Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Walgreens’ Pharmacy Problems

Walgreens has 9,000 locations in the United States, and, this week, in something like 200 of them, pharmacists are walking off the job, citing stress, understaffing, changing schedules at the last moment, and inadequate training for pharmacy staff.

This couldn’t come at a worse moment for Walgreens, whose stock value has roughly dropped fifty percent over the last year, and whose earnings aren’t improving significantly., and whose CEO departed recently. The company blames some of the problem on the fallout from fewer Covid vaccinations and says that the walkouts are limited to a few stores.

But, from what little I’ve seen, the problems are far worse than the company admits, and affect more than just a few locations.

We have a single Walgreens here in Cedar City, and it’s also where my wife and I get vaccinations, as a great many people do, because there aren’t that many options in Cedar City. It’s also not one of the stores cited as having walkouts.

Two years ago, I could call the store and get an appointment for a vaccination. Last year, Walgreens implemented a mandatory national vaccination schedule. Even if the pharmacy was empty, you had to go online to get an appointment.

This year I scheduled an appointment for Covid and flu vaccines. When I arrived, I was told that the Covid vaccine hadn’t arrived and that the store hadn’t been told the vaccine would be delayed in enough time to contact people – if, indeed, they’d had enough staff to do so, which they didn’t. Now… the staff was pleasant, and apologetic. And I got the flu vaccine quickly, with little fuss … and waited to reschedule the Covid shot. I also noted that the pharmacy staff never stopped moving, except to wait on people or answer the telephone.

When my wife went to get her vaccination, after the Covid vaccine arrived, despite the advance registration, the waiting time was forty-five minutes because the pharmacy didn’t have enough staff.

I’ve thought back, and over the past three years, that Walgreens appears to have changed almost all the pharmacy staff at least three times. I’ve had a different pharmacist or pharmacy tech give me a shot each time, and yet there are never more than five or six people working in the pharmacy.

So… I’m inclined to believe the pharmacists who attribute the problem to management, and I also suspect that management needs to pay more attention to operations than to the stock price.

No Perfect Solution

Americans are dissatisfied, in a wide range of areas, but particularly in their current political choices, and I’m afraid that the dissatisfaction is only going to get worse because, as a nation, we refuse to face certain realities.

The first unpleasant reality is that no society, even the U.S., can offer the higher standard of living which most Americans want to all its population (unless the society is small and relatively homogenous). In the U.S., there aren’t enough resources and energy sources to do that (not to mention the “small” problem that using that much energy would increase global warming). The second is that we’re producing twice as many college graduates for high-paying “elite” jobs than there are jobs, which means that more than half of those degree holders are unlikely to ever be able to pay back the debt they’ve incurred in pursuit of those degrees, and each year those numbers increase, and so does dissatisfaction.

Then there’s the fact that tens of millions of people outside the U.S. are more than willing to come here, because almost any form of subsistence in the U.S. is better than what they face where they are, and there’s at least some hope by coming here.

Add to that the fact that the majority of Americans are looking for a one-size-fits-all perfect solution. No system, plan, or method works perfectly all the time, and the greater the diversity of those relaying on a system and the greater the range of problems the system has to deal with, the lower the probability of agreement among the users of the system. For large systems to work, political or economic, compromise is necessary, like it or not.

On top of that, a significant percentage of Americans don’t want to compromise. Those with great wealth are piling up more wealth, and those with few or no financial resources feel their comparative situation is worsening. The wealthy have the political power and resources to avoid compromising, and the poor have comparatively less and less.

All of these facts and factors are well-known. They’re everywhere. So what are our politicians doing to address them?

In recent political debates, especially among Republicans, I’ve observed that, for the most part, the politicians who assess the current situation more realistically and also advocate at least semi-realistic changes appear to be the least popular. I see the same problem among the Democrats.

Could it be that everyone fears that any actual realistic solution will hurt them or go against what they believe? And that any politician who’s realistic faces getting thrown out of office?

It’s certainly possible, since the U.S. continues to spend far more than its revenues and the politicians appear unable to cut spending (because too many people will suffer) and unable to raise taxes on the wealthy (despite the greatest income disparity in U.S. history)… and yet they’re unwilling to work out a realistic compromise, because it’s clear that too many voters find compromise unacceptable… and are demanding the unworkable and unobtainable perfect solution.

The “Dickens” Approach

I’d venture to say that the vast majority of Americans have encountered something written by Charles Dickens, even if it’s only one of the movie versions of A Christmas Carol, or perhaps high school English class required reading of A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, or David Copperfield.

One of the aspects of Dickens that has always bothered me about his work is the lack of loose ends. As one New York Times book reviewer wrote years ago, “Dickens seduced his readers with atmosphere and then clubbed them with coincidence. He dreaded loose ends – no one has ever tied up his literary anxieties with more circumstantial knots.”

While Dickens has been criticized for “paper” main characters, excessive sentiment, and a reliance on fortuitous circumstances, what bothered me more was the lack of loose ends. Even as a student in high school, it always seemed to me that life was filled with meaningless death and loose ends.

Over the years, I’ve seen that novelists certainly recognize and often overdo meaningless deaths, if sometimes imbuing deaths with more meaning than they actually have, but some seem to work too hard to tie up all the loose ends, even if that seldom happens in real life, which is far less tidy than fiction.

But today, as in Dickens’s time, a great many readers enjoy having all the loose ends tied up and feel that the only loose ends that shouldn’t be tied up are those that will indeed be tied up in the sequel. This is natural, given that life is indeed untidy, and one of the reasons people read novels is not only to be entertained, but also to be challenged, as well as given a sense of meaning or order in life.

As a result of my feelings about loose ends, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I leave more than a few loose ends in any novel, some of which will never be resolved, and that just might be because I have the feeling that, more often than not, the only order and meaning in life come from what individuals and their societies create, and that no one is capable of tying up all the loose ends in life.

But that also might explain, at least partly, why I don’t have a best-seller like Tale of Two Cities, which, tied-up loose ends and all, has sold more than 200 million copies and is still selling, more than a century and a half after the author’s death.

“Freedom Caucus”

Right now, it appears as though the main objective of the right-wing Republicans in the U.S. House isn’t to improve government, or to adopt a sensible federal budget, or even to keep the government going, but to attack and try to impeach President Joe Biden because he beat Donald Trump in the last election.

To me, it also seems as though the Republicans in the House have forgotten that they live in a representative democracy where they need to consider the views of all the people, not just those in their districts who elected them. Right now, the far-right wing in the House has little or no interest in working policy matters out, despite some of their rhetoric. Even the rhetoric is totally unrealistic – just how are they going to pass eleven appropriations bills in a few days, when in nine months the Republican leadership has only been able to get one relatively non-controversial appropriations bill passed by the House?

The Republican right is far more interested in imposing their views on everyone else, just like Trump (not to mention Tommy Tuberville) wants to do, regardless of the Constitution and long-standing political processes and practices.

It apparently doesn’t matter to those of the far right that the overwhelming majority of Americans want some form of legal abortion close to what Roe v. Wade provided. It doesn’t matter that the majority of Americans doesn’t want government shutdowns, or massive cuts in Medicare or Medicaid, or the freezing of military promotions. And, of course, the far-right wants also wants to stop all investigations and prosecutions of those involved in the January 6th insurrection and attempts to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. They also want to close the U.S. southern border, but have no workable plan (and will never be able to implement one without turning the U.S. into a total autocracy, as I’ve discussed earlier).

And, ironically, despite all their efforts to run over everyone else’s rights, they persist in calling themselves the “Freedom Caucus.”

Anger Stupidifies Americans

A recent ABC news poll finds Trump almost ten points ahead of President Biden in a head-to-head match-up.

How is it that a man convicted of sexual abuse and sequential tax evasion, who’s also facing four more criminal indictments and 91 felony counts, is outpolling the President who’s accomplished more legislatively in two years than any other President in at least a decade, if not longer, and, messy as it was, finally extracted the United States from a seemingly endless war in Afghanistan?

How is it that Biden gets blamed for the inflation that was started by overspending in the Trump administration? How is it that the most pro-labor President in decades is losing labor votes to a billionaire whose every action in the private sector prior to becoming president effectively minimized or screwed labor and their employers?

How is it that people worry so much more about Biden’s age than Trump’s, especially since there’s not that much difference in age between the two, and since Trump is a convicted criminal and a serial liar who takes enormous liberties with the facts, a behavior far more indicative of senility than Biden’s occasional speech gaffes (which he’s had most of his life, possibly the result of a childhood problem with stuttering)?

In addition, the poll shows that more people blame Biden than Trump for Congress’s failure to act to stop a government shutdown, when the shutdown is being caused by the right wing of the Republican party, and when the Republicans control the House, and so far have only been able to pass one minor appropriations bill.

The only answer that makes sense is anger at rising prices and government’s failure to deal with issues – most of which failure lies with Congress, not with Biden.

But right now, it appears the majority of Americans are so blinded with anger that they honestly can’t see or think straight… and that’s a real problem.

Pot and Kettle?

Some pundits and many Americans seem think that both political parties are equally corrupt. Now, I know as well as anyone that facts seldom change anyone’s mind, but I can always hope that some day it might happen.

As for the equal corruption… let’s see how the Republicans stack up.

Exhibit #1 – Donald Trump. In addition to four pending criminal indictments, with 91 separate criminal charges, he also lost a civil lawsuit for defamation in which he was found guilty of sexual assault, and now faces another charge of defamation in which he’s again been found guilty, but hasn’t yet been sentenced. Trump and the Trump companies were found guilty of gross tax evasion. He also paid hush money to a porn star not to reveal his sexual relations with her.

In addition, the following Trump aides were charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison: campaign chair Paul Manafort; former campaign vice chairman, Rick Gates; former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen; former adviser and former campaign aide, Roger Stone; former campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos; Trump Organization’s former CFO, Allen Weisselberg. Also, former White House national security advisor Michael Flynn was charged and convicted, as were Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, and Elliot Broidy, vice chair of Trump’s inaugural committee.

Finally, those charges don’t include criminal charges against more than eighteen other individuals that are still in the process of being litigated.

Exhibit #2 – Ken Paxton. Over 21 years, the Republican Texas Attorney general has been charged with duping investors, using inside information illegally for profit, using his office to interfere in legal proceedings on behalf of a friend, using government funds to hire outside counsel to investigate his political enemies. The Republican dominated Texas State House impeached Paxton, with 70% of the Republicans supporting impeachment, but the Texas State Senate acquitted him on all charges. In the meantime, Paxton was indicted in federal court for criminal fraud in lying to financial institutions and faces a federal trial.

Exhibit #3 – Republican Congressman George Santos. Indicted on 13 felony counts, including wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and making materially false statements to the House of Representatives.

Exhibit #4 – Republican Congressman Jeff Fortenberry. Convicted in March of three felonies involving lying to federal investigators and concealing illegal campaign donations.

On the other side, all the Republicans seem able to do is to claim that Hunter Biden failed to pay his taxes on time, that he used drugs, and bought a gun while under the influence. But Hunter Biden isn’t even an officeholder, and so far, with all their rhetoric and hearings, Republicans have yet to come up with any evidence involving his father, just as they never could come up with criminal evidence against Hillary Clinton. Also, isn’t a little strange that the Republicans are hounding Hunter Biden about $2 million in fees he received from Ukrainian businesses, but they seem to have forgotten the $2 billion that Ivanka’s husband Jared Kusher got from the Saudis?

I’m not saying that Democratic national political figures are blameless or that some haven’t been convicted of felonies, because some have been, but never recently on this scale. In recent years, however, there’s no comparison in corruption on the national level… and by the way, Watergate was also a Republican example of corruption, with real evidence and jail sentences.

What You Don’t See

As some readers may know, we have dogs and cats – well, we’ve downsized in more than one way. We’re down to two dogs and one cat, and the dogs are both dachshunds.

One of our dachshunds was supposed to be a miniature English cream longhair, but with dachshund puppies you often can’t tell. When we got him, he looked like the others in his litter. Then after a month or so, he developed whiskers like a wire-haired dachshund, but his ears were smooth like a short-haired dachshund, even as his coat began to grow out like a long-hair. That coat turned into a mixture of gold and reddish brown, but it was neither long nor short.

We began looking at dachshund pictures. After looking at hundreds, if not thousands, we found one that looked like him. One. Later we found a few others. More research determined that he looked like what one book described as a short-coat wheaten – considered by many of the texts and tomes we perused as the rarest color for a dachshund – although, as we discovered, dachshunds come in quite an array of colors.

The other thing that bothered us was that he didn’t bark. Oh, he was verbal, but it was and still is a whine-whimper that ranged from questioning to pleading to insistently demanding. He was affectionate and enthusiastic, but didn’t bark.

All of this provided the background for Rudy, the dachshund protagonist of “The Unexpected Dachshund” in the animal rescuers anthology Instinct. And like Rudy, finally, at age two, our boy began to bark.

But there’s more to the story. Dachshunds were originally bred to hunt badgers or other largish rodents. Our short-coat wheaten has never had any interest in such, but any bird he can see, anywhere nearby, any size, large or small, and he’s off like a shot. He’s caught one, which I managed to rescue before any apparent damage was inflicted, but his enthusiasm is unabated.

The other day I took him out in the back yard, and he began to bark, insistently. There was no one around. No birds in the evergreens, no cats, and no other dogs, either, except our other dachshund, an older black long-hair, and she was contently rolling in the grass, clean grass, mind you, because she’s very prim and tidy, but, had there been any other dog or person around, she definitely would have sounded the alarm.

But our boy kept barking, and finally I looked up. Our supposedly rodent-hunting miniature wheaten dachshund hadn’t been distracted at all from his self-discovered calling – despite the top of his head being only a foot off the ground, his concentration was focused thirty feet in the air on the top of our neighbor’s roof at four huge ravens having some sort of raven conclave, with low muttering caws so unlike their usual piercingly ugly call.

The unexpected dachshund birddog.

Rewarding Falsehoods

Both the Democrats and the Republicans continue to spend more money than the government takes in.

The Republicans say that they want to cut spending, but only on programs that benefit the poor and working classes, while cutting taxes paid by well-off Americans, and allowing programs that benefit business and the rich to continue uncut, while the Democrats continue to press for expanding social programs they can’t fund, except through deficits.

When somewhere around 23% of this year’s federal spending requires running a deficit, neither political party is behaving rationally, but then, we all know that the term “responsible politician” is an oxymoron.

But why are politicians unwilling to face up to the problem?

The answer is simple. Any politician who goes anywhere close to telling unpleasant factual truths quickly gets attacked and voted out of office. Of, if they’re “fortunate,” like Nikki Haley, when she pointed out that both political parties were responsible for inflation and excessive spending, they’re simply ignored.

But it’s worse than that. In today’s political climate, politicians who tell, time after time, popular political and economic falsehoods get rewarded by a public that also doesn’t want to hear unpleasant truths.

You can’t have lower taxes and all the programs people have come to rely upon without running a deficit or increasing taxes. You can’t have an all-volunteer military without paying them more. You won’t get better teachers with higher standards unless you pay them more. You can’t have less expensive consumer goods without offshoring or automating production of those goods, and either way reduces industrial jobs in the U.S. You can’t keep producing more college graduates, when the economy requires only half the number of graduates, without increasing the debt-loads of the graduates who can’t get higher paid jobs. You can’t keep increasing income inequality in the United States without creating more and more anger and resentment.

But no one wants to hear any of this, least of all the majority of politicians, all of whom insist that they’re not like that.

Oh, Really?

Maybe I’m missing something, but I was under the impression that one of the “benefits” of satellite networks like Direct TV and Dish was to obtain programming free of all those annoying ads, but now ads are appearing in the middle of movies – even movies made decades ago. And while the profits of Hollywood studios are down, those of Netflix, Amazon, and a few others are way up.

Ad breaks used to be a few minutes, but on satellite and cable networks, now they’re often five minutes long. And sports TV/internet is now using split-screen technology so that you get a silent picture of the “action” on one side and a loud commercial on the other side. And yes, advertising revenues are way, way up.

And, oh, yes, my monthly internet access bill went up 40%, unannounced, last month.

So, with all the revenues from this vast array of news and entertainment going up and up, exactly why are the real content providers, i.e., the writers and actors (the majority of them, not the super high-paid stars) getting stiffed and striking? And why do the media giants complain that they can’t afford real people? To pay for the exorbitant pay of high executives, perhaps?

As a provider of entertainment content myself, I can see that the list price of one of my fantasy hardcovers has gone from $21 in 1991 to $32 in 2023, an increase of slightly more than 50%. That’s over 32 years, which amounts to an increase of 34 cents a year, or an annual price increase of under 2% (not exactly exorbitant). In the meantime, my property taxes have doubled, and to replace my 2009 SUV would cost twice much as I paid for it.

But I’m one of the more fortunate authors. I know a number who no longer can make a living from their writing or who couldn’t save enough and afford good enough health insurance and who’ve been financially and sometimes physically destroyed. I’ve seen editors sacked by publisher after publisher, with downsizing after downsizing.

And, unhappily, this isn’t just happening in the entertainment industry. The IT industry is famous for hiring young talent comparatively cheaply and then laying off more experienced (and higher paid) technical staff in their forties and fifties, and sometimes younger.

Academia used to rely on the expertise of tenured professors. Now those positions comprise less than a third of university teachers, and are declining every year, while the majority of undergraduates are taught by part-time adjuncts, who get no health or retirement benefits and have no idea whether they’ll have a job in the next semester.

At some point, all these comparatively underpaid workers will no longer be able to service the debt that they’ve built up while struggling for better pay and job security… and then what?

Fantasy Classifications

These days, there is a plethora of ways to classify or categorize almost anything, and fantasy fiction is certainly no different.

The Masterclass system lists eighteen different fantasy subgenres, yet almost no fantasy novel I’ve written fits neatly, or even not-neatly, into any one of those classifications, and that’s true of quite a few other writers I know.

“Discovery” lists fifty fantasy sub-genres, and only a handful or so have the same categorization as the Masterclass system, while Wikipedia offers a listing of thirty fantasy subgenres, with a disclaimer that the listing doesn’t encompass everything.

In Rhetorics of Fantasy, the scholar Farah Mendlesohn (a lovely scholarly lady, by the way) takes a different approach, by providing four ways of classifying fantasy: portal/quest fantasy; immersive fantasy; intrusive fantasy; and liminal fantasy, the last of which is fantasy where the reader really isn’t sure whether it’s fantasy or not (if I understood the explanation correctly).

Then there are those who simply break fantasy into two types: high and low.

In effect, almost everyone has their own definition/classifying system for fantasy, and I’m no different, although I haven’t seen any other classification like mine (not that someone hasn’t done it besides me, just that I haven’t seen it).

My “system” breaks fantasy into two types, one type where the characters live fantasy lives in a fantasy world/universe, and another where the characters live “real” lives in a fantasy setting. By “real” I mean that the characters have to have jobs and a way of supporting themselves, and that the economics, politics, society, and magic all work logically and consistently in that fantasy setting.

Of course, in the end, I suspect few readers really care about classifying what they read, or even what “classification” or type of fantasy the novel happens to be, but about how entertaining they find the novel, and possibly about what insights it provides.

An Immoral Society?

According to the dictionary, moral behavior is “concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior” and “holding or manifesting high principles for proper conduct.”

And certainly the Founding Fathers were definitely concerned about moral behavior, even if their focus was initially on white male property holders and proper (and submissive) wives, but over time that focus expanded to include women, and after the Civil War, and especially after the Civil Rights Act, minorities as well.

But what is “right behavior” or “proper conduct?” Certainly, for the first hundred and fifty years of the United States, there was an emphasis on morality, excessive at times, but without doubt there was a difference between moral and immoral behavior, and there were unspoken standards for such behavior. Even when people didn’t meet those standards, the standards remained, generally applicable to society as whole.

Those standards weren’t just confined to criminality, but to all aspects of life. In additional to being law-abiding, being “moral” required public politeness to everyone, certain standards of attire appropriate to the locale and situation, charity toward those less fortunate, at least a nod to a higher power, respect for those in authority, and polite language in public. Underlying this was the tacit or unconscious realization that such “morality” was important to hold society together.

For various reasons, this more traditional understanding of civic morality has largely vanished, exemplified by the election of Donald Trump, who, by any definition, is totally immoral and who even proposed suspending the Constitution if it suited his purposes.

Equally disturbing is the change in attitudes of younger Americans. A long-standing survey of incoming college students shows a disturbing pattern. In 1967, about 85% said that their principal goal was to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. By 2000, only 42% said that, while the majority said being financially well off was their goal, and by 2015, 82% of students said wealth was their principal aim in life.

Interestingly enough, over recent years, Americans have also become less charitable. In 2000, over two-thirds of households have to charity, but by 2018, that percentage was just below fifty percent.

While the Constitution clearly established both freedom of religion and freedom from religion, right-wing “Christians” have become increasingly vocal and effective in passing laws based on their beliefs in an effort to force their beliefs on others, failing to recognize that a society that imposes one set of religious values on the entire population by law is not a moral society, but an immoral tyranny.

While “traditional” morality had quite a few flaws, it also held the precept, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” something that current society, especially the extremists, also seems to have discarded and replaced with “me first, no matter what.”

Another Real Crime Problem

Recently, with all the publicity surrounding the charges against Donald Trump, there’s been a great deal of commentary on a “two-tiered” system of justice, where those with fame and money are treated far differently that those without either. That’s indisputable. It’s also always been the case – anywhere in the world.

What seems to get overlooked is just how long it takes for so many criminal cases even to get to trial. Recently, a CBS News investigation uncovered a massive backlog of court cases. Data from courts and district attorneys’ offices in more than a dozen major American cities showed that “pending” criminal cases jumped from 383,879 in 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, to 546,727 in 2021. In California, New York, Florida and Michigan, the number of “pending” cases in 2021 totaled nearly 1.3 million.

The indictments against former President Donald Trump join a major backlog of cases, since Trump’s case in the D.C. federal district court is just one of the more than 6,000 pending criminal cases there. Trump may be the best known, but he’s far from the first defendant charged in connection with crimes related to the 2020 election. More than 1,069 people have been charged with crimes related to Jan. 6, which the indictment says Trump’s actions helped fuel.

But this isn’t just a Washington, D.C., problem. In one Georgia case, a man charged in a shooting spent ten years in pre-trial detention, finally had his case heard, with the result that the jury couldn’t reach a verdict, leaving the defendant facing another trial. Even in Utah, the current case backlog in just the state courts is over 10,000 cases.

In many cases, defendants spend more time in pre-trial detention than they potentially could serve if convicted. Is it any wonder that some innocent (usually minority) defendants who are unable to make bail “plead out”, rather than spend months in detention before trial? It’s also why many who are convicted get “credit” for time already served.

But whether it’s Trump or someone we’ve never heard of, waiting months, or even years, to even get to trial is a disgrace… and suggests that our justice system is anything but just, since the poorest are the ones most penalized by such seemingly endless waiting – except in the case of Trump, where he hopes waiting will allow him to escape justice.

Conspiracies

The ultra-conservatives and many in the right wing of Republican party tout all sorts of conspiracies, including 9/11 being a clandestine government operation, the “liberal” deep state (with various acts purportedly associated), the “stealing” of the 2020 election,” that the January 6th insurrection was an antifa operation, that liberals, including Hillary Clinton, ran a child porn operation, and that Joe Biden is the head of a family crime ring.

There are, however, significant problems with all these purported conspiracies, principally that not a shred of hard provable evidence exists to back up any of them, despite years and years of trying to find any hard evidence — and this is in a country that can’t keep anything secret for long and where cellphone photos are everywhere.,

Yet, despite the lack of hard evidence beyond unprovable rumors and repeated lies, the true believers in all these “conspiracies” persevere in their beliefs.

What’s so amazing about all of them is that they ignore the biggest conspiracy of all – that Donald Trump conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election. So far, Trump has been indicted and arrested on ninety-one criminal counts in four separate jurisdictions so far, on both state and federal charges. He’s currently out on bail, awaiting all those trials.

And there’s plenty of evidence, unlike in all the Republican conspiracy theories. We have Trump being recorded asking an election official to find him over 11,800 votes, and his attorneys documented as fabricating false slates of electors. There’s video and documentary of him retaining classified information, as well as paying hush money to a porn star not to reveal their sexual encounters.

And, oh yes, Trump’s even lost a civil case involving his sexual assault on a woman.

None of this is speculation. There are thousands of pages of documentation, as well as hundreds of video images.

Yet the right-wing conspiracy types not only insist that Trump didn’t nothing wrong, but they’ve gone so far as buying mug-shot mugs and donating even more millions of dollars to Trump.

All the evidence in the world won’t change their support of Trump, not surprisingly, since, where Trump’s concerned, those who actually have minds lost them long ago.

The Problems with the Illusion of “Instant Gratification”

From even before the founding of the United States, Americans, in general, have been an impatient lot, and technology has made us even more impatient. With the arrival of cellphones, Amazon, and the internet, more and more people want what they want now, regardless of reality.

My wife, the music professor, encounters this all the time, with students who just want to Google an answer or who want to sing better instantly. They don’t want to hear that learning how to work out the answer develops skills that they need. Nor do they understand that it takes time to train muscles to produce the best singing, or to learn music – because, whether in a musical or in opera, you can’t Google the music while you’re on stage.

But the problems of wanting instant results also bleed into other areas. A few years ago, if you had the money – or the financing – you could go to a car dealer or other sources and get a car of your choice, or close to it, in days, if not hours. Now, depending on the make and model, people may have to wait months. Assembling parts and systems to produce a car takes most manufacturers around two workdays, but what gets overlooked is that the average car consists of around 30,000 parts, which come from different sources, and all of those parts take time to manufacture and ship to the assembly plant, and after assembly, the finished car has to be transported to a dealer. But until COVID disrupted the supply of certain critical computer chips, very few people understood or cared how long the entire process for building a car took. They just paid their money or financing and got a vehicle quickly.

Most products – even produce – get to the end consumer in a similar fashion, and most consumers don’t give the slightest thought to the process, or to the fact that nothing of value is produced instantly, even information on the internet.

The problem arises when there are glitches in the system… or when the system can’t produce the desired results. But the present system is relatively recent, especially historically.

I’m old enough to remember when the only items most people bought on credit were homes and cars. I didn’t even get a credit card until several years after I graduated from college, and in those times, it was difficult for women to get credit cards in their own names. Most people could only get what they could pay for in cash or check, and often you had to save for a time to afford large purchases.

Credit cards and then the internet changed all that, and, curmudgeon that I am, I’m not so sure that the instant credit and purchase system serves most people all that well, especially given the massive growth in personal debt and the seemingly ever-growing anger when instant gratification is denied.

Viewpoints and Knowledge

As with many, if not most, of my books, the “reviewer” reviews of Contrarian include those reviewers who often review me but didn’t, to those who didn’t like the book very much, to those who liked it, and those who liked it very much.

As some readers may know, more than thirty years ago, after having published eight novels and nine short stories, all science fiction, over the previous seventeen years, I took on a new challenge, that of writing a fantasy novel with at least semi-realistic economics and politics, and a logical and internally consistent magic system integrated within the economics and politics of that world. That novel was, of course, The Magic of Recluce.

At that time (1989), there were few fantasy novels that even attempted the goals I set out. And then, and even today, many readers were looking for escapism unconstrained by reality. In either arrogance or naivete, if not both, I thought it was possible to write a fantasy novel with realistic people, economics, politics, and logical magic that some readers would buy and enjoy, and I think it’s fair to say that I’ve done so repeatedly, or at least come close.

But along the way, I’ve come to realize that many of the readers and even some professional reviewers who reject more “realistic” fantasies don’t reject them because they’re realistic, but because they don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, certain aspects of the real world.

That’s why one reviewer of the Grand Illusion books can term them taut political thrillers while another rejects them as boring and unrealistic, why one person smiles knowingly when reading about a seemingly boring vote on agricultural subsidies or “incidental” appropriations and another puts down the book.

In the end, how interesting and exciting a book is – or isn’t – depends not just on the author, but also what the reader brings to the book… or doesn’t.

The Problem With “Now”

People are angry, and they’re unhappy with the state of the economy. So they blame the current President. That’s not only unfair; it’s also stupid.

The current state of the economy is largely determined by events in the past. Most of the inflation we’ve suffered in the past two years was rooted in decisions and actions that occurred in the Trump Administration, but people blame Biden because they’re hurting now.

This is hardly new. George Bush senior made unpopular tax increases, but those tax increases were beneficial. Unhappily for him, they took effect in the Clinton Administration and boosted Clinton, not Bush.

But the internet and instant everything has made people even more impatient. When people can order something online and get it in days, if not sooner, they tend to think everything can be done quickly, not even considering that they’re ordering something that was already manufactured.

Biden pushed through the inflation reduction and the infrastructure act over a year ago. With the time that it takes to determine what projects can be done, to let the contracts, finalize the plans, get the permits, and assemble the right workforce, any project takes time, and most of those projects are just beginning. They’re barely breaking ground on the first of the new computer manufacturing facilities.

This also isn’t new. At the beginning of WW II, it took time to change auto plants into aircraft factories… and then there was a recession when the auto plants had to retool back to producing automobiles.

But the “I want it now” mentality, unfortunately, isn’t just limited to politics and industry. It’s pervaded everything.

I’m astounded at the number of automobile accidents, many of them fatal, caused just in southwest Utah by drivers speeding through yellow and red lights or not even stopping at stop signs. That doesn’t include those caused by speeding – and I mean really speeding, like at 100 mph. All of which are caused by impatience and the “I want it now” mentality.

Some people want environmental improvement now. Others don’t think the environmental conditions aren’t that bad. Both types fail to understand, or accept, that decades of using fossil fuels and greenhouse gases can’t be undone any time soon, and possibly not at all, given human nature.

Some people on Maui are already getting impatient at the “slowness” of disaster relief and the lack of housing for those whose homes burned, while “property sharks” are trying to gobble up burned-out properties even before authorities and families have sorted out who’s dead or missing, but Maui is an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and all the necessary goods, tools, and personnel have to be flown or shipped in. That takes time.

Some Americans are now getting impatient that Ukraine hasn’t been more effective against Russia, apparently without considering that Ukraine has stalled one of the largest military forces in the world, and without having adequate airpower. And these impatient Americans are wondering why the U.S. can’t get the F-16s to Ukraine quicker. These folks don’t seem to realize that it takes the U.S. a good nine months to train a pilot in the F-16. U.S. military experts have consistently made the point that it will take 4-6 months to adequately train a Ukrainian pilot already proficient in flying a MIG 29 – and that’s if the pilot’s fluent in English. Compressing that training much will just result in dead pilots and lost aircraft.

Lots of times, you just can’t have it now, but too many Americans can’t or won’t understand, and then they blame whoever’s in charge, even when it’s not the fault of who’s currently in charge.

Another Rich Myth

For more than fifty years, the Republicans have been preaching that tax cuts, especially for the wealthiest Americans, are good for the country. Yet years of research all across the world show that tax cuts, possibly except when the marginal tax rate is above 70%, actually hurt the poor and the middle class, while benefiting the rich.

A recent report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also rejects the trickle-down theory and states that “increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20% results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down.”

Why? Because the expenditures of middle- to-low-income sectors are the drivers of the economy, and increasing the incomes of low-income earners increases gross domestic product (GDP), while increasing the income of the top 20% of high-income earners decreases GDP.

Not surprisingly, U.S. tax cuts over the last thirty-five years have resulted in almost no increase in real income for typical working families in the U.S., while the wealthiest one percent of Americans became $29 trillion richer, and more and more assets flowed into Wall Street and the financial community.

A study from the London School of Economics says 50 years of such tax cuts have only helped one group — the rich. The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn’t, and then examined their economic outcomes. The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered, but that “prosperity” didn’t even trickle down to the middle class, let alone to the working poor.

Research from two prominent economists, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, published in 2019 shows that for the first time in a century, the 400 richest American families paid lower taxes in 2018 than people in the middle class. Even before the pandemic, income inequality had reached its highest point in 50 years, according to Census data.

And since the pandemic began, the combined wealth of America’s 651 billionaires has jumped by more than 25%, that growth exceeding $1 trillion, according to Americans for Tax Fairness.

Yet while we’re still not catching up on collapsing bridges, highways, and other infrastructure, or the medical needs of veterans, and quite a few other needs, America’s billionaires are doing just fine, and the GOP is pushing more tax cuts for the wealthy and benefit cuts for the working poor and increasing deficit spending as well to finance those tax cuts – while blaming it on the Democrats.

What’s more… most people seem to believe the GOP about tax cuts and have for fifty years, despite all the research findings to the contrary.

Impeachment Hypocrisy? Again?

House Republicans are pursuing an impeachment “inquiry” against President Biden, largely on the grounds that his son, Hunter Biden, cashed in on his father’s name. While millions of dollars were paid by foreign entities to Hunter Biden and others while Joe Biden was vice-president, so far, the House Republican Oversight Committee has found no financial links to President Biden.

House Republican Oversight Committee Chair James Comer insists that payments to family members to corruptly influence others can constitute a bribe.

There are several problems with this. First, there’s no evidence Joe Biden benefitted. Second, there’s no evidence that he was influenced to do something. Third, Washington, D.C., is flooded with family members cashing in on elected officials’ positions, and that’s been the case for generations on all sides of the aisle.

But what’s even more hypocritical is that the House Republican Oversight Committee is ignoring even more obvious and blatant examples of corruption in Republican appointees to the Supreme Court.

Over the last twenty years, Clarence Thomas accepted from wealthy individuals at least 38 vacations, 26 private jet flights, eight flights by helicopter, a dozen VIP passes to sporting events, as well as stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica. In addition, Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire, not only paid for many of Thomas’ vacations, but also his mother’s house and a nephew’s tuition payments. Wayne Huizenga, another billionaire, provided cost-free flights on his personal jet to Thomas.

Justice Samuel Alito went on a fishing trip to Alaska with hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, a Republican donor with cases before the Supreme Court. Alito traveled to the remote Alaska site on Singer’s private jet, along with Leonard Leo, a longtime leader of the conservative Federalist Society. And the salmon fishing lodge that they all stayed at was owned at the time by another big Republican donor, Robin Arkley II, who footed the bill for Alito’s lodging. Alito did not subsequently recuse himself from a case involving Singer’s legal interests before the court.

Neither justice disclosed any of this.

Justice Neil Gorsuch tried for years to unload a 40-acre property he co-owned in Colorado. Nine days after he was confirmed to the Supreme Court, the property was purchased by the CEO of a law firm that has had numerous cases before the court — and whose clients Gorsuch has sided with much more often than not.

Now, while it may be that Congress cannot “regulate” the ethics and conduct of Supreme Court Justices, Congress can impeach justices and remove them from the bench – but there’s not a word or a hint that the Republicans have any interest in looking to impeach justices who have documented evidence of receiving payments, services, and goods from wealthy donors, especially when all of those donors appear to have had cases or issues before the Court.

But the Republicans seem determined to take on Joe Biden, while, at the very least, indicating that Republican corruption is perfectly acceptable.

And they’ll probably get away with it, just as they have by refusing to deal with Trump’s crimes.

Clichés Because They’re Repeatedly Accurate

Too often, a judgment or commentary on an event or action is dismissed because it’s a cliché, but often clichés are applicable precisely because human nature tends to repeat itself, particularly in how we make mistakes.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, swinging for the fences comes from baseball and is a term for trying to hit a home run every time at bat. It’s usually accompanied by busting a gut (another cliché), and for most hitters, it doesn’t work nearly as well as making contact with the ball with a solid swing.

This sort of excessive effort isn’t confined to baseball or even to sports. Singers making an additional effort to hit that high note usually work against themselves because extra effort tightens muscles in the throat and squeezes off the note (if I’ve remembered correctly what my wife the opera singer has told me), which makes it even harder and creates a strained and often ugly sound.

It’s also true in writing where the excess often results in “purple prose.”

“Repeating a big lie often enough that people believe it” is a cliché, given the examples of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and, of course, Trump, who lies and exaggerates to such a great degree that almost everything he utters in public is at best a great exaggeration and at worse an outright falsehood (lately, especially, most likely the latter).

True professionals in any field make the most difficult of tasks appear easy, even when they’re not, and when excessive effort destroys technique, the result is almost always a diminution in results, or, as put in another cliché, “trying too hard.” It’s much better to stay “in the groove.”

Wince at time-worn clichés, if you must, but don’t dismiss their applicability to a situation just because someone used a cliché.

Another Kind of Stupidity

Way back in time, in my first year in college, I took the introductory course in Political Science in a school that was known to have a strong department, and I was stunned, because, for the most part, the course dealt almost exclusively with the Executive Branch. So did the majority of courses dealing with U.S. politics, and none of the professors seemed really to understand grassroots politics, and some actually minimized the electoral side of politics, which struck me as a form of arrogance.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised because most of the professors teaching, those who had any experience in government, had been political appointees in the Executive Branch. At that time, I didn’t have, obviously, that kind of experience, but my father had been a city councilor and acting mayor of the town where I grew up, and my mother was an executive board member of the League of Women Voters for the state of Colorado.

Later on, after I finished my tours in the Navy, and after being less than successful as an industrial market research analyst and real estate salesman, I got involved in local politics as a precinct committeeman, and then as a researcher for a political campaign for Congress, which led to a job as a legislative assistant to a congressman (the campaign was successful) and staff director for his successor. In turn, that led, after ten years, to an appointment in the Reagan Administration as Director of Legislation and Congressional Affairs at the U.S. EPA, after which I spent another ten years working for a high-powered D.C. consulting firm.

The head of EPA when I was there was an intellectually brilliant attorney who’d been a noted and successful state representative in Colorado. Although she thought otherwise, she didn’t know squat about how the federal government worked. Neither did a great many of the senior Reagan administration appointees who came out of state governments. The result was a political nightmare, with the result that almost all of the political appointees at EPA, including the Administrator, either resigned or were fired [two of us out of 36 survived], and one assistant administrator went to jail. Also, the Secretary of the Interior and a few others were canned.

Why? Because all these people who’d been successful elsewhere carried an air of arrogance, a definite feeling that they knew better than all those elected officials and federal bureaucrats. They assumed that intelligence and past experience would suffice… and they also didn’t listen to those who’d been there. Just like the Freedom Caucus and the Trumpists.

This is scarcely new, but what is frightening to me is that the current Trumpist/populist wave is also being led by a group of arrogant grassroots politicians who understand nothing about how government works. One can complain about Biden being a creature of Washington, D.C., but in two years he got more substantive legislation passed than Trump did in four years and, from what I can tell, more than Obama did, as well.

Not only do the populists not understand government, but they don’t want to. The fact that they excuse/ignore the January 6th insurrection and the three indictments and forty charges against Trump is a good indication of their indifference and arrogance. In addition, they essentially want to destroy the U.S. rule of law because they don’t like the results, but they also have no constructive plan about what to do once they have.

So far, neither Trump nor his GOP allies in the House have yet to accomplish anything except to attempt to significantly cut federal spending with no real understanding of what cuts might be useful and what would be disastrous and to seek to impeach people they don’t like, while defending the greatest liar in American political history.

What’s happening with Trump and the Trumpists is because too many people know too little about how government works while dismissing the knowledge and experience of those they don’t like and believing they know far more than they do.

And we’re all going to pay for that arrogance.