We’re Not Asking the Right Questions, Perhaps

Posted on Monday 20 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

The more I read on a wide range of topics that touch on various deep questions — is there a God? do we have free will? — I’m thinking that these are probably the wrong questions. Considering the biases of the human mind, the limitations of our senses, the limitations of our intuitive senses of time and space (i.e. ‘scale-blindness’), and idea of different levels of reality (e.g. how understanding physics and understanding biology work in completely different ways, while both being valid). These deep questions expect an answer at one level of reality, e.g. the cosmos, where the only apparent answer is at a different level, e.g. human existence. Example: What is the meaning of life? As another example, asking Is religion true? is likely beside the point. Of course it’s not; its internal contradictions and variance from reality make that obvious. The question is, why does religion exist, and why does it have such a hold on so many people?

For now, let me note another guy I’ve seen on Facebook, one Jim Palmer. He has no Wikipedia page, but has a lot of books for sale on Amazon. And he has a Substack, called Deconstructionology, on which he posts, virtually every day, very long pieces about religion and psychology and “existential health.” Perhaps a key point is that he’s a former believer. His posts are so long I’ve not read any of them through. But for today I’ll note this one, since it seems aligned with my thoughts just expressed about religion.

Deconstructionology, Jim Palmer, 2 Jul 2026: How Religion Saved Our Species, subtitled “Why Big-R Religion Was Humanity’s Greatest Evolutionary Innovation”

I’ll quote the first few paras. The entire post is 38 of my screens long.

For many years, much of my writing has explored the ways religion can distort, constrain, and sometimes wound human lives. I do not regret that work. Many of those critiques remain important, and I believe they still need to be made.

Over time, however, I found myself asking a different question. Rather than asking only where religion failed, I began wondering why it appeared everywhere. Why did every known civilization develop something remarkably like it? What human problem was it solving?

The more seriously I explored those questions, the more my understanding evolved. I no longer see religion primarily as humanity’s greatest mistake or simply as divine revelation. I have come to see it as one of the most remarkable evolutionary innovations our species ever produced.

This article is my attempt to explain why.

Before There Were Religions

If religion had never existed, our species might never have survived.

That sentence will disappoint some atheists and alarm some believers. The former often regard religion as humanity’s greatest mistake, a long detour through superstition that delayed our intellectual maturity. The latter frequently understand religion primarily as divine revelation, believing its significance rests upon the truth of its doctrines and the authority of its sacred texts. Although these perspectives differ profoundly, they share an assumption that has shaped almost every modern conversation about religion: both treat religion primarily as something people believe.

I want to suggest something much older, much broader, and, I think, far more interesting.

Long before religion became Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any of the traditions we recognize today, it was already performing an extraordinary function within human evolution. Before there were creeds to confess, doctrines to defend, or institutions to preserve, there existed a uniquely human capacity to construct shared symbolic worlds. That capacity transformed small bands of vulnerable primates into civilizations capable of cooperating across generations, organizing millions of strangers, preserving knowledge, confronting mortality, and creating cultures that could outlive the individuals who built them.

That’s enough quoting. These thoughts align with Harari, in his many books: religion, like money, is a kind of story that everyone agrees to believe in because it’s useful.

Thus, ironically, the persistence of humanity’s tribal inclinations, and its religions, are evidence of its evolutionary past, never mind the creationists. Since they are inconsistent and contrary to the evidence of the actual natural world, religions cannot be true. What are they there for, then? Basically: religions are parochial stories that blend intuitive perception of the natural world as agent-driven, with binding agents to unify the tribe and fortify it against other tribes with different stories/religions. Shared symbolic worlds, as the essay says.

Remember, human nature evolved, complete with its biases and confabulations, because it promoted human survival. Which only occasionally overlapped with understanding the real world. Which most people still don’t.

Yesterday Palmer posted this: If You Read Only Fifteen Things I’ve Written, subtitled “Articles that best capture my exploration of meaning, spirituality, existential health, and what it means to be human.”

The list includes the item I posted above.

P.S. the undermining of convention wisdom, the potential of new realms of understanding, is what the best science fiction attempts, and sometimes succeeds.

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And now for the usual batch of political items, which inevitably reveal tribal, religious thinking, and rarely considers evidence-based, logical thinking about the real world.

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We actually watched the World Cup final, though only as I walked around the house and occasionally paused.

  • Robert Reich, yesterday: He Can’t Resist
  • Subtitled: This photo is worth a thousand words

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I had never heard of this PIX app.

  • Paul Krugman, today: Trump’s War on the Future, Monetary Edition
  • Subtitled: Trying to punish Brazil for adopting a better payment system
  • This isn’t just Trump, it’s conservatives, who always resist and resent any change to their order.

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  • JMG, today, from Christian Post: Vance: Satan Is Behind Separation Of Church/State
  • Argh. How to say this. He is living in a simplistic fantasy world of good and evil, God and Satan; a childish theological cosmology.
  • It’s another sign, as if needed one, not to take anything he says seriously, ever again. He is religion-addled.

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This is rich.

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The headline earlier today, when I captured this link, was about how these worshipers objected to The Odyssey.

CNN, Joe Baur, yesterday: These people say worshiping ancient Greek gods is a route to modern happiness

I’m not going to quote. The point is the same as above.

Posted in conservatives, Philosophy, Religion, Science | Leave a comment

Better Today; Tearing Things Down; Ransacking; Hate

Posted on Sunday 19 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

First of all, this. Another piece about how things were *not* better in the past. (Somehow, things are getting better. Despite.)

Vox, Bryan Walsh, 12 Jul 2026: The forgotten success story of America’s teenagers, subtitled “Today’s teens are much safer than 1990s teens. Why doesn’t anyone talk about it?”

I’ll quote the Key Takeaways.

Key takeaways

  • The teen birth rate hit another record low in 2025 — down 81 percent from its 1991 peak, or roughly half a million fewer teen births a year.
  • It’s not just pregnancy: Teen drinking, smoking, fighting, and drug use have all collapsed since the 1990s.
  • The best theory: Teen lives got longer, safer, and richer — and their futures became too valuable to gamble.
  • A teenager today is about a third less likely to die than one in 1990.
  • The price: Teen sadness has surged since 2017, and the good kinds of risk-taking declined too.

Here’s how the piece begins:

It’s been feeling very 1995 lately.

Oasis, whose last good song came out back when Macs were still see-through, was the second-biggest tour on the planet last year. Gen Z is snapping up the flip phones and digital cameras their parents had traded in for smartphones, and Y2K-era fashion is flooding the mall, in case you were wondering where all the rhinestones came from. Pop star Olivia Rodrigo just released a hit album heavily influenced by alternative rock recorded a decade before she was born.

And this bit:

Speaking as someone who lived through the 1990s as a teenager and mostly enjoyed it (at least in retrospect), it makes total sense to me. Of course, it would — as a Washington Post analysis found, when Americans name the country’s “best decade,” the answer inevitably boils down to whichever decade they turned 11.

This is what, I think, MAGA means: return the nation to whenever they grew up. That’s all. It’s a psychological response that likely has occurred throughout human history. There is no knowledge or analysis to their nostalgia.

The writer goes on expand on that third point.

The best unified theory comes from psychologists like Jean Twenge and more recently writers like Mastroianni, whose “Decline of Deviance” essays argue that kids stopped taking risks of all kinds in part because their futures became too valuable to gamble. As lives got longer, safer, and richer, the expected cost of any given joint, fight, or pregnancy went up. Twenge called this the “slow life strategy,” and it shows up as much in data about taking good risks as it does in taking bad ones: The share of high school seniors with a driver’s license, for instance, fell from 82 percent in 2005 to 63 percent in 2023.

This is fascinating. It can’t be a conscious decision. And yet, there’s the issue of sadness.

The problem with reducing risk-taking behavior across the board is that not all risks are bad. The same caution that might keep a 16-year-old from smoking or having sex might later keep her from founding a company, moving across the country, or writing a strange novel. In Mastroianni’s “Decline of Deviance” essays he documents falling cultural and scientific risk-taking right alongside fewer fistfights. “For the first time in history,” he writes, “weirdness is a choice. And it’s a hard one, because we have more to lose than ever.””

Citing Jonathan Haidt. And concluding:

But our valid worries about the mental state and uncertain future of today’s teens shouldn’t blind us to just how remarkable the shift from the 1990s is as a whole. As Mastroianni writes, “We would have spent billions to solve all of these problems back in the 1990s…and yet when we got the thing we wanted so badly, we didn’t even notice.”

America wanted its teenagers to stop getting pregnant, stop smoking, and stop fighting — wanted it badly enough to put it at the center of a State of the Union address — and then got nearly all of it, mostly free of charge, from the kids themselves.

“Can we take a win?” Mastroianni asks. We can start by counting this one.

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Moving on to how the current administration is tearing things down.

Salon, Heather Digby Parton, today: Marco Rubio’s quest to destroy the International Criminal Court, subtitled “The secretary of state is using the right’s long-standing hatred of the ICC to bolster his MAGA bona fides for 2028”

Setting aside the misunderstood drive of progressives to “defund” the police, why would this administration want to dismantle an international criminal court? The answer is pretty obvious.

For a man who considers himself the greatest builder the world has ever known — move over, Pharaoh Khufu! — Donald Trump has managed vanishingly little of it in either of his presidential terms. What his administrations have done is show an impressive talent for tearing things down. 

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NY Times, guest essay by Sally Quinn, today: It’s No Longer So Much Fun to Be MAGA in Washington

The worst part about living in Donald Trump’s Washington has been seeing just how much fun he and all the MAGA vandals he brought to power have been having sacking and pillaging the place. This while the rest of us longtime Washingtonians who abided by norms, shared values and even bipartisanship were filled first with shock, then a feeling of helplessness, and hopelessness. It could border on passivity. What could be done?

This is striking:

I remember running into Kellyanne Conway at a newish private club, already packed with crypto types, who scolded me: “Sally, I wish you would stop writing all these pieces about how terrible Washington is now and how everyone is so depressed and scared. We’re having fun! You know what your problem is? You’re not invited to the right dinners and parties.”

So that’s what it’s all about? But now MAGA is despairing.

Lately, the vibe has shifted. The MAGA Republicans don’t seem to be having such a good time ransacking the place anymore.

It’s not that the party is over, exactly. And to be clear, there’s lots more damage that will be done to this city, and to our democracy — not to mention America’s place in the world — before Mr. Trump and his rabble are through. But it’s clearly starting to dawn on the MAGA minions that the morning after is going to be a doozy.

AlterNet covers this piece with this headline: MAGA complains it’s no longer ‘fun’ ruining everyone else’s lives: report

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Axios, Marc Caputo, today: GOP midterm strategy: Make it a “hate election” (via JMG)

Republicans admit the GOP’s midterm forecast is bleak. But they’re clinging to two hopes: voters’ fear and loathing of Democrats.

  • “It’s going to be a hate election,” a Republican tied to President Trump‘s political operation told Axios. “Voters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us. And we have material to work with.”

Straight out of Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four.

Posted in authoritarianism, conservatives | Leave a comment

The Drive to Preserve an Idealistic Past, Which Will Inevitably Fail

Posted on Saturday 18 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Conservatives have been trying to preserve the past forever. They’re probably successful more often than we realize. Those of us who do realize this do so by recognizing that their stories are full of holes, or don’t make sense. On the other hand, when attempts to rewrite history are this blatant, they’re not likely to succeed. The cultural weight of documented history has too much momentum to be easily altered.

NY Times, guest essay David W. Blight, yesterday (but in today’s print paper): Trump Is Bending History to His Will. He Will Fail.

On July 4, the White House Domestic Policy Council issued a long-awaited and lengthy report, “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” a frontal assault on the work of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in particular and on the entire Smithsonian Institution. The report asserts that the museum’s leadership has “traded settled truths and basic history for political activism and division.” It condemns the museum for engaging in “anti-white activism,” supporting “illegal aliens” and embracing transgender people.

Historians employ time-honored methods in the use of evidence but, by instinct and training, never accept determined “settled truths.” The Trump White House and its history police want us all to live in their chosen bubble, immune from instability or perceived disorder in their take on American greatness. They have a right to their bubble as individual citizens, but to impose it on the rest of us as policy egregiously breaks the public trust.

The report is not a document about history; it is the product of a racial and political ideology in search of a history that no longer bears scrutiny. People often joke about how Trumpism would like to return us to some version of the 1950s, when America supposedly was “great.” In this report, the administration has done just that. The report would prefer that nothing had ever happened since the ’50s to mar the White House’s polished, superficial, puerile version of America’s past.

(I going to use a font color, rather than bold, to highlight what I think are key passages.)

Later:

Triumphalist history, which is exactly what the Trump White House demands, cannot tolerate nuance, ambiguity, complexity. These elements of real history — dare we say truths about human experience — always spoil the party and the military flyovers. President Trump and his supporters have instincts for history, but far too little knowledge.

Of course this all aligns with my take of conservatives as generally simple-minded, black-and-white thinkers. Slightly immature. A tad short of true human potential.

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This is interesting not just for its immediate point, but in its discussion of how the military, being essentially a conservative institution, time and again rejects change, even as technological advancements happens around them.

The Atlantic, Phillips Payson O’Brien (a professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland), today: Fighter Jets Are Passé, subtitled “The future of warfare is drones, clearly.”

Beginning:

In the interwar period, some military officers did not believe the combustion-engine vehicle would replace the horse for combat operations. Cavalry officers from around the world, including the United States and United Kingdom, argued strongly against trading their lovely mounts for new tanks. Many insisted that heavy armored vehicles could never conquer the hilly terrains in which horses thrived.

More of this, for two para’s. Then:

The world’s biggest militaries, most notably that of the United States, are now at a similar turning point. The deployment of cheap unmanned vehicles on a mass scale, in the war between Russia and Ukraine and more recently in the U.S. war with Iran, has revealed the vulnerability of hugely expensive tanks, aircraft, and ships and the near impossibility of making major advances by infantry on the ground. Yet Western militaries have failed to reckon with these innovations in warfare, planning and spending as if nothing new is afoot.

And it goes on, with many examples that illustrate one of science fiction’s recurring themes: things are changing faster than you realize. (“In 2024, Brigadier General Douglas Wickert, the U.S. Air Force official in charge of AI piloting technology, insisted that robotized warfare was still “centuries” away.” Centuries? Nonsense.) Yet militaries are still heavily invested in building combat aircraft, tanks, and aircraft carriers.

Yet the lessons of the wars before us are that cheaper, nonhuman piloted systems are changing the balance of fighting. The future will be dominated by weapons of war that do not have a human onboard. These include cruise and ballistic missiles, a long-familiar category of weapons that can effectively attack targets anywhere in the air, on land, or in water. More and more, warfare will also include unmanned ground vehicles, which can fight, deliver goods, and evacuate the wounded; sea drones, which threaten ships and containers around the world; and unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, which Ukraine, Russia, China, Israel, and the U.S. are making by the millions.

The writer notes,

The growing role of machines that are operated by a human at a distance—or programmed to operate autonomously—represents a fundamental “de-humanizing” of war.

The “de-humanizing” of war began when soldiers could fire guns, and kill at a distance, instead of stabbing or lancing their opponents in the chest at close hand. Which is apparently where Pete Hegseth is focusing his attention.

As always, science fiction has thought way ahead. Even in the popular context of Star Trek, 60 years ago: the 1967 episode “A Taste for Armageddon,” from TOS’s first season, was about two planets whose war has been completely computerized, with no damage to property, to the point where the “victims” would voluntarily report to disintegration stations to be killed.

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Conservatives have a weird kind of common sense, that makes it all about themselves, and personal ‘freedom’. Again, this confuses advice (based on what the species has learned) with orders.

Media Matters, yesterday: Some right-wing media figures blast commonsense health advice that limits exposure to dangerous wildfire smoke

Subtitled: Millions of Americans as far south as the mid-Atlantic are experiencing the “worst air quality in the world” due to Canadian wildfire smoke

As American cities across the Midwest and Northeast suffer from the “worst air quality in the world” due to the spread of smoke from Canadian wildfires as far south as the mid-Atlantic, several right-wing media figures are railing against health recommendations for staying safe.

…

Despite this, several right-wing media figures are taking an absurd stand against such health advice and mocking those taking steps to protect themselves from wildfire smoke.

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This is so, so, so telling.

Washington Post, opinion by David Desteno, yesterday: People of faith are finding a new moral guide in AI, subtitled “Are you there, Claude? It’s me, Margaret.”

Today, millions are seeking moral guidance from AI chatbots. It might seem reasonable to assume that those who reject religion as a source of wisdom would be more inclined to turn to AI for a seemingly comprehensive and objective analysis of the moral consequences of any action. But this isn’t the case. It’s actually people of faith who more regularly turn to AI for moral guidance and spiritual advice. With its appearance of omniscience and objectivity, AI poses a threat to the authority of traditional religious bodies.

AI is telling people what they want to hear.

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This captures the core idea.

Free Inquiry, Ronald A. Lindsay, 16 Jul 2026: Placating the Gods: The Core of Religion

Gods, sacrifice, prayer, prostration. The key:

But logic and religion are cut from entirely different cloths. The latter is an atavistic hangover from our past, when our lack of understanding of how the world works, as well as our instinctive concern for our survival, caused us to resort to supernatural explanations for storms, floods, drought, disease, and unexpected deaths. This was combined with the modeling of our gods on how humans react: you want a powerful person’s favor, you provide a gift and beg.

No, there is no call to sneer at the ancients. They represent the infancy of humanity—an infancy that most inhabitants of Earth have not yet outgrown. Whether they ever will remains an open question.

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This afternoon: Bruckner 3, Wand

Posted in conservatives, History, Music | Leave a comment

Losing. Casting. Hormones. Freedom.

Posted on Friday 17 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Trump made some kind of speech last night. In prime time. The networks didn’t broadcast it. The messages of these three items are in the titles or subtitles; I don’t need to quote from the pieces themselves.

Slate, Ian Prasad Philbrick, today: The Most Important Thing About Trump’s Big Election Speech Was What He Didn’t Say, subtitled “The president has claimed more than 100 times that the 2020 election was stolen. So why did he shy away from that lie in his big ‘election fraud’ speech?”

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The Bulwark, Brian Tyler Cohen, today: The Silver Lining of Trump’s Reheated Election Denialism, subtitled “Take Trump seriously. Take him literally. But also see his speech for what it is: He knows he’s losing.”

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Robert Reich, today: Trump Can’t Get No Respect, subtitled “His biggest lie wasn’t about elections”

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And in recent discussion about the CHIPS Act, he confused ‘transistor’ with ‘transgender.’ Examples here.

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This movie opens today. Not sure when I’ll see it. I will eventually. Anyway, of course any work of art that doesn’t pander to white supremacy evokes the wrath of MAGA.

The Daily Beast, yesterday: Why ‘The Odyssey’ Is Exposing the Stupidity of MAGA’s Uproar, subtitled “Believe it or not, right-wingers have gotten ‘The Odyssey’ all wrong.”

Casting. (It’s supposed to be about white people!) And about Elliot Page as Achilles. It turns out Page is playing a different character.

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Briefly noted.

And

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  • Once again, tribalists value loyalty above all else, in particular above experience or expertise.
  • JMG, from Donald J. Trump, today: Trump Endorses Graham’s Sister For Full Senate Term
  • She has no experience in government whatsoever. She’s a placeholder, but who presumably can be counted on to vote the way her brother would have.

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Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Tribalism | Leave a comment

Testosterone?

Posted on Thursday 16 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

The latest eye-rolling development in the current administration is that Defense Secretary, or is it War Secretary?, Pete Hegseth is very concerned about testosterone levels among the troops.

NY Times, yesterday: Hegseth Plans to Screen All Troops, Including Women, for Low Testosterone, subtitled “Pete Hegseth, as defense secretary, has sought to cultivate an image as a manosphere-friendly leader.” [gift link from a Fb friend]

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Wednesday a new mandatory screening program to test all service members age 30 and older, including women, for testosterone deficiency annually.

Hormone treatment for troops with low testosterone will be voluntary.

“Our most decisive tactical advantage will always be the individual warfighter,” Mr. Hegseth said in a video from his Pentagon office. “We have a sacred duty to maintain that advantage.”

The goal, he said in a social media message accompanying the video, was a “High-T Department of War,” Mr. Hegseth’s preferred name for the Defense Department.

Also:

The Atlantic, Tom Bartlett, yesterday: Pete Hegseth Wants YOU to Test Your Testosterone, subtitled “The secretary of defense has a questionable plan to monitor the hormone levels of every service member over 30.”

Pete Hegseth wants a manly military. And he really, really wants you to know how badly he wants a manly military. In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth worried that the military risked becoming “effeminate, and apologetic”; he insisted that what liberals really want is “soft men, and a weak military,” and he scolded “Pentagon pussies” who refuse to stand up for soldiers on the battlefield. As secretary of defense, Hegseth has blocked the promotion of female military officers, removed the first woman to lead the Navy, and ordered a review of women’s “effectiveness” in ground-combat roles. He has also used the Defense Department’s social-media channels to post a steady stream of tougher-than-thou videos.

And

The Daily Beast, today: Doctors Torch Pentagon Pete’s ‘Ridiculous’ Testosterone Plot, subtitled “The Defense Secretary’s macho-macho makeover at the Pentagon is getting a little weird.”

Does he believe soldiers are literally fighting on the battlefield, these days? Like in The Odyssey?

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Then this today:

Slate, Fred Kaplan, today: Hegseth Wants to Test Troops’ Testosterone Levels. It’s Absurd—and Dangerous., subtitled “I can’t believe his testosterone testing proposal isn’t a parody.”

When I read on Wednesday that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will start testing U.S. service members for testosterone deficiency, I thought it was an internet joke, maybe a post from the Onion, a play on Dr. Strangelove‘s Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper ranting against fluoride as a Communist plot to sap our precious bodily fluids.

But no, it turns out there’s a video, which seems to be real, of the former Fox News host and Army major announcing annual tests of all members of the armed forces over the age of 30—and testosterone shots for those who score low—as a way of “restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities” and retaining our military’s “leading edge of lethality.” He claims that “our most decisive tactical advantage will always be the individual Warfighter.” Hence his new slogan: “The High-T Department of War.”

Hegseth has spouted a lot of rubbish in his 18 months as the Pentagon’s top civilian and the Trump administration’s keenest war hawk, but this one may top the pile: It’s ill-informed on every level and, in some ways, dangerous.

One more bit:

But the main fallacy in Hegseth’s latest campaign is that, even if his assumptions about testosterone were correct, they have little to do with the nature of modern warfare or the talents, abilities, or “lethality” of a modern “warfighter.”

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For the record, I have some experience with low testosterone and testosterone injections, from about 15 years ago, when I was in my mid-50s. A body-builder neighbor of ours, in Woodland Hills, on hearing I’d had a check-up and gotten blood work done, asked to look at the results. My T level was low, and he advised T injections to improve my gym results. Mmm, OK. I took T injections for several months, maybe a year. Shots in the butt.

There were positive and negative consequences. The negative consequence was that my PSA level, a blood indicator of potential prostate disease, went up dramatically, to the point where I visited a couple urologists, including one at UCLA, who did two rather painful prostate biopsies, and found nothing. Anyway, I stopped the T injections. On the other hand… That period back in 2010 and 2011 when I was getting those shots did actually help me build some muscle, at the gym. Much more significantly, they somehow gave me more ambition, more drive, more focus. Those were the years when I bought my M3, when I started posting on Locus Online every single day, when I finished the upgrade from my awards database on Locus Online to an independent site, at sfadb.com, and when I began this blog. And those drives… have never gone away. Perhaps because I lost my day job at the end of 2012, and could focus on those new focuses.

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Briefly noted items. The tribalist right.

The Bulwark, Matt McManus, today: Who’s to Blame? Ask the Far Right—They Have a List., subtitled “Feminists, immigrants, professors, and just about everyone else: a look at the movement’s ever-expanding catalogue of villains.”

The intellectuals especially, since knowledge undermines religious myths. Just below the top three: LGBTA+ people.

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Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, yesterday: MAGA Cultist Shane Vaughn Says Former Trump Supporters Are Being ‘Selfish’ By Thinking For Themselves

Don’t think for yourself! Conform to the tribal myths!

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Without addressing Reich’s 10 points, my point is: the right has no plans, just grievances. (Trump changes his mind every day, depending only on popular feedback.) The left has plans. Here’s a plan.

Robert Reich, today: A 10-Point Plan to Make America Affordable, subtitled “Every candidate should pledge their support”

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This afternoon’s music. Cliff Martinez’ score for the 2002 George Clooney version of Solaris.

Posted in conservatives, Music | Leave a comment

Conservative Priorities

Posted on Wednesday 15 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Conservative principles: none. Priorities: power, and money;
  • More about Lindsey Graham and those who are most against gay rights;
  • The recurring nonsense about “Daylight Saving Time”;
  • Brief items about how facts are stubborn things, and Hegseth’s ongoing campaign to enforce white supremacy in the military.
– – –

Once again. There are no principles here, only thirst for money, and power (see Lindsey Graham, yesterday).

Slate, Fred Kaplan, today: Trump’s Iran Bluster This Week Revealed the Only Thing That Really Matters to Him

Continue reading →

Posted in conservatives, Science, The Gays | Leave a comment

Conservative Opportunism, and Being Careful About What We Want to Believe

Posted on Tuesday 14 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The death of Lindsey Graham, conservative opportunist, and perhaps closet gay;
  • The only damage in the reflecting pool is from Trump’s limousine entourage;
  • Item from Facebook about America and Finland;
  • Another item about how America is opting out of the world order it built;
  • And an item about how our perception of truth changes with the fading of print literacy.
– – –

A perfect example of how conservatives politicians are motivated by opportunism, and not principle.

NY Times, Peter Baker, yesterday (though in today’s print paper): How Lindsey Graham’s Journey From Trump Critic to Ally Made Him a Power Player, subtitled “He initially called Donald Trump a ‘kook’ who was ‘unfit for office,’ only to join the new president’s Mar-a-Lago circle. ‘I’m still in the game,’ Mr. Graham once explained of his much-analyzed turnabout.” [gift link]

Continue reading →

Posted in conservatives, Human Nature, LIteracy | Leave a comment

Kurt Andersen: FANTASYLAND

Posted on Tuesday 14 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
(Random House, 2017, 462pp, including 22pp acknowledgements and index)

Here is a book by a writer who doesn’t generally write this type of book. Andersen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Andersen) writes mostly novels and TV, and he did write one other nonfiction book of the same nature as this one, EVIL GENIUSES (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_Geniuses:_The_Unmaking_of_America) about the conservative influence on politics and the economy since the 1970s.

FANTASYLAND provides at least a partial answer to why Americans seem especially credulous compared to other nations, and overly religious. Continue reading →

Posted in Book Notes, conservatives, Culture, History | Leave a comment

Motivated Reasoning and Human Gullibility. UFOs!

Posted on Monday 13 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • UFO fans aren’t impressed by the latest government doc’s;
  • More about supposed geo-engineering.
– – –

This is funny. And sad.

NY Times, 11 Jul 2026 (though in today’s print paper): Non-Disclosure: In Roswell, New U.F.O. Docs Are a Declassified Bummer [gift link]

Subtitled: Roswell’s annual U.F.O. festival was supposed to be full of triumphant “told you so’s” after the Trump administration declassified its alien files. Instead, apparently, the coverup continues.

Continue reading →

Posted in conservatives, Psychology, Science | Leave a comment

The Dystopian Portrait of America Is Not True

Posted on Sunday 12 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • An essay on American loneliness denies the dystopian view of the nation;
  • Gay marriage opponents revive a discredited 14-year-old junk science study;
  • Brief items: a “Christian values” candidate with dicey behavior; restricting the public expressions of Muslims; Pete Hegseth’s pastor who would deny voting rights for women; David Barton’s continued historical distortions; Trump’s communist claims about Democrats; a MAGA pastor who is sure Jesus was ripped; why the right is obsessed with banning Pride flags;
  • People who don’t understand how reality works: the Noah’s Ark folks; flat-earthers who think there’s a universal “down”; MAGA thinks Democrats and geoengineered the weather in Washington DC.
– – –

Long essay.

The Atlantic, Yair Lapid, today: American Loneliness, subtitled “It’s not an epidemic—it’s an immune system.”

He begins:

Driving on I-79 south from Pittsburgh toward Charlottesville, I started composing this birthday card in my head—a love letter to America on its 250th birthday. The hills of Pennsylvania were blanketed in glittering white snow from which bare-armed trees rose like the locals: lean, weathered, lined and stained like the earth. In a frozen sales lot beside the road, 50 John Deere tractors stood in formation, their booms raised toward the sky like eaglets waiting to be fed. At the crest of one hill, someone had planted an old shipping container painted with large letters: TRUMP. I drew closer, and more words appeared: GUNS. LIFE. JESUS. LOVE.

The writer talks about making random car trips a couple times a year. He gives examples. This is what caught my eye: Continue reading →

Posted in Lunacy, Morality, Religion, Tribalism | Comments Off on The Dystopian Portrait of America Is Not True