Bribing a Senator?
Apparently, some group vehemently opposed to the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh has raised over a million dollars in campaign contributions to go to a future opponent of Maine Senator Susan Collins if...
View ArticleShorter Isn’t Always Better
The other day I was going over some editorial corrections/suggestions sent by my editor, who was concerned that I was using too many long sentences with too many subordinate clauses. As I’ve always...
View ArticleGulf Coast Fan Fest
A very recent addition to my schedule is The Gulf Coast Fan Fest, a comic con by any other name, set for October 13-14, in Biloxi, Mississippi. I can’t say much about it, because I’ve never been there,...
View ArticleLying Statistics and Hypocrisy
President Trump claims that his administration has turned things around, that the stock market is booming, unemployment is nearing at an all-time low, and that real estate values have recovered and are...
View ArticleAnother Aspect
There’s another aspect of the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh that the Senate Judiciary Committee isn’t even considering, and that’s the “prep school” culture that produced Kavanaugh, a culture...
View ArticlePatreon?
Lately, I’ve run across more and more writers, singers, and other artists who have set up sites on Patreon to solicit financial support for their writing. There are even some non-profit publications...
View ArticleMaybe the U.S. Deserves This
It just could be that Brett Kavanaugh is the Supreme Court Justice the American people deserve. He’s lied twice under oath, then declared that yes, he did receive hacked emails, but that it was no big...
View ArticleArticle 0
I just turned in the final version of a new science fantasy novel, entitled Quantum Shadows, which is set in the very, very far future on a world called Heaven. Even my editor and my publisher both...
View ArticleIs Lying Really That Bad?
The Kavanaugh Affair is incredibly symptomatic of the United States today, and I don’t mean in the matter of polarization along political lines, true as that may be. Kavanaugh, as I noted earlier, is...
View ArticleGender-Based Pay Discrimination
The evidence of gender-based economic discrimination is clear and obvious to anyone who wants to look. Study after study has shown that women get paid less than men, and those studies also show that...
View ArticlePresumed Innocent?
Now that Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed and sworn in as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Republican PR machine has been generating wave after wave of propaganda about the...
View ArticleMinimization/Discrimination
All American women have been minimized and discriminated against, as have women in every culture, and far more greatly in many countries other than the United States. The only question in each woman’s...
View ArticlePaying for It?
The other day, I read an interesting article in the local paper about how upset the Utah state legislature was with the Board of Regents for not keeping down tuition increases at state colleges and...
View ArticleSocio-Political Apocalyptic Dramas
Whether it’s “The Walking Dead” or “Designated Survivor” or “The Man in the High Castle,” or any number of other TV, or streaming media shows, from what I can tell, there’s been almost an explosion of...
View ArticleMan-to-Man Mansplaining
When I wrote the blog “Gender-Based Pay Discrimination,” I thought I was laying out something relatively obvious, but one of my readers took exception, using various statistics to explain both in...
View ArticleBack to the Constitution?
I recently ran across an “open letter” to conservatives which said, “Right now, liberals are waging an all-out assault on our nation’s founding principles at the polls, in the courts, in our culture,...
View ArticleA Proliferation of Awards
Several weeks ago, when I was at the Gulf Coast Fan Fest, one of the other authors at the Bard’s Tower booth learned that his debut novel [Empire of Silence, Christopher Ruocchio] had been shortlisted...
View Article“Truth” and “False News”
As some readers know, I’ve never cared much for the word “truth,” largely because, these days, it has come to hold a moral and political certitude that goes far beyond facts and their accuracy. In...
View ArticlePost-Election Observations
I live in the state with by far the lowest expenditure per pupil for public education, a state filled with overcrowded classrooms and underpaid [by any standard] teachers, a state where only 20% of new...
View ArticleThe “White” Party, Hate-Mongering, and the Future
A recent column in The Economist analyzed Trump’s appeal among Republicans and came to an unsurprising conclusion, unsurprising at least to me – that while various Republicans have scattered interests...
View Article