which point the Italian greyhound snapped his inadequate leash and pranced toward Buddy Mozart, obviously just obsequiously oblivious to the fact that Buddy Mozart had no interest at all in being friendly.

Buddy Mozart made no move toward the greyhound, but barked and growled, trying to convey that he wanted no part of the greyhound’s overtures, while the other dog-walker proceeded to have great difficulty controlling his now-leashless dog.

No person or dog got hurt. No dog bit or snapped, and Buddy Mozart and I moved away and proceeded to finish our otherwise uneventful walk.

As we did, I got to thinking about the brief encounter. The clearly clueless Italian greyhound and the man walking him reminded me of a certain type of excessively friendly person who invades your space and doesn’t understand that you’re just not up for it… and he obviously also didn’t understand dachshunds.

The first science fiction books I read (in the late 1950s) were either mass market paperbacks or, very occasionally, library hardcovers. But back then not many SF books were printed in hardcover, and most so published were “classics,” like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , H. Rider Haggard’s She, or Frankenstein .

The first paperback SF novel that I recall reading was A.E. van Vogt’s Slan, which I snitched from my mother’s SF bookcase and took to school – except it was stolen from me on the school bus. Fortunately, that occurred on the way home, and I’d finished reading it. Explaining the loss to my mother was another matter. Still, I have a particular fondness for Slan, because one of the first author blurbs I got was from A.E. van Vogt for my first novel (The Fires of Paratime, later republished in an uncut version as The Timegod).

My first eight novels were only published in paperback, except for The Fires of Paratime , which had a Science Fiction Book Club hardcover printing as well. The Magic of Recluce was my first novel with a hardcover printing.

I don’t recall ever buying a hard-cover SF or fantasy novel until I was at least in my fifties, for the simple reason that I couldn’t afford hardcovers, at least not in the quantities in which I bought and read mass market paperbacks.

When I left Washington, D.C., and moved to a MUCH smaller house in New Hampshire, to become a full-time writer, I sold most of those paperbacks, well over two thousand of them because there was no place to put them. For all that, I still have a fondness for the mass market paperback.

Those paperbacks developed two generations of readers and writers, and I’m not so sure that ebooks have the same beneficial effect, even if ebooks are much easier to store. And, somehow, to me, trade paperbacks are a compromise representing higher cost and less convenience, while ebooks lack a certain permanence, given that Amazon can erase everything.

I suppose that makes me a creator of fictional futures and fantasies with his heart anchored in the pulp paperback.

Do real-world nations use a weapon or a tactic just once and then discard it because it’s no longer new or interesting?

Let’s see. Knives and bladed weapons were developed so far back we can’t accurately tell exactly when. They were definitely used as a main weapon for thousands of years and remain in use as personal and professional weapons. Gunpowder is still around (if the latest new and improved version) some two thousand years after its first use. In more modern weapons, the first F-35, the latest fully operational U.S. fighter/interceptor, was delivered twenty years ago, and it’s projected to be in use for another 20 plus years. The B-52 is still going strong after more than sixty years.

People, and presumably aliens as well, will use tactics so long as they’re effective and existing weapons so long as there’s not something better and/or more cost effective. And they may develop new weapons or tactics, provided they’re actually better or not too costly.

Yet, over the years, and slightly more so recently, I’ve gotten comments complaining that protagonists keep using some of the same tactics and magical weapons time and time again. Some also complain that the antagonists’ forces are dumb or slow to change their reaction to the protagonist’s skills and tactics.

Now, I realize that there’s a certain segment of readers who want something new in every book, and I do my best to provide that in terms of political plotting, treachery, who else gets involved in the fighting, and even with protagonists gaining greater mastery of their magical skills and how to apply them.

But… I also know history and culture. Tactics don’t change unless weapons or defenses change, and even then, they tend to change slowly. One reason for slower change in lower tech cultures is that limited communications mean that when one land or leader comes up with something new, other countries have never seen it and refuse to believe what’s happening until it’s too late. There’s also the fact that the military leaders are conservative and don’t like to change tactics, particularly when it requires retraining forces.

The Mongol invasions, Alexander’s use of the phalanx, the rapid conquest of two-thirds of the Mediterranean basin essentially by Islamic culture, the machine gun, the German blitzkrieg, all were examples where those techniques worked well initially because existing armies and cultures were unable or unwilling to adapt quickly.

And, of course, sometimes, brute application of time-tested weapons, along with massive casualties, can surmount smaller forces equipped with limited wonder-weapons. That’s why Alyiakal spends so much time training his forces, because even the most powerful mage of the age is limited and needs disciplined and effective troopers.

I work to maintain a certain realism (strange as that sounds for fantasy) in the way cultures, tactics, and weapons work in human societies, and that means that characters will keep using tactics that work, until they don’t.

Alas… that also means readers will often find Alyiakal and other protagonists using tactics and devices that work time and time again.

The United States is historically based on both laws and shared accepted customs. Not every aspect of its operation and governance is laid out in the Constitution.

For example, George Washington set the custom that a President should only serve two terms. That precedent lasted roughly a hundred and fifty years, until Franklin Roosevelt ran for and won third and fourth terms, which led to the adoption of the Twenty-Second Amendment.

Then there was the understanding that the sitting President could nominate Supreme Court Justices, until Senate majority leader McConnell decided that the Senate didn’t have to accept and vote on nominees until after the next election.

Bit by bit, parts of the U.S. political structure that were taken for granted from past experience are being challenged or rejected simply because various politicians have, in effect, said, “There’s no law forbidding this; so I’ll do it.”

More often than not, when politicians and businesspeople do something unfair or biased or grossly advantageous to a significant group of people, public pressure increases for a law to forbid that practice.

The United States already has too many laws and regulations. At least, the Republicans think so, as do at least some Democrats, but in a democracy abuse of position and power creates more pressure for laws to restrict that abuse.

Bias and civil rights abuse continued despite the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and reaction to that abuse finally led to the Civil Rights Act and federal supervision of the acts of certain states.

Failure of corporations and businesses to clean up after themselves led to Superfund and hazardous waste laws, and cost the EPA Administrator her job, and sent the Assistant Administrator for Solid and Hazardous Waste to prison.

Abuse of market power by large corporations in consumer goods led to increasing federal intervention, and the creation of the Consumer Protection Agency.

As for Trump’s abuse of power based on doing things no other President has tried (except Andrew Jackson and Richard Nixon), and that of the Republican majority in the Texas legislature in trying to turn state representatives into instant convicts, there are two possible outcomes – more legislation or dictatorship (also supported by more legislation).

Either way, we’ll have less freedom because too many people are willing to do anything that’s not expressly forbidden by law, either for power or profit, or out of fear of those in power.

And from what I see, few see the danger, and even fewer speak out.

For the past three months, men have been working to replace a sewer line running down the middle of the street beside university buildings here in town. We’re talking five blocks, a third of which is bordered by parking lots on one side or the other. The street is cordoned off a block at a time, but most of the time, no one is actually working. Days can go by with no apparent progress.

Because it’s a sewer line, and Cedar City doesn’t have a separate sewage and water entity, this “construction” has to be under municipal control or authority.

Now, at the same time, just off the northwest corner of the campus, the state of Utah is building a roundabout to replace a four-way stop sign on the main road into the university area, as well as one of the few direct routes to the downtown area from the west. Two months have passed since that section of road was closed (containing one of the three major overpasses of the freeway), and only a limited amount of ground has been torn up, and the university has been told that the closure will continue for at least another two months.

When fifteen thousand students return in less than a month, I suspect that there will be more than a little anger and confusion.

These aren’t federal projects; they’re state and local. So the blame here doesn’t lie with the feds.

Over roughly the same time period, we’ve seen entire subdivisions be laid out and the first houses going up on the west and south sides of town.

And, oh yes, in less than three weeks, an older hotel on the edge of the historic downtown was razed, the land cleared, and construction is underway on a half-block square Maverik super gas station. Why, I have no idea, given that there are three other Maverik gas stations within less than a mile, but I’m betting it will be operating before the roundabout or the sewer construction is complete.

To me, at least, all these are another indication of American public priorities.

“Compromise” is not a nasty word. In fact, compromise is the basis of a free society, yet far too many people fail to understand this.

A truly “free” society is one where one’s freedom to act is maximized within the law. In a free society, laws provide the guardrails so that someone else’s freedom doesn’t minimize or destroy yours.

The greatest problem facing any society is drawing the line between individual rights and maintaining the order necessary for society to function. As Alexander Hamilton pointed out, “without order, there is no liberty.”

Theodore Roosevelt had a similar view when he said, “Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.”

Because people have different views about how the order necessary for a working society should be structured and maintained and the degree of personal freedom optimal for that society, effective government requires compromise.

Yet today, both the far left and the far right seem to have forgotten this, each side wishing to impose through force of law its vision for society, even though some of those beliefs impose constraints on others that are not necessary to maintain order and public safety and legal imposition of some beliefs can result in physical harm to others.

A good example of such extremism are laws that prohibit abortion in all circumstances as well as any procedure that might conceivably result in abortion or miscarriage. As a result, both women and their unborn children are dying at record numbers in states like Texas.

Another is requiring Christian theology be taught and actively practiced in schools and other public, when roughly one-third of all Americans are not Christians. What’s ironic about this is that many of those insisting that Christian theology be more publicly imposed are violently opposed to the Islamic practice of Sharia, which would impose Muslim beliefs as law.

On the left, the attempt to require institutions mandate which pronouns are used by whom is nothing more than speech police. While I understand and respect people’s desires to maintain and announce their own gender preference, that should be a personal preference, not a government requirement. Requiring everyone to announce their gender identity by specific pronouns goes too far and attacks the right to personal privacy.

Unfortunately, the apparent simplicity of absolutism in government and religion can be so seductive that common sense – and compromise – are all too often swept away.

A while ago, I read an article that made a simple point about dogs – that they live in the present with all their attention focused on the moment. While this may be an overstatement, as someone who has lived with dogs for virtually my entire adult life, there’s a great deal of truth in that observation, although a dachshund hurrying to greet me with his squeaky pig in his mouth and his tail wagging is more likely thinking about the moment to come, rather than the present moment.

Even so, he’s obviously totally fixated on that moment to come, and once we’re playing with the squeaky pig, that’s definitely all that he’s concentrating on. But it’s a joyful concentration, with his tail wagging as he returns with the squeaky pig in his mouth. It’s not all rote concentration, either. Sometimes, he wants to play tug-of-war with me trying to pull the pig from his mouth (which won’t happen unless he lets me), and sometimes he throws his pig in the air as if daring me to catch it (that doesn’t happen, either, although he often manages to catch it unless he’s thrown it over and behind the computer and then begs me to recover it ). And if all that fails, he’ll drop the pig at my feet, with a whine that asks if I’m going to pick it up and throw it. I never know which he’ll do when he returns the pig.

One of our sons was dog-sitting several weeks ago. He was determined to see how long Buddy Mozart (don’t ask) would continue retrieving the pig. Our son gave up after two hours. Dachshunds are persistent and stubborn, even at play.

I obviously get great satisfaction out of writing, or I wouldn’t have worked so hard to get published and kept at it for so long, but I have to admit that I don’t often get the same unbridled joy from writing that Buddy Mozart does from chasing his squeaky pig or taking our morning walk.

That’s another reason why I love dachshunds.

In terms of presence in the F&SF field, in my view, authors roughly fall into five categories: wild and continuing bestsellers, such as Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, Sarah Maas, and, recently, Rebecca Yarros; solid bestsellers; those lauded by various media, often regardless of sales; and everyone else.

Like a number of moderately successful authors, it took me years to become a successful full-time writer, i.e., one with a writing income sufficient to support a family.

My first science fiction story was published in 1973, a few months shy of my thirtieth birthday. My first novel appeared in 1982, a month after my thirty-ninth birthday. Given those dates, I was never considered an up-and-coming young F&SF author. In fact, I was rarely mentioned in F&SF trade publications. My first New York Times bestseller, as I recall, was Princeps, the second book of the Imager Portfolio, and that didn’t occur until I was in my sixties, although I did have another Times bestseller and have had quite a few Recluce books on the USA Today bestseller list in my fifties and thereafter.

Part of my comparative lack of “presence” in the F&SF field in my early writing years was likely because I didn’t even attend any conventions until I was forty-five. In fact, I really didn’t even know what a convention was or what it entailed, and working as a political appointee in Washington, D.C., took an enormous amount of time.

Another part was, I suspect, that my work has never fit into any of the F&SF marketing genres. I’ve never been nominated for, let alone won, a national award in the F&SF field, but I have won a few regional awards as well as awards in the romance field, including a Romantic Times Pioneer award, despite never having written an explicit sex scene (except for one).

Another factor is that my books appeal to a wide variety of readers, rather than a specific market segment. Because of these factors, the tours I did for Tor from roughly 1996 (after I left Washington, D.C.) to 2015 consisted of an evening signing every day and visiting as many bookstores as I could before and sometimes after the signing. Unfortunately, given the demise of so many bookstores and the smaller inventories of most of the survivors (and the greater restrictions on what managers of chain bookstores can order), this kind of handselling/personal presence marketing is no longer as effective as it once was in gaining and/or maintaining an authorial presence.

Another factor hampering author recognition is the effective demise of the mass market paperback, combined with the fact that most of the remaining bookstores carry much smaller numbers of backlist titles. Since eBooks are the replacement for mass market paperbacks, these days authors need to maintain some form of internet presence, but the problem there is that maintaining a presence on Facebook, X(aka Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok can be a full-time chore in itself, leaving less time for actually writing (which is why I only maintain a website).

And then, there’s the “fan” factor. For various reasons, the way and what certain authors write results in a sort of charisma that creates a wide and self-sustaining fan base, not necessarily based on the technical expertise of the writer, but usually where vivid storytelling subsumes everything else.

Given all the changes in publishing and communications, I’m glad I started writing when I did, because I suspect that, were I starting today, it would be difficult if not impossible to get published traditionally (given that it wasn’t easy back then) and almost that hard to establish a presence in the field as an independent self-published writer.

But then, who knows? “What ifs” are speculative at best.

There are many ways to tell a story or write a novel, and some writers use the same “methodology” for every book, while others explore different ways, one of which is to
write in a different culture.

This isn’t as easy as it seems. All too often attempts to depict a differing culture do little more change the names, but different cultures have different mores and different structures of relationships.

More than once recently, readers have criticized how I’ve depicted relationships, because what I’ve written doesn’t reflect either what they’ve experienced or feel they want to experience. Such criticisms are accurate in that I’m not depicting what happens today, especially in the United States. For most of human history and in most cultures, relationships have been formalized into almost fixed patterns, at least involving interactions that are seen publicly or that can be inferred publicly.

Every viable society/culture has rules and patterns, and those rules and patterns extend into and influence the most personal and seemingly private aspects of life. For example, certain Polynesian cultures allowed far more sexual freedom, both for men and women, and, as a result, inheritances, etc., flowed through the female lineage.

Private property requires legalities and the backing of power. How those legalities are written and enforced influence culture and personal choices. Economics and technology (or the lack thereof) resulted in comparative past values far different from what we experience today. In Anglo-Saxon England, a mason might make five pence a day, a carpenter four pence, and while a cottage could be rented for sixty pence a year, a simple velvet cloak could cost over ten pounds (and at 240 pence to the pound, its cost represented over two years’ earnings for a skilled tradesman).

Clothes literally were worth their weight in silver or gold, and theft of them could result in harsh punishment, even death.

While people did “fall in love,” love was usually secondary to property and status. Contemporary readers often fail to understand just how strong those rules and customs could be, and how risky any relationship outside of marriage could be. When a young woman was “ruined,” the results could destroy her future, if not any hope of a decent life in the future, and might even cripple the position of her family.

In the current Recluce “sub-series,” Alyiakal and Seliora have a painstakingly long courtship, not because they’re reserved, but because any serious misstep could destroy all they’ve personally accomplished. They couldn’t be even as close as they are without greater repercussions if Seliora were trying to build a factorage in a larger town or a city. And of course, as Seliora becomes more well-off and powerful, she can quietly let her relationship with Alyiakal become known, but even that acceptance occurs within unspoken rules.

The movie The Age of Innocence shows accurately just how binding unspoken rules were in New York during the gilded age. And all societies and cultures have unspoken rules, perhaps better described as unwritten rules, often with high costs for breaking them. Most writers understand that. What is less often mentioned or understood is the cost to society of not having unspoken and binding rules.

Societies cannot long survive without order. How order is maintained determines the nature of a society. Greater reliance on uncodified rules often means that the laws are few and harsh, because smaller infractions are handled on a “personal” basis. It’s hardly a coincidence that laws have multiplied in the United States as unspoken rules and conventions have been ignored or willfully disregarded.

One of the problems in dealing with public finances in a democracy, and particularly in the United States, is that, when it comes to large numbers, a significant percentage of the population suffers from innumeracy, i.e., a lack of full understanding of numbers and/or mathematical concepts, and the ability to reason with them.

For example, the Senate just passed a $9 billion recission bill that will “claw back” funds already appropriated for foreign aid and public broadcasting, a cut that will primarily cripple if not eliminate broadcast stations in rural areas. While a $9 billion cut sounds significant, it only amounts to less than one tenth of one percent of the total federal budget, according to the Republican Senate Majority Leader. But just a week ago, Trump signed his “big, beautiful bill,” which will raise national defense spending by $156.2 billion. The cuts in non-defense federal programs aren’t enough to offset the massive increases in defense and homeland security, and few if any politicians are keeping track of the negative multiplier effect of federal job cuts.

Likewise, as I wrote previously, the “tax cut” won’t grant most taxpayers any lower taxes than they’ve paid over the last several years. It will keep their tax rates from returning to pre-2018 levels.

Because “big, beautiful bill” also increases health care and other costs, families may receive modest tax cuts, but face higher costs in health, education, and other areas. According to the Congressional Budget Office, on average, families earning less than $56,000 a year will bring home $300 less than before the bill was enacted as result of the increased cost of federal or federal supported services, while families earning less than $43,000 will bring home $750 less. On the other hand, families with earnings in the top ten percent will benefit by an average of $12,000.

According to the most conservative of economists, the deficit from the bill will add over $2 trillion to the national debt, and that debt will need to be financed, increasing the pressure on interest rates. The apparent consensus among federal policy makers is that an inflation rate of two percent a year is “feasible,” but that “feasible” rate means that today’s dollar will only be worth fifty-one cents in twenty years – or that you’ll have to increase the value of your savings by almost fifty percent to have the same purchasing power in twenty years. And two percent is far lower than what’s likely to occur.

Yet the majority of Trump’s supporters don’t seem to have the slightest idea that the “big, beautiful bill” will reduce real incomes of possibly as much as a fifth of American families (based on CBO figures) both now and in the future.

Despite all the rhetoric about violent illegal immigrants and immigrant illegal drug dealers, what are ICE and others assisting it actually doing?

From what I can tell, they’re targeting immigrants and anyone who even looks like they might be an immigrant, largely without probable cause, in and around schools, colleges and universities, markets, churches, and even around immigration offices where immigrants are trying to follow the law. They’re also targeting immigrants here legally whose only crime is to have the nerve to criticize ICE and/or Trump’s policies.

What they don’t seem to be doing, or aren’t doing all that successfully, is targeting, arresting, and prosecuting and/or deporting the comparatively tiny percentage of illegal immigrants who are criminals (beyond being undocumented) and who are behind the epidemic of fentanyl and other illegal drugs, human sex trafficking, and other violent crimes.

The federal/ICE attitude seems to be that, if they deport anyone and everyone who looks like an immigrant, that will solve the problem. It won’t, because the skilled and hardened immigrant criminals avoid all the locations where ICE is patrolling and seizing people to deport, at times almost randomly, and without any form of legal proceeding.

This near-blind snatch and grab campaign terrorizes communities, disrupts workplaces and schools, increases the costs for farms and businesses, and creates chaos. It also provokes violence and crimes. What it doesn’t do is reduce crime and illegal drugs.

Effective law enforcement works systematically and with the community, not against it, to target and find actual criminals, prove their guilt, and apply the proper punishment. But all that takes planning, time, and hard methodical work, none of which seem to be employed by ICE and Homeland Security.