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, while also trying to use the law to force one set of religious beliefs or another on those who disagree with whoever is in power, despite a Constitution that explicitly forbids laws imposing religious beliefs.

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.

Millions of Americans are looking forward to a federal income tax cut that won’t and cannot happen.

Both Donald Trump and the Republican Congress are touting a non-existent tax cut as part of Trump’s big beautiful (beautiful only in the eyes of certain beholders) bill, but to know or understand this, one has to know the full background of what happened more than seven years ago, which is an eternity in most people’s minds, particularly the minds of Trump supporters.

On January 1, 2018, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act took effect, reducing tax rates and increasing exemptions, with a whole host of other provisions. These lower rates have been in effect ever since then, but would have expired at the end of this year.

What the “big beautiful bill” does is to make those earlier tax cuts permanent and make a few additional temporary tax cuts (from 2025 through 2028) for some income from tips, as well as make some modest increases in allowable deductions and add a few targeted tax deductions, such as auto loan interest payments on U.S.- made cars. The “cost” of all this is higher taxes on green and renewable energy generation and reductions in health care programs for the poorest Americans.

The bottom line? Very few will get significant tax cuts from what they paid last year, except for people with a significant income from tips. And something like 10 million Americans will lose various health and SNAP benefits, while scores of rural hospitals will face cuts that may force their closure.

But Trump gets credit for a non-existent tax cut, or more charitably, for making his 2018 temporary tax cuts permanent. So he gets popular credit for doing the same thing twice.

Meanwhile, from what I can tell, the Democrats haven’t even been able to point this out in any effective fashion, which doesn’t bode well for their chances in upcoming elections.

The United States can survive most policies – good or bad – carried out by a president.

What we may not be able to survive is the polarization fueled by the fiery waves of hatred emanating from President Trump, the latest of target of which were Democrats, when he declared on nationwide television that he “hates Democrats.”

I hate as well, but I hate misguided policies and the stupidity and cupidity of most of Trump’s supporters in government. But hating all Republicans?

My wife and I have friends, neighbors, and relatives who are staunch Trump supporters and often Republicans. Most of them are good people who’d do almost anything to help. While I cannot understand why they support unwaveringly a President who spouts vileness and hatred for anyone who disagrees with him and who espouses policies that, in many cases, will have severe adverse consequences on the country, I do not hate them. I find it hard to believe that they accept his lies unthinkingly, but I don’t hate them.

I also hate quite a few policies espoused by extreme leftist Democrats, but I don’t hate them, either. I do think their extremism enabled Trump’s victory and supplied fuel for his hatred campaigns.

As I’ve written here before, one of the greatest problems with unthinking or violent hatred is that it consumes people and makes them stupid, and that is exactly what Trump is accomplishing with his continuing hate-fueled tirades. He’s using hatred to enact laws and establish policies that are detrimental to the best interests of the nation.

Yes, among other things, we need to get our fiscal house in order and expel immigrants who have committed crimes other than merely being here without proper documentation. But the legislation just passed by Congress primarily gives tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and actually takes more from most Americans in other ways. Unthinking spending cuts have already had to be rescinded in many cases because they targeted vital government functions, while not touching obsolete military bases even the Pentagon has wanted to close.

Trump’s immigration policies are expelling foreign students who entered the U.S. legally and who paid money to U.S. colleges and universities. Many of these students, as in the past, would like to stay and contribute to making America great. The vast majority of “illegal” immigrants swept up for deportation were not criminals beyond not having entered the country legally. Many others swept up entered legally, and ICE and even Trump have ignored the legality of their presence. Overall, the rate of criminal offenses among “illegal” immigrants is far lower than the rate of criminality among U.S. citizens.

And those are just a few of the stupidities created by Trump’s waves of hatred, and those stupidities will continue so long as unthinking hatred is widespread.

AI is coming, regardless. And while AI applications will have a strong impact on manufacturing and production, they’re also going to affect so-called white-collar clerical and lower-level data-management, as well as routine computer coding.

Authors and artists won’t be exempt, either. Artists who do illustrations for books and other publications are already complaining, and at least some publications are refusing to use artwork solely or partly AI-generated.

As for authors, a number of lawsuits have been brought in California and New York courts against various AI companies for copyright infringement because the companies employed unauthorized copying of authors’ works to train their generative AI models.

The discussions around this appear muddled, at least to me. Intelligence has to “learn” in some fashion. I’d read more than a thousand SF books and all the stories in ANALOG (including some from the Astounding Science-Fiction era) for fifteen years before I ever thought about writing a story, let alone a novel. So have a great many other authors.

The problem I have with the way the AI companies approached this was that while I had to pay (or occasionally borrow from the local library) to read and learn, these companies used pirated copies and paid no one. Some have attempted to claim “fair use,” which is absurd, given that “fair use” case law doesn’t allow use of extended prose in any form.

So why shouldn’t the AI companies pay royalties to authors whose works aren’t in the public domain? Shakespeare doesn’t need the royalties, but living, breathing, and working authors need and deserve them.

Since none of these legal suits have yet come to trial (so far as I can tell), we’ll see what the courts have to say.

Of course, those lawsuits don’t address the fact that dialogue from movies and TV shows has been used by companies such as Apple and Anthropic to train AI systems.

I could be underestimating the potential of generative AI, but I doubt that it will ever produce truly great prose or poetry, or even well-written mid-list fiction, but I have no doubt that, in time, it will be able to churn out serviceable methodical fiction with little uniqueness.

As in many fields, we’ll have to see, but in the meantime, the AI companies have no business pirating current authors’ works in an effort to eventually replace them.

Manufacturing in the U.S. isn’t declining. In fact, total manufacturing output has increased by thirty percent over the past twenty years.

Figures from the Federal Reserve in St. Louis show that, even in the so-called “Rust Belt” (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin), manufacturing output has increased by 14 percent over the last twenty years. In the south, output has increased 25 percent over the same period, while output has increased by 114 percent in Arizona, 78 percent in California, 70 percent in Oregon, and 39 percent in Colorado.

So why does everyone think the U.S. is manufacturing less?

The simple answer is that there are fewer jobs in manufacturing. Employment in manufacturing has dropped from roughly 16 million jobs in 2005 to 13 million at the end of 2024. At the same time, the hourly wage rate for manufacturing production workers has increased by 75%, but the cost of living has increased “officially” by 64% (I say “officially” because the official figures understate real inflation felt by most people).

At the same time, U.S. population rose from 296 million in 2005 to 347 million in 2025. So while the U.S. population increased by 51 million people, the number of manufacturing jobs dropped by 3 million. Put another way, one in eighteen Americans worked in manufacturing in 2005, but in 2025 only one in twenty-seven did.

All this translates into the facts that there are fewer manufacturing jobs, which on average pay in real terms about the same as they did twenty years ago. So those working in manufacturing, on average, haven’t seen significant improvement in real wages, and there are fewer jobs, largely because of greater technology and more automation. In addition, an increasing percentage of those jobs are requiring greater and greater skills.

This also suggests that increasing manufacturing in the United States won’t significantly increase the number of jobs being created, no matter what Trump and the Republicans claim.

In the world of golf, today begins the U.S. Open, one of the four major tournaments in professional golf. This year, it’s being held at the historic and extremely difficult Oakmont Country Club, in Oakmont, outside Pittsburg. A hundred and twenty-five golfers qualified to play in the Open, and after two rounds, the field will be cut to sixty (plus any others who tied for the last spot) for the last two rounds. The winner will take home $4.3 million, while even the 60th place finisher will pocket something like $43,000.

Apparently, some of the professionals who qualified to play in the tournament have been complaining about the length of the rough (the grass outside the comparatively manicured fairways).

My sympathy for those complaints is ambivalent. First, the rough is there to penalize golfers with less control of their game. Second, the rough is there for all players. Third, by design golf is a game/profession designed to test those who play it because there are so many variables that can affect a player, and they’re often capricious. The wind can pick up or die down at times. Rain between rounds can change how fast the green is or how heavy the sand in a bunker might be.

Every golfer faces those varying factors, and professional golfers work extremely hard to sharpen their game to minimize their impact. But when a single stroke can make a difference of anywhere from thousands of dollars to over a million dollars, it can be difficult to be philosophical.

One young and moderately successful (and single) young pro golfer actually posted what it cost him to play the pro tour, and his rough estimate was $6,000 a week, and that was with comparatively basic costs. Given that the PGA tour consists of something like 32 tournaments and seven other events, there is certainly a fair amount of mental strain as well.

All of which might also explain why I gave up golf young, especially since, despite all my efforts, I was a high handicap amateur.