I happen to like vests, but it’s clear that, except occasionally with three-piece suits, vests are not currently popular or fashionable in most parts of the United States. But what is fashionable today?

The definition of fashionable is “characteristic of, influenced by, or representing a current popular trend or style,” while stylish is usually defined as “fashionably elegant and sophisticated.”

Now, obviously, with my love of vests [tastefully flamboyant with matching tie when I’m making writing-related appearances, and quite conservative otherwise], dress shirts, and cowboy boots, I’m no slave to current fashion, but what I wear, according to more than a few people, is a style that suits me, in more ways than one. Because I have high arches, cowboy boots are one of the few forms of footwear that don’t destroy my feet, and all of my boots are either solid black or brown.

When I was younger, I sported longer hair and a mustache, partly because my first wife thought both were more fashionable This was in the 1970s, and 1970s fashions, especially in retrospect, didn’t benefit most people, and I was no exception. I look better with short hair [even if there’s not much of it left on top] and clean-shaven. I also feel better that way.

Any type of fashion trend generally tends to look better on people who are young and painfully thin. Most of us aren’t. And that means, if we want to look our best, we need to choose what looks good on us and what is also practical and comfortable.

What I don’t understand is why so many people, especially younger [defined loosely as those who are less than forty] people, particularly men, seem to go out of their way not to look good. Maybe I’m missing something, but when people I know are not poor, or even close to it, show up wearing ripped pants or cargo shorts, dirty shirts, and flip-flops in forty degree temperature weather, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Nor does wearing shorts that swallow you, or tank tops that show and exaggerate every extra pound.

If dressing like that is making a statement, what exactly is that statement?

I recently discovered that a number of readers have decided that my books fall into a category that I’d heard in passing over the last several years – “competence porn.”

I don’t have a problem with readers finding my protagonists competent – as well as even some of my villains. My problem lies with the category itself, possibly because I’m definitely old school, and while I can’t object to knowledgeable adults reading and viewing pornography, it’s definitely not my thing. As Marian Zimmer Bradley – who definitely knew pornography – once observed, pornography is mainly concerned with anatomical plumbing. Combining pornography with competence exalts the former and degrades the latter.

And I have a real problem with degrading competence, especially at a time in our history where everyday competence is getting rarer and when fewer and fewer young people can read or write competently. Classifying books with competent main characters as a type of pornography is the last sort of thing we need today.

Part of the idea behind the “competence porn” classification is a failure to understand that competent characters aren’t perfect. Even the most competent individuals make mistakes; it’s that they seldom make stupid mistakes in their own field, because competence requires knowing your field.

Another problem with the term “competence porn” is the current tendency of far too many readers to denigrate genres, subgenres, styles, and authors that they don’t like. I understand that many readers like and want fallible characters who get into messes because they’re not competent. Some readers want to root for such characters. That’s what they like. But that doesn’t mean that what they don’t like is bad. Sometimes it is; many times it’s just not to that reader’s taste.

I don’t have a problem with that. I do have a problem with anyone who denigrates books that feature excellence and competence. If an author doesn’t write competence well, one can fault the work, or the way it’s handled, but terming books that feature competent main characters as competence porn is a disservice to both the authors and to the ideal of competence.

This past semester, my wife, the voice and opera professor, has been faced with the most fragile and unprepared group of incoming students that she’s seen in more than fifty years of teaching, although for the past decade or so she’s found that incoming students have become increasingly fragile and less academically prepared.

Not only are the vast majority unable to write a coherent paragraph, but most of them have difficulty reading material that the majority of previous classes could handle. They also have difficulty following class discussions, in turning in assignments on time, and in being able to attend class regularly. And we’re not talking about minority students, but predominantly western USA whitebread students.

They consider writing a thousand word essay as a major and unnecessary trial and fifty pages of reading a week as excessive.

Every single faculty member in the music department is facing the same issues, as are faculty members in any department that is attempting to actually get students to study and to learn. According to a university staff psychologist, roughly forty percent of the incoming students in the university suffer from depression and/or have anxiety issues.

In the field of music, as in most fields, professional musicians and music teachers have to know the music, the techniques, and the history behind their studies, but these incoming students don’t know how to write or how to learn and memorize music. They’re under the illusion that they can Google everything, and they often get sullen or resentful when they find out that they can’t… and they also can’t be separated from their cellphones. Under university policy, while faculty can request students to put away cellphones, faculty can’t prohibit them in class. One student in another department even requested that the university director of ADA certify her cellphone as a psychological necessity after her professor asked her to stop using it incessantly in class.

Many of them break down in tears – and the males tend to be bigger babies than the women – when they discover that they actually have to work to pass a class.

Yet the administration pressures faculty members to do everything they can to keep students in school, even students who’ve missed weeks of classes because they’re too stressed out to attend classes.

Given the way the students are when they arrive at the university, there’s too much they’re not being taught in elementary and secondary schools, and they’re certainly not being taught true self-discipline or accountability. But everyone seems to think it’s the job of college faculty to undo all the damage caused by overindulgent parents and elementary and secondary school teachers bludgeoned into submission to the “self-esteem” requirements forced on them, largely by parents.

The first two definitions of “interface” are: (1) the point where two systems, subjects, organizations, etc. meet and interact and (2) a device or program enabling a user to communicate with a computer.

One of the greatest problems with the increasing use of computerized systems is that all too many human/computer interfaces are flawed, both on the human side and on the computer side, as exemplified by the following examples.

A little over a week ago, the local Walgreens called to remind my wife that she was due for her second Shingles shot. She couldn’t do it immediately, but she had time after a dental appointment last Tuesday. So she stopped in at the Walgreens around 5:00 p.m. and went to the pharmacy. There was no one waiting for anything, and two pharmacy technicians and a pharmacist were on duty. She asked for the shot. She was told she had to make an appointment, except the store’s pharmacy telephone information line said that appointments were only necessary for COVID and flu vaccines, and that people could go to the pharmacy without an appointment. The main Walgreens website said the same. She pointed out that when she’d called the store, she was told she didn’t need an appointment for Shingles. She came home furious, but she called for an appointment, but was told by the Walgreens central vaccine scheduling office that they could only schedule COVID and flu shots by telephone. Other shots had to be scheduled online. But when she tried that, the Walgreens system wouldn’t schedule anything but COVID and flu. Another call back to Walgreens vaccine scheduling didn’t solve the problem, but the person on the other end suggested a Walgreens’ scheduling subsite that she could go to directly, a site that wasn’t listed anywhere. That worked… so far as getting the appointment, but that site wouldn’t accept her doctor’s info, which mean more of a wait when she did get the shot.

That’s definitely an example of an interface problem.

Another example is something experienced by a Canadian reader who was trying to obtain a Kindle version of ISOLATE from Amazon.ca [the Canadian Amazon outlet]. He could get the audiobook and the hardcover, but not the Kindle ebook. The same was true for a number of his Canadian friends. I brought the matter to TOR’s attention, and my editor looked into it. Amazon replied to TOR that there was no problem. The links worked fine. Except they didn’t for those Canadians. Paradoxically, my Canadian friend got the Kindle from Amazon.com [the U.S. Amazon], but he informed me that Amazon.ca still said the Kindle version was unavailable, not only to him, but to number of others.

I’d like to think that these are isolated examples – but they’re not. Too many organizations have websites that are close to impenetrable even for people with considerable familiarity with computers, not to mention those businesses with semi-AI telephone systems that not only work poorly, but often never allow a caller to talk to a real person, or only if the caller spends forever going through menu options and trying to reply to a computerized voice saying “I didn’t get that. Did you mean XXXX,” or the equivalent.

Yet more and more businesses are relying on flawed computerization and voicemail systems that don’t deal with real-world people and their problems… and with the shortage of workers, this problem is likely to get a lot worse.

Now that Isolate is finally published, I’ll be interested to see if reader reviews follow a familiar pattern to that of my earlier books, a pattern, interestingly enough, that also occurs in the political world.

Once one of my books is published, usually the first reader reviews are mixed, but almost immediately, along with those who liked the book are those who go to great lengths to find faults with it, of all sorts. Those quibblers and naysayers tend to have a greater presence in the days and weeks immediately following publication, but then, over time, those who quibble and carp about what’s in the book and about what’s not (and find the book “boring”) drop off, and later comments tend to be more positive.

What I find interesting about this is that it’s very similar to the reaction to major political events. Whatever the event or occurrence, the naysayers are usually out in force first, whether it was January 6th, or Obamacare, or walls and immigration, masks and vaccination.

Part of the similarity, I suspect, lies with the subject matter. Neither politics nor my books are simple, and anyone who’s studied either knows that. Anything that’s complex tends to draw opposition, possibly because saying “no” is always easier than a considered and thoughtful response.

In addition, in dealing with large numbers of people, even the best crafted regulation or law will have repercussions on someone. If a vaccine is 93% effective (and that’s high for a vaccine), that means that it doesn’t work well on 7% of those who receive it.

Likewise, even the best crafted thought-provoking book will irritate some people, and as study after study has shown, negative reactions show up more often first and more strongly than positive reactions. This has been true in politics as well. The AMA and most businesses were initially dead-set against FDR’s Social Security proposals. Going back a bit farther, the southern states would have blocked the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution had slavery been outlawed from the beginning.

But it doesn’t always happen that way, which is why, sometimes, it’s better to think things over, from books to politics.

In the United States of today, I’ve observed two types of arrogance manifested by those who have ability and power, usually but not exclusively by males. The first type of arrogance is that typical of most elites in most societies – that they’re special and everyone should know it, even if they gained their position, power, and wealth largely aided by factors they had little to do with, such as family economic and social position.

The second kind of arrogance is the assumption that, if they can do it, anyone can, if others only work hard enough. I’ve seen this kind of arrogance manifested far more than a few times, usually by white males. I’m not saying that most of them didn’t work hard to get where they got, because many of those I know did in fact work hard, but all too often hard and even hard smart work isn’t enough.

What few of them fail to realize, or at least to acknowledge publicly, is that many of the aspects of their lives that they take for granted as “normal” are anything but normal for tens of millions of Americans, things like a stable home life growing up, having enough to eat as a child, a decent grade school and secondary education, living in a low-crime area, not having an ethnic/cultural background that makes strangers suspicious, having good role models.

Another factor that too many “self-made” individuals ignore or minimize is the role of luck and timing. I owe a great deal of my success to what I’ve learned from my wife, yet how we met was statistically effectively impossible.

A publisher once told me that the great success of a particular book/series was made possible by a set of circumstances that existed for only one five-year period ever in the publishing industry. Now, the writer in question had been published previously and could have likely continued as a successful midlist author…and perhaps eventually done better than that, but those circumstances and the fact that the publisher recognized them gave the author far greater success than others who had equal ability, but wrote earlier or later in time.

I’m not writing about myself, but in my case, I got my first and long-standing editor as a result of the intersection of three facts – the fact that I’d published a handful of stories in ANALOG, that he read short stories because he compiled anthologies, and that he recognized my last name because he’d known my cousin [with the same uncommon last name] in college. Those were just enough to get him to read my first novel… and to publish it and eventually many others. And it was pure luck, from my point of view, that he then became an editor for a publishing start-up then known as TOR.

Yes, I sold my first stories over the transom to people I’d never met, and I worked hard, damned hard, and I sent that first novel to every F&SF editor whose name and address I could find, but I’ve known lots of other authors who have worked hard and weren’t in the right place at the right time with the right book. And even after that, it took me another ten years to be able to become a full-time writer.

It’s been said by others that great success comes when hard work meets great opportunity, but hard work doesn’t always meet such opportunity. For those reasons, and quite a few others, I find that it’s arrogant when someone says, “If I can do it, anyone who works can do it.” It’s just not that simple… and it never has been.

The fatality rates of diseases, at least in theory, shouldn’t have any connection with political beliefs. That’s in theory, but since this past June, that theory has been proven wrong.

Since Delta began circulating widely in the U.S., COVID has exacted a horrific death toll on counties where Donald Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote, killing 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June. In counties where Trump won less than 32 percent of the vote, the number is about 10 out of 100,000.

In October, twenty-five (25) out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from COVID, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.

Is this a lethal political litmus test? In a way it is. Because of the vast amount of COVID misinformation circulated and accepted by Republicans, or for other factors unique to Republicans, they are far less likely to get vaccinated, and vaccination keeps the vast majority of those vaccinated from being hospitalized or dying from COVID.

A late October poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation’s COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor found that 39% of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, while just 10% of Democratic adults were unvaccinated.

Yet depending on the state and the statistics, between 89% and 98% of patients hospitalized for COVID are unvaccinated, and the current number of U.S. COVID fatalities is now at 751,000 and continuing to grow.

What I want to know is why so many Republicans believe that dying for the freedom not to be vaccinated is so glorious.

Not all election insanity or power-grabs are national. Last Tuesday, Cedar City held an election for its mayor and for two city council seats. The city’s population is roughly 36,000, and the city’s annual expenditures are [if I’ve added all the scattered budgets correctly] are around $42 million, which, besides normal government functions [administration, water, trash, sewage, parks, police, and fire] also include operating a modest airport, a municipal theatre, and a golf course.

Councilors serve four years and are paid slightly more than $13,000 annually. The mayor has a four year term and an annual salary slightly above $20,000. The City Council is the body that decides policy, and the mayor has no voting power.

On the surface, the council seat elections were unremarkable, in that the four candidates [all male – after all, this is Utah] all promised that they would be the best in guiding the city forward. The four candidates spent from $5,000 to $15,000 each on their campaigns, for a total of roughly $40,000.

The mayor’s race was another story. The two-term incumbent is a corporate attorney in her very early thirties, married to a doctor, with deep family roots in the area. She was the youngest mayor in city history and the only woman ever elected mayor. She raised over $106,000 from a variety of business and corporate sources, as well as from personal sources, but the majority of contributions came from the business and corporate sources.

Her challenger was a local businessman who had founded and expanded an extremely successful plumbing supply business for over 30 years, who put $130,000 of his own money into his campaign, and who also donated $11,000 each to the two council candidates that he favored, effectively allowing them to significantly outspend their opponents.

In the end, money won. The challenger came up a winner by a little over a hundred votes out of a little more than 7,500 cast… but only one of the two council candidates he backed happened to win.

I still have a hard time understanding why the race for a mayor’s position that pays only $20,000 a year and has no voting power ended up costing close to a quarter of a million dollars, except that the mayoral challenger clearly wanted the position.

The other day I read in the next-to-latest edition of BBC History about how the BBC was swamped with complaints about a program that depicted a Roman Legion Commander as dark-skinned. The facts – lots of them – prove that while the Romans were imperialist bastards, they didn’t give a damn about skin color. Their upper class, all across the empire, had various skin tones. So did their slaves. Power and wealth mattered, not skin color.

Yet, to this day, people deny this, along with scores of other matters that go against what they want to believe, and in this time of “pick your own news” and pick only your own facts, this trend of denialism is worsening, certainly in the United States, and apparently in at least some of Europe.

So why do intelligent people believe things that are not so? It’s not primarily a matter of intelligence. In fact, studies have shown that intelligent and well-informed people, whether conservative or liberal politically, are often more likely to use their knowledge in support of matters that are not accurate or true than are less informed individuals.

In psychological terms, denialism is a person’s choice to deny reality as a way to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth.

In theory, resolving factual disputes should be relatively straight-forward. Present strong evidence, or evidence of a strong expert consensus. Unfortunately, when scientific advice presents a picture that threatens someone’s perceived interests or ideological worldview, large numbers of people will reject those facts. The strength of rejection turns out to be related to someone’s political, religious or ethnic identity, and the strength of those identities.

In short, denial is notoriously resistant to facts because it isn’t about facts in the first place. Political or scientific denial, as well as other forms of denial, are an expression of identity – usually in the face of perceived threats to that identity.

And, unfortunately, right now, a great number of facts threaten a great number of personal identities, and many of those facts don’t appear to be going away.

I was recently featured on Con-Tinual’s “Hot Off the Press” program, along with other authors.

The Facebook version is live now at https://www.facebook.com/james.nettles/videos/6641981779153027 .

The U-Tube version should go live in a few days at: https://www.youtube.com/c/ConTinualConvention

Just because people feel strongly and voice those feelings persistently at high volume doesn’t mean that they’re right. It usually does mean than they’re feeling angry and frustrated. Sometimes, those frustrations are justifiable, as in the case of people who’ve been denied equal rights and fair treatment under law for generations.

And sometimes, they’re anything but justified. Like many Americans, I’m more than a little tired of those who shout and scream that the last election was stolen. It wasn’t. They lost fair and square, as shown by the numbers, counted in more states by Republicans than by Democrats, but the people who stormed the Capital on January 6th, as well as many others, continue to refuse to believe that. But such individuals equate their “cause” with those of civil rights protestors and black and other activists.

The difference between the two “groups” is simple. The civil rights and most other activists have the law and the facts on their side. They also had the numbers of the election results. The “Trump-related activists” just have anger that they didn’t win an election that Trump then tried to steal. They’re also angry that the other guys might have gotten a little more power. So they shout and scream louder.

The same is true of the conflict arising over vaccinations. I’ve read and heard a great deal from both sides, but the plain fact is that vaccinations work on an individual level, and the Covid vaccinations have a higher level of effectiveness than any flu vaccine, as well as many others.

All the arguments against the vaccinations are, from what I can tell, based on the literature, flawed or theoretical. The facts are simple. Over 93% [roughly] of the hospitalizations and deaths are among the unvaccinated. So the vaccines don’t last forever. Many don’t. So they don’t stop the spread. Of course, they don’t, not when anywhere from thirty to fifty percent [or more] of the population, depending on the state and locale, aren’t vaccinated.

Yet far too many Americans, including many considered intelligent, ignore the basic numbers in so many areas and argue, vociferously, on the basis of feelings not grounded in hard fact or grounded in hard facts that are largely irrelevant.

Millionaires argue for lower taxes, saying that all that excess wealth creates jobs, and it does, but far too many of those jobs pay so little that those who hold them live below the poverty line, and with each reduction in tax rates for the wealthy income inequality and the federal deficit and debt increase.

The numbers show that negative media and Facebook presentations gain more supporters than balanced or positive ones, which is one case where following the numbers “works,” at least for those owning those media outlets.

Just follow the hard basic numbers and learn what they mean, not what you think they mean.

The so-called labor shortages facing the U.S. today are the result of a number of underlying factors, some of which have been ignored or dismissed.

A study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis reveals that more than three million baby-boomers retired early. While the study doesn’t and likely can’t quantify the reasons, the most probable reasons are attractive incentives to retire early, discomfort with COVID in the workplace, and layoffs or forced retirements of older workers.

In addition, I know, if anecdotally, of hundreds of senior white collar job layoffs across a range of institutions and professions, and most of those individuals are going to find it difficult, if not impossible to find similar or equivalent positions, which will mean that many are unlikely to return to the workforce unless absolutely necessary. Law firms also aren’t hiring as many law school graduates as in previous years. As a result, those remaining in many organizations are being pressured to produce more, and those workplaces are becoming more stressful, which is leading to more departures and retirements. And paradoxically, the result is a slowly growing shortage of people with the same skills as those who were forced out, but those who were forced out appear reluctant to re-enter the workforce under current conditions.

I also know a number of small-business people who have been looking for workers, sometimes for well over a year, but can’t find people who even want to interview. I see signs everywhere saying, “Now Hiring,” or the equivalent. So there’s clearly an imbalance between the jobs that are open and what they pay and/or require in terms of working conditions and those who are unemployed or seeking jobs.

In certain fields, those imbalances have existed for years. There are far more trained singers, either classical or in any other musical genre, than there are available jobs. The same is true of theatre arts graduates. Creative MFA programs turn out far more would-be authors than can be published.

Yet there are shortages of workers in skilled trades.

The other day, I spent some time at a highly regarded and accredited post-high-school technical training school. While the institution’s graduates are in demand, those available jobs are located in other towns and cities. For example, there are jobs available for every automotive technician being graduated – if they’re willing to leave Cedar City. At around 50,000 people, Cedar City just isn’t big enough to provide jobs for all of them. So while their skills are needed elsewhere, the “entry costs” [i.e., housing, transportation, moving expenses] to relocate to those communities are often almost prohibitive. And if a family has two parents working, which has become more and more economically necessary, relocation may cost the other parent a job.

This doesn’t occur just here, either. In many east coast areas, people are commuting hours each way because they can’t afford decent housing and schools for their children closer to their jobs. Women often can’t work because they can’t find reliable, affordable, and decent childcare.

But, so far, I don’t see politicians and businesses addressing these and other structural imbalances… and with the comparatively smaller numbers of workers in generations younger than the baby-boomers, these worker shortages/imbalances aren’t going away any time soon.

At the time when the Founding Fathers codified freedom of speech, they had few illusions about the press or its truthfulness, but at that time, they were used to untruthfulness being applied more to character and personal acts, or to failures in acting responsibly. While there were instances of false news and manufactured blatant non-personal falsehoods, since media consisted largely of local newspapers and broadsheets, the impact of such was largely restricted to specific and limited numbers of cities.

Even with the growth of newspaper chains in the 1890s, it took significant personal and corporate resources to manufacture and spread totally false and incorrect news on a wide regional or national scale. This was largely the case until roughly the early 1990s, when the internet and low-cost and sophisticated electronics made low-budget national media campaigns possible, including those spreading total falsehoods. But the full impact of the Media Revolution didn’t really register on the public consciousness until after the Founding of Fox News in 1996, and particularly after Roger Ailes became CEO in 2001.

The greatest danger of false news is that so much of it is designed to appeal to people’s emotions, rather than to their intelligence, and it’s often so well designed that even highly intelligent people are sucked into believing things which are factually untrue. A peer-reviewed study by researchers at New York University and the Université Grenoble Alpes in France has found that from August 2020 to January 2021, news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, and interactions as did more trustworthy news sources, such as CNN, BBC, or the World Health Organization.

Under current statutory and case law, it is perfectly legal to print absolute falsehoods, no matter how untrue or outrageous, so long as they do not cause verifiable and provable damage to an individual, and usually that damage must have an economic component.

One of the legal rationales for this is the idea that any law that criminalizes falsehoods places the definition of a falsehood in hands of the government, which can and, in the past, has led to the destruction of freedom of speech.

In the end, the only thing that can halt the spread and growth of misinformation, falsehoods, and disinformation is for individuals to monitor their sources of information for accuracy, rather than for comfort – and that’s largely contrary to human nature, which means that false news is here to stay. Because it is here to stay, it’s likely that a greater number of politicians will espouse views and actions unsupported by facts or even reality.

Welcome to the world of newspeak.

As a recent and continuing victim of supply chain woes, I not only have a personal interest in the problem, but a definitely professional one – because I don’t get paid the last of the advance on Isolate until the book is printed and published, and it appears likely that its publication date will be moved again (although this is not yet certain) because of the impact these issues are having on the printing industry. I’m far from the only author having these difficulties, which include some of the largest best-sellers in F&SF, and which will before long, if not already, affect a great number of authors who rely on the sales of actual printed books.

Too many people are blaming most if not all of the delays and problems on COVID, but while COVID may indeed be a contributing factor, what COVID also did was reveal the near-fatal [at least I hope they’re near-fatal, rather than fatal] flaws in the current U.S. and world economic structures.

Some time ago, I pointed out the fragility of an economy and an industrial structure based so heavily on “just-in-time” delivery systems and suggested that this could prove problematic and have wide-spread repercussions. When companies don’t have inventory of products and of components and parts, the smallest disruption can halt production, and many corporations are facing more than small disruptions. These repercussions also appear to be increasing rather than decreasing, and they’re being complicated by other problems.

A record number of employees quit their jobs in August. They weren’t furloughed, fired, or laid off. They quit, and they quit at a time when wages are increasing. A recent study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company found that while corporations thought employees were most motivated by money, the leading complaints by workers were that they felt undervalued, overworked, and that corporations didn’t really care about them or listen to them.

Amazon may be raising wages, but it’s also raising the pressure to “produce” to the point that more than a few employees have stated that they don’t even have time for bathroom breaks.

The difficulty in finding sufficient retail and service industry employees will likely mean that consumers will turn more to Amazon and other online delivery platforms at a time when those delivery systems are already overloaded, and when there’s already a shortage of truck drivers.

It’s not just in business, either. School systems and higher education are facing more and more disgruntled employees, especially teachers and professors who feel that they’re pressured to compromise on standards, to coddle students who are unmotivated and undisciplined, and to turn out “numbers” rather than quality.

Shortages of trained medical professionals at all levels are increasing, both from deaths and disabilities and from burnout caused by continual overwork.

Add to these the growing demand for electronics/computerization in all fields and the fact that certain key resources are limited both by design and by physical scarcity and/or production difficulties.

Good systems that can endure hardships and shortages incorporate redundancies, back-up plans, contingency planning, and additional staff, but those cost money, and the emphasis on immediate results, maximum profits, and minimizing costs means that when disruptions occur, small problems escalate into larger ones, and larger ones can become catastrophes.

And that’s exactly where we’re heading. Even if we muddle through this time, the odds are that the lure of low costs and higher profits will drive business back into the same rut… with even worse results the next time… assuming there is a next time.

There’s a very simple rule about making laws. You have to have the votes. Right now, the Democrats barely have the votes for the second “infrastructure” [for social/environmental programs] bill if the total cost is somewhere in the vicinity of $2 trillion [or possibly less] over ten years. They can’t possibly get that $3.5 trillion bill that they want, because they do not have the votes.

All the gnashing of teeth, all the crying out about the unfairness, or the need to reduce the inequalities of opportunity and wealth mean nothing without the votes to pass a more expensive bill. The simple fact is that those votes are not there, and it’s highly unlikely they will be in this Congress. It’s even more unlikely that they will be there in the next Congress, given that the political party in control has almost always lost votes in a mid-term election.

The sensible course is for Democrats to negotiate within their own party for the best they can get support for and pass it now. They certainly won’t have any more votes next year, since next year is an election year and political positions will become even more entrenched. That means there will be even less chance to pass a large bill.

If they pass whatever they can this year, it’s better for them than passing nothing, and if, miracle of miracles, they actually gain seats in the mid-term elections, then they can revisit the issues in 2023.

But Democrats being Democrats, it appears likely that all the Republicans have to do is to do what they always do best – and that’s nothing, because the Democrats appear to be on the road to accomplishing nothing at all because the “progressives” in the party don’t have the votes for what they want, and, in demonstrating their purity and resolve not to accept less than what they’re demanding, they’re destroying not only their chances for improving matters for their constituents, but they’re also eroding support for their President, which will make it even harder for them to hold seats in Congress in the mid-term elections, let alone pick up seats.

As I’ve said before, you have to get the votes before you can enact the policies you champion. And right now, the Republicans and the more conservative Democrats have the votes, and the way the “progressive” Democrats are acting, it’s likely to stay that way.

Arrogance has always been distasteful to me, but recent “debates” on this website and in the public arena about COVID have demonstrated a great deal of arrogance. Two categories, in particular, stand out: arrogance of the able/entitled and arrogance of the comparative young.

I will freely admit that I had advantages growing up, particularly being raised in an intact, caring, economically stable, and quietly disciplined family; being given the advantage of a good education by my family; and inheriting decent genes. None of these advantages were my doing, but those basic advantages gave me a far better personal foundation upon which to build a future and several different careers than millions of people who were born at the same time. This is nothing new. It’s been that way at least since the beginning of towns and cities.

The problem is that far too many people of modest or even greater accomplishment discount those basic but unseen advantages and claim, variously, that they accomplished what they have all on their own, or that others could do the same if they weren’t lazy, or that their superiority is innate. Yet study after study has shown that accomplishments are the result of a myriad of factors, roughly half genetic and half environmental, most of which factors we do not control, especially when we’re young. But too many people of “ability” and/or accomplishment, especially, disproportionately, Caucasian males, have the arrogance to assert or imply that the failures of those less fortunate are entirely their own fault, and, even if that’s not so, there’s no reason to help them or even try to improve equality of opportunity in society.

The other form of arrogance revealed in the COVID debate is the dismissal of older people, immuno-compromised people, and others who are not healthy young adults as not worth protecting because the length or type of life they have remaining is somehow less valuable.

I did a quick check of people who accomplished notable achievements late in life, and that list is anything but short, but I include some examples. Winston Churchill was 65 when he became Prime Minister at the beginning of WWII, and it’s doubtful that there was anyone else who could have done what he did (since every other leading British politician had already botched matters). Peter Roget created the first effective thesaurus when he was 73. Darwin didn’t publish On the Origin of Species until he was 50. Louis Pasteur was 63 when he developed and proved the effectiveness of his rabies vaccine. Rita Levi-Montalcini won a Nobel Prize for her discoveries about the nerve growth factor at age 79 and made additional significant discoveries for almost another decade. At 55, Pablo Picasso completed his masterpiece, Guernica. At 88, Michelangelo created the architectural plans for the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri. Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the “Little House on the Prairie” book series, was 64 when she published her first work, Little House in the Big Woods. Benjamin Franklin was 70 when he signed the Declaration of Independence. Then, of course, there’s Stephen Hawking, who was anything but hale and healthy for most of his life.

The value of a life can be “measured” in many ways – by accomplishments, by character, by the changes in the lives of others resulting from one’s acts or failures to act, by the amassing of influence and power, but why are those, or other measurements, not applied to older, immuno-compromised, or disabled individuals, rather than considering them of less worth or consideration merely because of their age or physical frailty? Or is youth, which is so often wasted on the young, so much more important?

I certainly learned more from older teachers and older mentors than from those younger, yet many of the views I’ve seen expressed suggest that, rather than require a minimal effort of others, such as a vaccination, politicians and policy makers would rather subject older people and those more vulnerable to greater danger. And if those who suggest such an approach do succeed in establishing such a precedent, will they go “gentle into that good night” or will they “rage against the dying of the light” [of civility and care] when it comes their turn to be minimized or disregarded? [With thanks to Dylan Thomas].

Many years ago, when I was eased out of a position, essentially dehired, my soon-to-be previous employer made a comment along the lines that he didn’t mind so much my calling a spade a spade, but he drew the line at my calling it a “God-damned shovel.”

Well, it’s shovel time. I’m sick and tired of the anti-vaxxers, the anti-maskers, the apologists for those who endanger everyone else by refusing to follow tried and effective public health practices. Those practices work, and they work not just for COVID-19. Last year, because of masking and social distancing, the number of flu cases dropped by roughly 95%.

There hasn’t been much recognition of that fact, especially by the anti-maskers and the “I want my personal freedom” crowd.

Vaccines work. Just look at who’s in the hospital and dying — and at the vast majority who aren’t.

But too many people are saying words to the effect of “protect yourself and let the stupid ones die.” The problem with that approach is that millions of people are still vulnerable, either because they can’t be vaccinated, because they’re stupid or ignorant, or because those who control their health decisions are. My wife the professor has college students who are afraid to get vaccinated because their parents oppose vaccinations. Small children can’t be vaccinated. Older people who are immuno-compromised and vaccinated can still get COVID, and some small percentage will die despite taking every preventive step they could. Even those who recover from COVID may face lifelong negative health consequences.

And the “freedom” crowd persists in saying that people should have the right to make an informed decision. Vaccinations have a minuscule negative effect, but when a large group of people fails to get vaccinated, the impact on the rest of the population is significant – witness the continuing death toll. So a decision not to get vaccinated isn’t just a personal decision; it has a significant adverse public impact. Even if “you” escape the consequences of COVID, “Your” freedom can and will kill other people, even if you don’t know them.

One real problem is that too many policy-makers and politicians refuse to admit that a great number of people are in fact stupid or ill-informed, and their ignorance results in too many innocents dying. Public health measures are called “public” because they affect everyone. School systems require vaccination for something like ten diseases, and most of them aren’t as deadly as COVID, but idiot legislators across the U.S. are forbidding COVID vaccine mandates, either because they’re afraid they’ll lose votes, or because they have no understanding of public health requirements, or because they’re idiots, possibly well-meaning, but still idiots who don’t want to admit, either publicly or privately, that a significant fraction of any population isn’t that well informed or intelligent.

But this shouldn’t be a great surprise. Too many Americans have been ignoring reality for years, coddling their children, turning their eyes from ongoing economic and educational dysfunction, supporting political philosophies and decisions that cannot work over time, and extolling freedoms that, in actuality, don’t exist for everyone. And now they’re insisting that everyone is rational and can make an “informed” decision and that everything will be fine if we let them make that decision.

Can I interest you in buying a large used bridge in California?

I’ve called the Republican Party “the party of No,” but this stance by the GOP predates Trump, although he certainly amplified and took advantage of the negativity of Republicans. And I’m certainly not the only one to make that observation.

So why do Republicans continue to oppose almost everything – except lower taxes? And, by the way, lower taxes are essentially opposition to existing government programs in general.

It strikes me that there are several reasons. First, most Democratic proposals involve change, and the majority of people, including many Democrats, are wary of or opposed to change.

Second, many policies that Republicans champion, just like lower taxes, are essentially negative in their impact on most people. Being violently pro-life is a restriction of a woman’s right to decide her own reproductive freedom, especially when some pro-life proposals essentially tacitly condone rape and incest. Proposing to cut back on federal regulations on business almost always results in allowing greater harm to people and the environment.

Third, and possibly most important, recent studies, including studies on the impact of Facebook postings and algorithms, show that people are more likely to get physically and emotionally involved when they are encouraged to oppose something than when they support something.

In addition, almost every policy change or legislative proposal will have opponents, and the opponents tend to be more vocal and angry than the supporters, which is why, even though anti-vaxxers are a small minority, they create more visible support, as well as unrest and violence, than those who support vaccination. The same is true of white-supremacists. Thus, a policy of negativity generates more support, particularly among conservatives, who are already wary of change, while it’s harder to get support from Republicans, and even some Democrats, for proposals or legislation that would change the system away from what people believe or are familiar with.

In effect, Republicans are wagering, often successfully, on negativity as the best way to maintain and/or gain popular support.

The current legislative battle over the budget, debt ceiling, and federal spending between Republicans and Democrats will result in disaster, no matter who claims “victory.” That’s because it’s a battle between a bad/flawed approach to dealing with the nation’s problems and a failure to even attempt to address the problems.

The Democrats recognize the majority of the problems, if not all of them, by any means, but their “solutions” in too many cases consist of throwing more money at flawed government programs. Sometimes, more funding is necessary. You aren’t going to get more women back in the work force without more childcare options, and “private” options are more expensive than what many women could earn. You won’t get better healthcare for veterans without more and better doctors. You can’t fix bridges and roads without spending more money. We have national parks that are overcrowded and falling apart for lack of maintenance funding… and so on.

But other spending is insane. Why should we spend tens of billions more subsidizing a failing higher education system? We already have millions of “graduates” who will never have a job requiring a college education, largely because they lack skills in basic reading, writing, calculating and problem-solving, skills that have to be taught and learned young. We need education reforms that start at the bottom, not at the top, and offer true equality of opportunity for students with ability and determination, not a free pass to watered-down education for everyone.

We spend unnecessary billions on bases and weapons and military procurement that even the most hawkish generals and admirals don’t need or want.

We spend billions on expensive emergency room health care because we don’t provide basic affordable health care for the poorest Americans.

The current Republican “solution” seems to be to spend less on all programs, good and bad, to build useless border walls, and to push for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans at a time of the greatest income and wealth inequality in U.S. history.

The likely result of the current “battle” is spending less than the Democrats are demanding and more than the Republicans will offer, with a possible stand-off that will worsen the economic situation. In the end, the Democrats will probably “win,” most possibly with a Pyrrhic victory, because the Republicans offer no real alternative… and even if the Republicans do “win” they have no real plan for the country, with the result that matters will be even worse, because the problems aren’t going away, and all too many of the proposed “solutions” don’t address the root causes, and just provide costly “bandages.”

As I have noted in “News” section of the website, the release/publication date of Isolate has been pushed back another two weeks, along with fifteen other Tor books, because of capacity problems with the printing firm. Those capacity problems result from a shortage of qualified and skilled workers.

For years, I’ve been making several points that most politicians and most of the American public seems unwilling to understand and face. First, credentials don’t automatically equate to ability. Second, a significant percentage of college graduates still can’t read or write effectively and lack basic mathematics skills, skills that need to be taught not in college [because it’s too late for virtually all students to learn those skills when they’re that old], but on the elementary school level. As a result, college undergraduate degrees are an expensive waste of money for at least half of those who enter college every year. Third, very, very few students at any level are being taught to think or solve problems. And fourth, most students are unfamiliar with real work and seem unable to concentrate on work or anything else, except possibly their cellphones and video games, for any length of time.

The result of these factors is that the United States officially has more job openings than unemployed individuals. In reality, those numbers don’t include voluntarily unemployed individuals or those who have given up looking for jobs.

I read a report the other day dealing with these issues, a report that contained the conclusions that businesses essentially aren’t hiring many people without experience except at the very lowest levels in services and sales… and that most unemployed individuals and those entering the workforce aren’t interested in such jobs.

The other day I was tied up with various chores and decided that, rather than head home and fix something to eat, I’d grab something from one of the various fast food outlets that abound in the college town that is Cedar City. Except I ended up fixing a late lunch at home because after discovering that the drive-in facilities at the first four outlets I tried [at 2:00 in the afternoon] were so jammed it would have been a half hour wait – for drive-in service, because they’d all closed their lobbies until 4:00 because of staff shortages, at least according to the signs they’d posted.

We’re going to see much more of delayed production and unavailable services because the generations who knew how to think and work are getting too old to keep doing it, and because too many of the younger generations lack the skills, can’t or won’t concentrate, and want to be paid more than businesses can afford.

The problem is compounded because too many businesses don’t want to invest in training people for a variety of reasons, some valid, and some because of a short-sighted emphasis on short-term profits and because the public education system is failing too many students on the basic level, while overspending on unneeded and unnecessary higher education that isn’t preparing students for the real world while loading them up with student debt.

But, if you think the computerization/ automation of jobs is bad now? Just wait until you’re not only arguing with online and telephone automated systems, but with drive-in restaurant computers that keep telling you can’t get what you want or ordered because of supply chain delays.