Frederik Pohl
(Did you notice we were gone?)
Gone we all were, and for weeks on end. There were the bugs that were flying around, for starters. We didn’t get any of the more popular brands, but we got some mysterious upper-respiratory hits and several others at other locations, and that’s without mentioning the plagues that, without warning, took our computers out.
But now we’re back, healthier and happier than ever — so give us a look and let us know what you think.
A recent Pulse — the Union of Concerned Scientists’ bulletin warning civilians about new threats to their life, liberty or good health — reports some alarming scientific findings about ground-level ozone pollution levels and what they are doing to our ability to breathe freely. The numbers are scary. By 2020, millions of people will develop smog-related asthma and other breathing illnesses, and thousands of them will be overloading our hospitals.
That’s really bad news, but —
It has at least one good aspect. The same measures that will be essential to trying to save people from new breathing problems are the ones that will slow down the far worse consequences of unrestrained global warning. If we can’t persuade the unbelievers that global warming is a certain deadly consequence of our enslavement to the burning of fossil fuels, maybe they’ll be willing to do what needs to be done for the survival of the human race as long as that is also what needs to be done for the ability to breathe easy.
If you’ve ever faced a final exam on subject matter you just haven’t been able to get your head around, you might like to know about a gene called HMGA2, recently identified by a team of 207 researchers at UCLA. The good part is that HMGA2 has reliably been shown to increase human IQ, leading some to think that the next step might be the mythical “smart pill” dreamed of by many a college student.
However —
The bad part is that the same study showed that the increase could be only something under 2%, or less than the difference between a D and a C+. So hit those books!
Who Bashed People With His Wit, Then His Cane
Keith Laumer
The first manuscript by Keith Laumer that I remember seeing was about an interstellar diplomat named Retief, 
I felt pretty proud of myself for recognizing their worth so quickly, but I later learned that he had intended them as a series all along, but planned for the series to run in Cele Goldsmith’s Amazing (and I can’t imagine why Cele, bright as she was, let them go). The thing about Laumer is, first, that he was great at satirizing people he had had a bellyful of, particularly Americans in the diplomatic service. (Keith had served a tour in Burma, which gave him much grist for his mill.) Second, that he had a keen sense of comedy, and, third, that he wrote quickly and well.
Not all of Keith’s sf was part of a series. He wrote stand-alone stories when the spirit moved him, some of them really good. There was one in particular — I’ve forgotten its name — which had to do with a time traveler who, leaving his family behind, travels a century or so into the future, where he finds a dreary, post-catastrophe world where his only companion is a nearly out of it centenarian who, when the time traveler mentions his name, sobs, “Daddy.” Corny, maybe, but it took me unawares to the point of actually bringing a tear to my eyes — something which rarely happens.
I left the Galaxy group shortly before Keith suffered the massive stroke that pretty much ended his successful writing career, but I did see him from time to time. Sadly, the wreck of his brain made him the legendary even-tempered man: mad all the time. It was a terrible fate for one as talented as he and, though he lived for twenty-some years after the stroke, he never regained the art of writing a Laumer story, and almost never managed to carry on a conversation without breaking into rage.
According to official Army reports, Army suicides have taken a big leap over 2010 and 2011 reports. Army deaths from suicide are said now to be running more than 50% higher than those from combat.
I think (this is now Fred talking, not some credentialed person) this might have something to do with what psychologists call the “gradient goal effect” and parents of young children know better as “Christmas Eve fever.” That is, the closer you get to a desired event, as for soldiers returning Stateside and for children the time when they’re allowed to open presents, the more you want it now. The phenomenon is pretty well known. Unfortunately, a cure for it isn’t.
But the army is trying to nose out a solution.
Death-dealing Arizona
Gov. Jan Brewer
Remember the death panels? The ones that the right-wing kooks warned we would all risk facing if Obamacare passed, consisting of committees of politicians whose job was to decide which severely ill patients got treatment and which were just allowed to go ahead and die?
Well, there actually was nothing of that sort in Obama’s proposed, so the worry was pointless to begin with. But it turns out that the prospect wasn’t entirely imaginary.
It just turns out that it isn’t the Democrats.who are deciding which old and unwell patients are to be permitted to live and which ones are condemned to death. In Republican Arizona, it is the Republican governor and state senators, who have formed themselves into a “death panel” that makes the decision on which otherwise terminal patients will be given life-saving organ transplants. The panel turned down more than 90 patients who had only one remaining option: Go ahead and die.
After a flurry of media coverage, the governor tried to save face by moving to create a pool to restore transplants — but then cut 280,000 people from the Medicaid rolls, which meant “The pool won’t be big enough to guarantee transplants because taking people out of Medicaid will create a surge in hospital patients who can’t afford to pay,” according to Bloomberg.com.
Funnily, the Republicans aren’t worried about death panels at all, now. Maybe it doesn’t hurt as much when the person who pronounces your sentence comes from your own political party.
