We attended a wedding yesterday, in Alameda, between my partner’s older son’s wife’s sister, and a man from a non-Catholic family, who had converted, and gotten baptized a year ago, in order to marry into my partner’s older son’s wife’s family, a Vietnamese family, that is resolutely Catholic. Got that? The ceremony was held at the St. Joseph Basilica in the middle of Alameda, led by Catholic priests, and went an hour and 15 minutes. So many of their rituals must be rote by them, performed and recited over and over again.
This particular ceremony, no doubt designed by the intended couple, was modernized. There were no separate vows, but rather a common vow read out by one of the priests, with a near-simultaneous ring exchange. Still, lots of songs, hymns, recitals of prayer, and audience responses of “Thanks Be to God”. With the Eucharist at the end, members of the church were invited to come forward, while others could remain in their seats. The groom’s family remained in their seats. As we did.
After an interval, the wedding party gathered at a restaurant in Emeryville, Hong Kong East Ocean Seafood Restaurant, a place we have been to several times and walked past many more times, on walks out and back on that Emeryville peninsula.
All of this was similar to a couple other weddings in recent years, on my partner’s side of the family, including Y’s older son’s. As it turned out, as I had not realized, the priests who conducted this ceremony were the same ones who had done his wedding in Fremont six or seven years ago — because they’re part of the Vietnamese community, which both grooms married into.
And as it happened, at the reception, Y and I were seated at a table along with a couple sets of elderly grandparents and the three priests from both of those ceremonies. At that earlier wedding wedding, there had been a gap between the wedding and the reception, and Y and I hosted a party of sorts at our house, up here in the Oakland Hills. Those three priests had come to our house. I remembered them, they remembered me, or at least the one: Fr. Tho Bui, SDB (I have the program from yesterday’s ceremony), who was seated beside me at the reception. We chatted about local things, restaurants and whatnot. (Certainly not about politics or religion). He is a charming man, and he and another of the priests got up to perform Karaoke.
The whole event was well funded. The dinner was lavish, with eight or nine courses, and bottles of Coca Cola and Cabernet and Hennessy XO were on every table. The entertainment was a DJ and a Karaoke machine, which only a few people used. Y gave the groom a red envelope. In return, in effect, we snagged a bottle of Hennessy XO, only one-third empty, to take home along with leftover rice and black cod and marinated beef. The bride’s father gave it to us and insisted.
There was a retinue of three or five photographers running around throughout the ceremony and the reception. I was tempted to ask one of them, from your perspective, are all weddings the same? And, did you get fed? All together, the events ran from 2pm to 10pm at least. But I didn’t get a chance to chat with any of the photographers.
OTOH, I did ask two 20-year-old kids at the groom’s family’s table if they were twins. They were. I wish I could have thought of a clever question to ask them, something like, Is there something you’d like people to know about twins that no one has ever asked? Or, what question do you get asked all the time that you hate? But I didn’t think of anything.
The entire weekend since Friday has been rainy. It rained off and on through the wedding/reception day. It might not have been perfect weather, but perhaps it was memorable. The photo above is what Y took from the restaurant window, in a break of the rain at sunset. Is that the bride out there? Maybe. Let us think so.
This is about the 1953 movie, surely one of the best known and highly-regarded SF movies of the ’50s, along with THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, FORBIDDEN PLANET, and perhaps INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS.
I wrote about the novel back in 2021, along with some comparison to this film. I watched the DVD of the film again last night.
(My DVD cover is similar to but not exactly like the one shown here. On mine, “The Original Invasion” appears at the top, and there’s no Korean(?) text beneath the title.)
Couched among other skiffy flix of the era, this film is an example of the Hollywood-ization of a classic novel to fit the pattern of what audiences excepted a science fiction movie to be at the time. With so many resemblances to other sf movies of the era.
First: the location is changed from the London suburbs to the desert or hills outside LA. Second, a narrator portentously explains how no planets other than Earth would be suitable for settlement by Martians. Fuzzy photos of Martian cities and canals (as in RED PLANET MARS) are shown to justify the Martians’ search for another world, and how they must have settled upon Earth. But we never see any clue about whether the Martians are intelligent or not; we only see them as mindless invaders. That reflects the cultural fears of 1950s America.
The story begins as a meteor is seen from a small California town, how it starts a fire, how the local fire trucks respond. Investigators respond, including a local scientist from “Pacific Tech,” played by the relatively well-known actor Gene Barry (perhaps better known later for a couple TV series). Lots of cars and tourists, men wearing the baggy suits of the time.
Later that night we see a hatch on the ship slowly opening like a screw, and a head emerging (with a distinctive shaking sound effect), then a local waving a white flag. Who is zapped with some kind of ray that disintegrates him. Meanwhile, lights go out at a local dance, along with the phones and watches. Another meteor comes down.
True to cliche, the military is called in, as reports come in from around the world of other landings.
Eventually we see one of the Martian ships emerge from where it landed — and this is the most striking thing about the movie, as well as a departure from the Wells novel. In this movie, the Martin ships are flat ovoids, floating slowly above the ground, with huge stalks coming out of the top with tri-color eyes that fire disintegration rays at everything. In Wells’ original, the Martian ships walked around on tripods of mechanical legs. The movie’s ships are far more striking. (And it would have been easier for the movie to float the Martian ships over a stage landscape, rather than try to depict them walking around on three legs.)
Plot follows. More military. Gene Barry’s character and his girl find refuge in a farmhouse, until an encroaching alien sends its probe into the house… and even glimpse one of the Martians themselves. They escape as the house explodes.
More military, even atomic bombs, which do not phase the Martian ships at all. Los Angeles tries to evacuate, with mobs attacking each other. The Martian ships coolly glide into the city, disintegrating buildings, including the iconic Los Angeles City Hall.
And then, in what’s literally a deus ex machina, and coincidentally as Gene Barry finds refuge in a downtown church, the gliding Martian ships sputter, and sink to the ground, crashing. We see the arm of a dead Martian, with its three fingers, falling out of one of the ships. In the church, people were praying for a miracle. The narrator intones about how the tiniest of creatures, bacteria, infected the Martians, who had no resistance to what to them were aliens. Such small creatures as “God in his wisdom had put upon the Earth.” Amen.
\
Now, the movie excels for its production values. It was directed by George Pal, who earlier did DESTINATION MOON and WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE and later did THE TIME MACHINE. It won an Oscar for visual effects.
And yet, it’s just another skiffy flix. The same patterns appear that were in so many other 1950s Hollywood science fiction movies. Frightening invaders, military response, and the invocation of the Christian God to take credit for the invaders’ defeat.
The novel by Wells was much wiser, as I discussed here.
Here’s a more detailed summary, with lots of context: Wikipedia
I saw the Steven Spielberg 2005 remake when it came out, but have not watched it again. As I recall, it followed the basic plot closely, complete with the farmhouse encroachment of a Martian eye, but added on a sappy happy-ending coda involving a boy. Typical Spielberg. But perhaps I’ll watch it again some time.
As I begin this post the Artemis II mission, named Integrity, while the spacecraft itself is called Orion (if I’m following this correctly), is about 20 minutes from splashdown. Here’s an essay on the chasm between those who understand and do, and those who believe and don’t, and can’t.
In the same time frame, however, we had reminders of how much of humanity remains trapped in detrimental religious fantasies.
Example at hand this week: each side in the Iran War thinks God is on its side.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the leadership of some countries invoke religion to justify their actions given that in these same countries religious fundamentalism still has a grip on much of the population. And in the United States, right-wing legislators are doing their best to ensure many Americans continue to be indoctrinated into Christianity. Various state legislators continue to push the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools, Texas is going to require students to study passages from the Bible, and public tax dollars are now subsidizing religious indoctrination in several states. Of course, the indoctrination has to be in the right type of religion; Islamic schools are being excluded from the handouts in the United States.
And what are they trying to accomplish? Conformance? What else *can* they accomplish? What *have* religions accomplished in 2000 years except interfere with those who can and do?
Ever since the Enlightenment, reliance on empirical evidence and application of the scientific method have brought us marvelous achievements, unimaginable in prior times. But throughout the past couple centuries, there has been an unresolved tension between the reliance on science for specific projects and solutions and the persistent influence religion has exercised over the minds of many, which, in turn, results in religious beliefs and doctrines affecting public policy and private actions—usually with harmful consequences. As the late physicist Victor Stenger once remarked, “Science flies you to the moon; religion flies you into buildings.”
The Atlantic, Rebecca Boyle, today: A Different Moon From the One We’ve Known, subtitled “NASA’s Artemis II mission is bringing home a view of the moon unlike any humanity has seen before.”
[[ As I type: Integrity seems to have made it through its blackout; the critical issue of heat shield integrity is past. ]]
The writer recalls Galileo. Then:
This week, we got a different moon—the Artemis moon. The moon captured by America’s first mission there in generations is not the moon I look for every time I step outside. It is not the moon I grew up with or the one my parents learned about during the Apollo missions.
On Monday—the moon’s day—we were introduced to a brown, battered world. Whole regions of its scarred far side did not appear a brilliant lunar white, but a much more familiar, homey hue. Mushroom, chestnut, hazel, cocoa, coffee, tea-stained, russet, brown: earth tones. Straight lines running over the moon’s surface; concentric rings that look like companion coffee-cup rings.
The new view comes from a combination of technology, orbital motion, and human nature, all of which are part of the point of the Artemis II mission. The camera quality on Artemis, let alone the ability to livestream the views, was inconceivable during the Apollo era. Film from cameras that were specially built for Apollo had to get home first, then be developed, before the images could grace the front pages of newspapers on Earth. During Artemis, we are getting at least a few of them straight from astronauts’ Instagram Stories. Many more stunning images will arrive home with the astronauts this evening, when their Orion capsule is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific, off the coast of San Diego.
\
Meanwhile there were essays about how spending all this money was pointless, and Fb posts about how it was all a fraud, because in space there’s no oxygen which the rockets need to burn their fuel. Dummkopfs. There will always be dummkopfs. (Relying the scourge of “common sense,” which is exactly the notion of extrapolating how the local familiar world works onto circumstances where those notions don’t apply. And Dunning-Kruger: they don’t realize how dumb and uneducated they are.)
\\
Only time to note these items briefly. And tomorrow I’m attending a wedding, so there’ll be likely no post at all.
The Atlantic, Stephanie Bai, yesterday: What Will Humanity Do With the Moon?, subtitled “As the Artemis missions work to build a permanent lunar home, we should remember why we keep going back.”
Concluding,
In a message recorded before his death, the Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell welcomed Artemis II’s astronauts to “my old neighborhood.” Koch, Glover, Hansen, and Wiseman listened to his tape before their lunar flyby, more than 200,000 miles from home. “I’m proud to pass that torch on to you,” Lovell said. “It’s a historic day, and I know how busy you’ll be. But don’t forget to enjoy the view.” His words were a reminder to his fellow space travelers that they come from a short line of people who have peered out at the swirling mass of the universe, and also a reminder to us: to look up instead of down, if only for a little while.
So supporting dictators is about defending Western Civilization? Well, that makes a kind of sense, if you believe Western Civilization should be modeled after the Old Testament. But most of us do not believe that. We’re part of a culture that has grown up.
More about the Christian right’s perpetual victim complex.
Now the Trump administration is threatening the Vatican;
Yet more evidence that they’re white supremacists;
Revisiting the question if Trump is suffering dementia;
Long piece about how Trump is stuck in the era of the 1980s;
Brief items: The administration delays published news about vaccine benefits; the USDA secretary sends a Jesus email to 100,000 of her workers; comment on Fb about why MAGA thinks protesters are being paid;
Subtitled: “Color-blind and merit-based” now seems to be anything but.
Earlier examples we’ve seen, and more examples. It concludes:
Authoritarian regimes behave as the Trump administration is behaving—optimizing for political loyalty rather than competence. Merit, in short, has little to do with it.
Hegseth is a prime example. Deeply unqualified for the job and convinced that brutality provides an easy path to victory, he has led the United States to the verge of a strategic defeat with a weaker adversary in Iran. The current cease-fire leaves Iran with a more hard-line government than before, one in total control of a shipping lane crucial to the world economy. The Islamic Republic is arguably in a stronger position today than it was when the war started, and probably in a stronger position than it was before Trump, in his first term, scrapped the Obama-era nuclear deal.
On Sunday, Trump posted on his social network a refrain that he and his toadies seem to think is insightful: “If you import The Third World, you become The Third World!” This archaic social Darwinism is the ideological mortar of the Trump project. It fuses Hegseth’s disdain for diversity in the military’s senior leadership and valorization of brutality with the administration’s attack on birthright citizenship and its deployment of federal agents to occupy American cities. It is a worldview that would assume an easy victory against a country like Iran, especially with America’s new, “unwoke” military. Bigotry isn’t just inefficient, as the U.S. military discovered in the 1940s. It also makes you stupid.
Dhillon admits that her overall vision is not just slowing down civil rights in America but “turning the train around and driving in the opposite direction,” as she told the conservative Federalist Society after her appointment as head of the division.
She has eliminated federal oversight of police departments accused of discrimination, once the centerpiece of the Civil Rights Division’s work.
She has directed universities to end all types of affirmative action, once defended by the Civil Rights Division.
She is now suing states to acquire voter databases in an effort to disenfranchise minority voters. The Civil Rights Division once existed to protect their voting rights.
Harmeet Dhillon is no advocate for civil rights. She’s a legal hack for Trump’s cruel agenda of attacking Americans trying to stop ICE and Border Patrol agents from doing their worst, of seeking to destroy academic freedom in American universities in favor of Trump’s narrow view of what should be allowed, of undermining equal opportunity for people of color, and of prosecuting anyone — like Cassidy Hutchinson — with the courage and integrity to stand up against Trump’s despotism.
Harmeet Dhillon is the last person who should be running the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. She should never become attorney general — which means Trump will probably nominate her.
(So it’s not precisely white supremacy. Note that she’s not purely white herself.)
\
Slate re-posted this piece, from January. Yes, people are asking this every day.
Slate, Anna Gibbs, 26 Jan 2026: Is Trump Losing It?, subtitled “It’s time to seriously ask the question.”
\
Here’s an interesting piece — it expands on the familiar idea that Trump (like so many conservatives) is stuck in the past and wants the present to return to what was familiar to him in his youth.
By the late 1980s, Trump was a celebrity real-estate developer, a best-selling author, and a tabloid fixture. But what he said then effectively previews how he is governing now; indeed, for a politician who has few consistent ideologies (except on tariffs; he has always loved tariffs), it’s striking how Trump’s views on Iran haven’t really changed. A New York Times write-up of an October 1987 speech in New Hampshire relayed that the businessman had suggested that the U.S. “should attack Iran and seize some of its oil fields in retaliation for what he called Iran’s bullying of America.” A couple of months later, Trump complained to Phil Donahue (we told you this was a very 1980s tale) that American allies were not doing enough to protect access to oil in the Persian Gulf. The following year, Trump told The Guardian that if he were ever to run for president, he’d be “harsh” on Iran, declaring that “one bullet shot at one of our men or ships, and I’d do a number on Kharg Island. I’d go in and take it.” Nearly 40 years later, the Pentagon has prepared a plan for a ground invasion to do just this. It’s awaiting Trump’s approval if the cease-fire falters.
Fast forward to now, and Trump’s backing off his threats against Iran.
Hours later, Trump backed off the unhinged threat, and a two-week cease-fire materialized. The fragile truce, however, seemed to only strengthen Iran’s claim over the strait; if that becomes permanent, it will be difficult to view the war as anything other than a strategic defeat for the United States.
Trump and his aides, though, would hear none of it. They insisted that the war has been won, that Iran’s regime has been changed, and that, as the president put it this morning on social media, we could soon see “the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!” How was that possible? Trump’s aides pointed us to the madman theory, saying that the president’s unpredictability, combined with his genocidal threat to wipe out Iran, had forced the agreement. “That’s The Art of the Deal, baby,” one White House aide crowed to us.
That book, of course, was published in 1987.
Linking a David Frum piece from yesterday.
In a sense there’s a truth of human nature here, not just of conservative human nature. Most people develop fixed ideas by their 20s or 30s and then never change. Even scientists, supposedly the most objectively thinking people. That’s why there’s a saying that, in order for science to progress, sometimes you have to wait for the oldest scientists (the stick-in-muds) to die.
I think most scientists are conscious of this and try to avoid it. Certainly I’ve been conscious of this. I’ve acknowledged having changed my mind significantly two or three times over the years, and I’ve learned a lot about human psychology over the past decade that has allowed me to rethink how I understand political issues.
Do Christians not realize how inappropriate this is in a country that is not, by definition, a religious theocracy? What would they think if a Jewish or Muslim employee send out a message of celebration about something in their faith?
Anonymous comment on Facebook:
The reason MAGA thinks protesters are being paid is because they can’t fathom doing something without a “what’s in it for me?” angle. It’s called having a moral compass … which is why it’s so confusing to them.
I think this principle can be applied more broadly.
\\\
And here’s the Radiohead song that, for some reason, popped into my head today. All day.
Why don’t you quiet down?
(Maybe I’ll wander the promised land
I want peace and honesty)
Why don’t you quiet down?
(I want to live in the promised land
And maybe wander the children’s land)
Quiet down!
(Yeah, and there, there we can free)
President Trump said he went to war to ensure that Iran never acquired a nuclear bomb. The war ended—for now, at least—with a demonstration that Tehran possesses an arguably more powerful weapon of deterrence against future attacks, one that is cheaper to use, gives Iran enormous sway over the global economy, can bring in revenue, and can’t be negotiated away: the Strait of Hormuz.
More than 12,000 U.S. missiles, bombs, and drones hit Iranian targets over the past five weeks, destroying the country’s navy and much of its military infrastructure. Several of Iran’s leaders and some 1,500 of its citizens were killed, including more than 170 who died in a strike on a girls’ school that was the apparent result of errant targeting. But 12 hours after Trump threatened to destroy Iranian civilization and weeks after demanding Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” the United States agreed to a two-week cease-fire last night while settlement talks play out. Among the president’s initial war goals—preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon; eliminating its ballistic-missile capabilities; laying the ground for a popular overthrow of the regime; and eradicating Iranian proxies in the Persian Gulf—none have been met.
\
And the deal that Obama made, and Trump cancelled because Obama, was far better than the current terms.
\
Robert Reich, today: Trump’s Defeat in Iran, subtitled “It’s consistent with how other countries, organizations, and people have defeated him”
In addition to Iran, similar strategies have been used by China, Russia, Canada, Mexico, and Greenland. Inside the United States, the people of Minneapolis have used them, as have Harvard University, comedian Jimmy Kimmel, writer E. Jean Carroll, and the law firms Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, and WilmerHale.
What’s the strategy that connects them all? All refused to cave to Trump, despite his superior military or economic power. Instead, they’ve engaged in a kind of jujitsu in which they use Trump’s power against him, while allowing Trump to save face by claiming he’s won.
With details on each of those mentioned.
\
Paul Krugman, today: Ignorance and Ignominy, subtitled “Our Hormuz humiliation was not an accident”
So the world’s greatest military power went to war with a poor, medievalist theocracy. It was an incredibly uneven match. Here’s are the GDPs of Iran and the United States in 2024:
Yet Iran won. The Iranian regime has emerged far stronger than it was before, controlling the Strait of Hormuz and having demonstrated its ability to inflict damage on both its neighbors and the world economy. The U.S. has emerged far weaker, having demonstrated the limitations of its military technology, its strategic ineptitude and, when push comes to shove, its cowardice.
We’ve also destroyed our moral credibility: Trump may have TACOed at the last minute, but he threatened to commit gigantic war crimes — and for all practical purposes our political and civil institutions gave him permission to do so.
How did this happen? Naturally, the Iranian Minister of War credited divine intervention, declaring that “God deserves all the glory.” His nation, he said, fought with the “protection of divine providence. A massive effort with miraculous protection.”
Well, theocrats gonna theocrat.
But I lied. That wasn’t a quote from an Iranian official. That’s what Pete Hegseth, our self-proclaimed Secretary of War, said while claiming that one of the worst strategic defeats in American history was a great victory.
\
Meanwhile.
Media Matters, today: How fractured right-wing media are spinning Trump’s Iran capitulation, subtitled “Right-wing media have been split over the war. As a ceasefire is agreed to, some figures claim Trump ‘negotiated the deal of his life,’ others argue he ‘chickened out again’ and warn the deal ‘could be an amazing victory for Iran.'”
With quotes from Trump, the Guardian, AP, Politico, The Bulwark, Sean Hannity, and many others. Long.
\
Enough of that.
\\\
The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel, 7 Apr 2026: An Incredibly Weird Time to Be Alive, subtitled “The world witnessed the best and worst of humanity in a single week.”
Seeing the Earth from space will change you so profoundly that there’s a term for it: the overview effect. The extreme minority who have had the privilege describe it similarly. You see something that you were never meant to see, namely the Earth just sitting there, with the entire universe surrounding it. Gazing upon the blue marble, surrounded by its oh-so-thin green layer of atmosphere, the auroras flickering on the fringes, is not merely awe-inspiring but something of a factory reset for one’s sense of self. Almost everyone tears up at the sight.
“You don’t see borders, you don’t see religious lines, you don’t see political boundaries. All you see is Earth, and you see that we are way more alike than we are different,” Christina Koch, one of the four astronauts on the Artemis II mission, told NASA recently. Jim Lovell, describing the view on Apollo 8 from the dark side of the moon back in the late 1960s, toldChicago magazine that he could put his thumb up to the window, and in that moment, “everything I ever knew was behind it. Billions of people. Oceans. Mountains. Deserts. And I began to wonder, where do I fit into what I see?”
Meanwhile, Trump.
Trump’s bluster, no matter how serious, has always been impossible to parse. (He’s famous for chickening out, backpedaling, or pretending like he never said what he said.) Yet one way to view our current age is as a series of existential reminders, be they nuclear proliferation, climate change, or pandemics. In Silicon Valley over the past half decade, civilizational extinction at the hands of hypothetical technological advances has moved from the realm of pure science fiction to a marketing tactic to an immediate concern for a subset of true believers. Humans may not want to die, but as a species we seem eager to invent and tout new ways to threaten our existence.
Concluding,
There is something disorienting, horrible, and somehow fitting in the timing of all of this. That one man with the means to do it would threaten destruction of a part of our planet at the same moment its beauty and fragility are on full display. We are, in this tense moment, living with our own overview effect. Four are watching from afar. But the rest of us are watching too—left to reckon with our own place on the pale blue dot, reminded of all the ways we might die, and all the reasons for which to live.
\
Trump made a bland congratulatory call to the Artemis II crew, which they had to listen to, and two days later slashed the NASA budget by a quarter, as noted yesterday. He needs more money to bomb people he doesn’t like back to the Stone Ages.
Artemis II’s journey around the moon, scheduled to conclude on Friday, has delivered stunning new images of our home world taken from space.
Those pictures remind us that Earth has changed immensely since the last time astronauts went near the moon in 1972. So has NASA. Budget cuts, chaos and political interference now threaten the very science that motivates and enables space exploration. President Trump’s 2027 budget request calls for a nearly 50 percent cut to NASA’s science division. We may still be able to shoot for the moon, but we’re losing the ability to understand our own world.
She describes the gradual escalation of cuts, of positions and funding.
Researchers studying the sun, the stars and other planets and moons also faced disruption and cuts. The library at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center was shut down, as were dozens of labs, supposedly a “consolidation.” The career scientific leaders we knew and trusted were struggling to guide us through the turbulence. Their bosses seemed more interested in making sure no one had pronouns in their email signatures than protecting science.
And then the NASA administrator’s disparaging of concerns about the climate, because politics.
Reasonable people can disagree on what should be done to limit the effects of climate change. But rather than debate policy, the administration has chosen to attack science itself. It has effectively canceled the National Climate Assessment, fired researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and left NASA scientists in limbo. Now, it plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a crown jewel of weather and climate science.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, today: Why MAGA men actually loathe tradwives, subtitled “A new study shows submissive women aren’t cherished but are held in contempt”
Plenty of citations to studies and surveys. This isn’t a surprise, given the far right’s tribalistic, hierarchical attitudes, in which men are better than women, whites are better than any other color, Christians are better than any other religious group, and so on. At the same time, many other religions treat women even more harshly.
\\
Get ’em while they’re young. As the Catholic Church has famously advised.
(AI Overview explains:
“Get them while they’re young” refers to the strategy of influencing or educating children early, as they are impressionable and lack experience, making them more receptive to forming lasting habits, beliefs, or brand loyalties. It is used in marketing, education, religious training, and parenting to shape attitudes that persist into adulthood.
Joel Webbon, a Christian nationalist who believes women should not have the right to vote and Jewish people should not be able to hold public office in the U.S., devoted an episode of his “New Christian Right” podcast to reveling in recent media coverage he has received, treating it as evidence of the ascendancy of his antisemitic, anti-feminist, and anti-equality brand of Christian nationalism among right-wing youth and young adults.
One of Webbon’s co-hosts read from a recent New York Times articlethat quoted Webbon writing “the youth are ours” after attending the recent Conservative Political Action Conference. That article quotes an administration official estimating that 75 percent of young Republican staffers are groypers, the name given to followers of the antisemitic and racist “America First” online personality Nick Fuentes.
Not a new story. This is how religions survive. If religion was not taught until students were, say, 30 years old, they would never take. Lesson: beware whatever you were taught as a child. Your parents meant best for you, but consider perhaps that they were just perpetuating a culture, and that there’s a truth that they’ve never known but which you can find out about. (Like, that your culture isn’t center of reality.)
\\\
The last Radiohead album, A Moon Shaped Pool, came out a full 10 years ago! (Though Thom Yorke has done side groups, and solo albums, and Jonny Greenwood has been busy composing movie soundtracks, several Oscar-nominated) But I’ve always had trouble connecting to it. I’m listening to it again this week, over and over. Here’s perhaps the most interesting song. And the video is interesting because it shows lead singer Thom Yorke, as always looking rather scruffy, wandering adjectively from place to place…
The entire weird ambience of this song is the essence of Radiohead.
The world worries about presidential insanity and nuclear war until Trump backs down, yet again;
AI and “cognitive surrender”;
With some perspective about electronic calculators and other forms of new technology over the millennia;
And how the surrender of critical thinking aligns with the credulity of religious faith;
Paul Krugman on MAGA’s war against science; that Trump and Hegseth think “overwhelming violence is Biblical” is a problem with the Bible.
“The moral arc of the universe bends toward finding out.” (via Mary Doria Russell)
Ennio Morricone: Once Upon a Time in America.
– – –
No surprise really: Trump put off his threats against Iran. This is after he said, just this morning, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” And reports of senior military officials considering disobeying his orders. But nothing from Republican politicians.
Just 90 minutes before President Donald Trump’s 8 p.m. deadline to “wipe out a whole civilization” with massive strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure and bridges, he granted a two-week extension for diplomacy to continue.
\
Meanwhile I’ll note some comments from earlier in the day.
Paul Krugman, today: Our Darkest Hour, subtitled “The civilization we destroy may be our own” (Video and text)
The Atlantic, David A. Graham, today: Trump Threatens to Destroy an Entire Nation, subtitled “The president’s position is that if he wants to wipe out a ‘whole civilization,’ then that is his decision to make.
Pupils using artificial intelligence are losing their capacity for critical thinking, according to a survey of secondary school teachers in England.
Two-thirds said they had observed the decline among children who they also said no longer felt the need to spell because of voice-to-text technology.
“Students are losing core skills – thinking, creativity, writing, even how to have a conversation,” one teacher told the National Education Union poll.
“AI is destroying what ‘learning’ – problem-solving, critical thinking and collaborative effort – is,” said another. A third anonymous contributor added: “Children no longer feel the need to spell as voice-to-text replaces knowledge.”
When it comes to large language model-powered tools, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes faulty service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect reasoning or factual flaws in responses. On the other side are those who routinely outsource their critical thinking to what they see as an all-knowing machine.
Recent research goes a long way to forming a new psychological framework for that second group, which regularly engages in “cognitive surrender” to AI’s seemingly authoritative answers. That research also provides some experimental examination of when and why people are willing to outsource their critical thinking to AI, and how factors like time pressure and external incentives can affect that decision.
In “Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender,” researchers from the University of Pennsylvania sought to build on existing scholarship that outlines two broad categories of decision-making: one shaped by “fast, intuitive, and affective processing” (System 1); and one shaped by “slow, deliberative, and analytical reasoning” (System 2). The onset of AI systems, the researchers argue, has created a new, third category of “artificial cognition” in which decisions are driven by “external, automated, data-driven reasoning originating from algorithmic systems rather than the human mind.”
This last paragraph is, of course, alluding to the title and categories of Daniel Kahneman’s foundational book (partly reviewed here).
Perspective: when electronic calculators came out in the early 1970s (I remember a high school science teacher brought one in, a Texas Instruments I think, to pass around class, in 1972 or so), no one bothered to divide by hand anymore, or calculate square roots, though there were pencil and paper techniques for both. So now children don’t learn to spell because voice recognition and correction software exists to spell for them? That might be slightly different. Literate adults, I think, *should* be able to spell themselves, if only because correction software only works to a point and isn’t available everywhere. Also, ability to spell is a sign of intelligence; that’s how we can conclude things about the MAGA/anti-science crowd that waves around placards at protests, and posts screeds on Facebook, with obvious misspellings.
That said, there’s an inevitable shift in human society as tools replace more and more individual human effort. As has been happening for millennia. (The Greeks worried that capturing words on scrolls would undermine the human ability to memorize.)
And yet, the points about critical thinking are genuinely worrisome, because that means people are abandoning, even renouncing, their ability to think and to solve problems when given easy answers by the machines (that aren’t always correct). I like the term “cognitive surrender,” because I would extend that term to what I’ve thought for some time about religion. A person who is inculcated from an early age to believe in religious myths, to think there’s virtue in believing things without evidence, and especially to take as real various fantastical stories (as in the Bible) that violate any number of scientific principles that have been discovered and proved over and over again in recent centuries, has essentially abandoned reason in favor of fantasy. They surrendered cognitively. And that’s why they’re subject to conspiracy theories and beliefs in demons and teleportation, as in recent stories. They can’t tell reality from fantasy.
\\\
Briefly:
And thus, there’s no need for studying reality; just believe what you want to ‘believe’. Whatever makes you feel good.
This is a problem with the Bible. Why do so many people think it’s the fount of all wisdom, just because it’s the oldest book still in print? That nothing has been learned since it was written?
The moral arc of the universe bends toward finding out.
She credits someone named Alex Norris, but I don’t know which Alex Norris that is.
\\\
And now I’m into Ennio Morricone. Beginning with his score for the 1982 version of The Thing, the other night, as I was writing up the 1951 version; then Marco Polo; today Once Upon a Time in America.
This doesn’t seem to be the full soundtrack, but it’s a taste.
I’m following news about the Artemis II mission, and am relieved that not once on the TV news coverage (I mostly watch NBC) nor on NPR have I heard the solecism “dark side of the moon.” Despite the Pink Floyd album, there is no dark side of the moon, any more than there is a dark side of the Earth. There may be a dark side to either at any given moment, but there is no permanent dark side to either. When people say that about the Moon, what they mean is the *far* side, which because of gravitational lockage we never see from Earth. That’s why the face of the moon as seen from Earth always looks the same. The Earth rotates, the Moon rotates, and the Moon just happens to rotate in the same amount of time it takes to orbit the Earth. (Because physics.)
Surely I must have mentioned this before, but in the 1970s there was an ambitious British TV show called Space: 1999, perhaps designed to appeal to bereft Star Trek fans. Its absurd premise was that a huge explosion on the Moon somehow blew the Moon out of its orbit around the Earth and sent it into deep space. (That wouldn’t happen. Something crashing *into* the Moon, maybe.) But what I remember is a title card in the first episode, identifying the setting as “The Dark Side of the Moon.” I instantly gave up on the show’s credibility, and only watched one or two episodes, and have never seen any more.
Anyway. Two more points. Again and again news coverage claims the Artemis II astronauts are or will be farther from the Earth than any previous astronauts, without explaining. I’m thinking, since several Apollo missions included an astronaut who remained in the capsule (while the other two descended to the surface in their lander), and who orbited the whole time, going around the back side of the moon, what does it means for the Artemis astronauts to be farther from Earth than they were? It can’t be by very much, given the distances involved. Perhaps just the slightly varying distances between Earth and Moon, during those voyages. Also, the claims were that the Artemis astronauts would see parts of the backside of the Moon no humans had ever seen directly before.
How could this be? Well, the NBC guy on this morning’s Today Show — Robert Bazell? No, Tom Costello — at least explained the last item. It’s because the Apollo astronauts were orbiting much lower, much closer to the moon, while Artemis is passing behind the moon from 10s of thousands of miles out. Thus they’re seeing an expansive view in a way the Apollo astronauts never saw.
And one thing they saw was this huge crater:
Following is a pic from the actual mission. “Everything to the left of the crater is the far side, the hemisphere we don’t get to see from Earth because the Moon rotates on its axis at the same rate that it orbits round us.”
I should mention that unmanned probes over decades have orbited the moon and mapped it extensively. When I was growing up we had two globes in the house: one of the Earth, one of the Moon. The backside has been seen and mapped for decades. Just not seen by direct human eyes.
The second point today. New views of the Earth and the Moon from Artemis II have brought out the flat earth crazies, who insist they’re all fakes. It’s partly that they’re prone to conspiracy theories — all those authorities and elites out to trick them — and partly due to what Ziya Tong calls “scale blindness.” As illustrated by a comment I saw on FB, and I’ll have to paraphrase from memory. About those views of the Earth. “Where are the all the thousands of planes in flight? Where are all the satellites in orbit?”
Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. Sunday morning update. Yesterday, I talked about how awful Trump’s message about glory to God and all of that was, but it’s looking much, much worse today. I’ll quote Trump in a second.
But let me do a Heather Cox Richardson here and talk about history for a second. …
He recalls Abraham Lincoln. Then quotes that quote from Donald Trump.
If Trump is actually going to give the order for massive war crimes, for destruction of civilian infrastructure, power plants, bridges, which will, among other things, lead to a lot of deaths in Iran, will the military obey it? A year ago, I would have said no.
But what we do know now is that, first of all, there turns out to be at least a significant MAGA component inside the officer corps. And we know that Pete Hexeth has been systematically corrupting, dismantling the military over the past 14 months. Generals who raise ethical concerns have been fired. Officers who even just want to be intelligent about warfare, and not believe that it’s all about warrior ethos and lethality have been fired, so it’s quite possible that there’s a quorum of officers who will follow instructions to commit war crimes.
…
It’s entirely possible that basically by this time Tuesday, America will have established itself as one of the world’s great villains. I don’t want to be here, but, you know, be warned. This is happening. This is real.
It’s the most astonishing, awful thing that I’ve ever seen, and we’ve all seen a lot of awful things. Take care, I guess.
Krugman doesn’t think so, but I think Trump will TACO.
Terrorism, according to ICE — yes, that ICE — “involves violence or the threat of violence against people or property to further a particular ideology.” The official website goes on to declare that “Terrorists do not care who they hurt or kill to achieve their goals.”
If you haven’t read Donald Trump’s Truth Social post from Sunday, above, take a minute to do so. Don’t rely on sanewashed descriptions in the media. And then tell me that Trump doesn’t perfectly fit his own officials’ definition of a terrorist.
There’s no question: Gregg Phillips, a top Federal Emergency Management Agency official, believes he was teleported 50 miles to a Waffle House in Georgia.
When CNN first reported the story on March 20, based on older podcast clips, skeptics wondered if things had been misconstrued. He was joking, surely. Or perhaps it was hyperbole. But no: Phillips, who leads FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, has since made it abundantly clear that he believes he experienced a supernatural transportation, twice. (In the podcast episode he used the word “teleporting.”) Once, his entire car was “lifted up” while he was driving and was carried to a ditch outside a church 40 miles away. “I know what I’ve experienced,” he wrote on Truth Social on March 23.
Similarly, the following week, a clip circulated of Vice President J.D. Vance claiming that UFO sightings are actually glimpses of demons in the sky. That also was not a misrepresentation of Vance’s words: He appears to believe that aliens visit Earth, and that those aliens are actually demons.
These stories lent themselves to eye-catching headlines. Teleportation? Demon UFOs? Critics of the administration saw in them proof that the MAGA movement is led by kooks, rather than qualified, levelheaded professionals. But there’s something that the stories about these clips have missed, beyond the individual-level absurdity. Phillips and Vance may sound, to the scientifically minded, ridiculous. But the bigger story, if you look at the landscape of American belief systems today, is that they’re actually remarkably conventional.
And
But sociologists who study belief in America have found that there has been a kind of weirding of American faith in recent years. According to Joseph O. Baker, a professor of sociology and anthropology at East Tennessee State University, there’s been a growth in the belief in paranormal matters thanks to the decline in conventional religion.
This was the theme of Nicholas Humphrey’s LEAPS OF FAITH, back in 1995; review here.
Long piece, concluding,
To be clear, Christianity is not to blame for any partisan action; it can and is used to justify a wide range of behavior or beliefs, including progressive ones. But the destruction of traditional guardrails on much of the practice of Christianity has meant that the notions that used to seem odd and fringe are now mainstream. This great weirding of American Christianity has made it normal for people in power to talk of demonic UFOs and teleportation. It may also continue to scramble our political conversation for years to come.
The New Republic, today: You Can Smell It Now: The Trump Presidency Is in Total Free Fall, subtitled “A loyal army of followers, a huge disinformation network, and a party of soul-selling cowards can crowd out facts for a long time. But eventually, reality catches up.” | As I’ve said: eventually reality catches up.
This is a 1951 black & white science fiction movie set in the Arctic, and it’s one of the most famous of the 1950s science fiction films. (This original version has been eclipsed over the decades by a 1982 remake directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell, with pulsing music by Ennio Morricone and gruesome special effects that turned off many viewers at the time. But that’s another discussion.)
This version is directed by Christian Nyby with music by Dimitri Tiomkin and a credit to John W. Campbell Jr., who wrote the 1938 novella “Who Goes There?” that the movie is based on. (That story ranks first in my latest weighted poll of science fiction novellas, as shown and discussed on this page.)
The film opens with distributor RKO’s logo, a Eiffel Tower atop a clear, slowly spinning globe, and then the logo, two crossed rifles, of production company Winchester Pictures.
Then we are in the arctic, amidst wind and swirling snow. The location is a base of the Alaska Air Command (according to the Wikipedia entry for the film) and the story opens as a visiting reporter, Scottie, enters the Officer’s Club looking for a story. Men inside play cards. A message come from the local Nobel laureate, Dr. Carrington (whom we later see is a somewhat fussy man with a goatee) that a magnetic disturbance suggests that some large plane has crashed nearby. Men from the Air Command fly — using a transport aircraft with skies on its front wheels — to Carrington’s outpost. (These appear to be live-action shots, not models or special effects.)
There we get a bit of love interest, as was common even among SF films of the time. Captain Henry from the Air Command base discovers that an old flame, Miss Nicholson, is Carrington’s assistant. They exchange banter about their last meeting, which Henry barely remembers, and flirt about whether they might give it another try.
A combined crew from both base and outpost, along with a pack of dogs, fly some 48 miles east, to the location of the anomaly. They find a clear round patch in the ice, with a airplane-like fin sticking out of it. They try blasting it loose with thermite, but that only destroys whatever is under the ice. But then they get another reading and discover a humanoid creature a bit away, as if an alien thrown away from the wreckage, under the ice.
They cut a block of ice holding this creature and carry it back on their plane to Carrington’s base. They put it in a room with a window smashed open to keep it cold, but one of them throws a plugged-in electric blanket over the ice, which thaws it out. By morning, the creature is gone.
Then follows a long sequence in which the everyone but Carrington wants to find and kill the creature, while Carrington wants to study it. Men and dogs are killed. Carrington discovers the creature is vegetable-like, which results in a crack about it being a “carrot.” Despite Carrington’s pleas (near the end the creature simply knocks him aside into a crumple on the floor — Hollywood’s judgment on eggheads and trying to understand), the creature is eventually cornered and destroyed via kerosene and an electric grid inside the station.
The movie ends as the reporter gets a connection to Anchorage, and submits his dramatic report, ending: “Tell the world. Tell this to everybody, wherever they are. Watch the skies everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!”
That last line was, of course, the title of the Bill Warren book I blogged about on April 1st.
\\
This is actually a pretty intelligent movie, to a point, that suffers a couple three crucial limitations or flaws. First, if not exactly a flaw, this 1951 film is directed in a manner like many 1940s films, in which all the actors speak their dialogue very quickly, as if they’re in a rush to get somewhere once filming wraps. It was just the style of the ’40s; see e.g. His Girl Friday. This manner gradually disappeared in just the next few years.
Second, the creature at the end is revealed to be just a man in a crude suit (see image above). To make it worse for the movie’s reputation, that actor was James Arness, who went on to have a great career starring in the TV series Gunsmoke for 20 years. This early role came to be rather an embarrassment on his resume.
And third, despite Carrington’s pleas, the creature doesn’t seem to act very intelligently at all. It breaks out of its cell, and cuts their power supply. Nothing about what a real intelligent creature might do, like… try to communicate? It’s primitive science fiction that considers alien life simply as monsters to be destroyed.
And it’s especially ironic since the source material, John W. Campbell, Jr.’ “Who Goes There?”, was much more intelligent and speculative about what the motives of this alien creature might be. Further, the shape-shifting theme of the original story was dropped from this film, and while Carpenter’s 1982 version used the shape-shifting theme gruesomely, both versions dropped Campbell’s mind-reading theme. In both cases, Hollywood dumbed down what was originally a deep, thoughtful, and clever science fiction novella.
Is Trump about to start World War III? Will big US cities be here in two days? (Look up “Eve of Destruction” on YouTube. It’s from 1965, and notice how many of the images are familiar in 2026.)
How far does Trump have to go before his fans see how unhinged he is? Before the rest of the US government does something? Before he is removed from office?
President Donald Trump escalated his threats to target Iran’s infrastructure if it does not open up the Strait of Hormuz, warning the country will be “living in Hell” in an expletive-filled message on social media Sunday. He later suggested that the United States could target “every power plant” in the country — an attack that experts warned could amount to war crimes.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform. “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
Some US politicians have reacted with alarm and questioned the US president’s mental state after Donald Trump issued an abusive, expletive-laden threat to Iran in which he called on the regime to “open the fuckin’ strait [of Hormuz], you crazy bastards”, as he threatened to further attack the country’s energy and transport infrastructure.
Of course, they can’t just press a button and ‘open’ the strait. It’s full of mines that would take weeks to remove, even with Iran’s help. But don’t bother Trump with details.
\\\
This is actually not a religious story. Well, yes it is, mostly.
NY Times, guest essay by P.G. Sittenfeld (who “delivered a version of this essay to his fellow prisoners at Ashland Satellite Prison Camp in Kentucky”), today:Resurrection Is Everywhere
If you were to pause the Christian story of Easter at the moment Jesus dies on the cross, it would look like a victory for power and cruelty. But soon there’s the empty tomb, the angel of the Lord proclaims, “He is risen,” and a resurrected Jesus tells his disciples, “I am with you always.”
In other words, death isn’t death. That is the radical, provocative, hopeful message of Easter. I believe that same familiar notion of resurrection applies to events in our lives, too.
He goes on with his own story (he was a Cincinnati City Council member convicted of public corruption) and many more religious allusions, but to me what he demonstrates is in the last sentence of what I just quoted. Things die all the time; it’s part of nature. But things grow anew as well, as happens every Spring. Stars live billions of years and explode; their remnants, complete with heavier elements formed in the explosion, collapse to become new stars and new planets. But these are not “resurrections” in the sense that something dies and comes to life as itself. (Furthermore, if Jesus sacrificed himself for humanity’s sins, what was the point of him being resurrected? Didn’t that negate the sacrifice? He’s still up there in Heaven answering prayers, right? But Christian theology does not bear close examination.)
The whole Easter story is such an obvious analogy to these ideas of Spring and renewal that happen everywhere and are observed by every culture in various ways. Also, it’s notable how religion conflates so many ideas, some obvious and others wholly implausible, with the implication that, if you accept one, you accept the whole package (e.g. how the traditional arguments for the existence of God (e.g. the Cosmological argument) are taken by believers to prove that their religion is one true one).
Thus eggs, and flowers, and so on. Fine.
\\\
Example of how the motive to privatize everything (to keep the government small) is actually driven by big business and their Republican servants. Certainly not for efficiency, or reducing costs to consumers.
This tax season, as you wade through the absurdly expensive and complicated process of filing income taxes, remember to thank the Trump administration.
Filing taxes should be really easy and completely free. It is in most other developed countries. And in 2024, the Biden administration debuted a pilot program called Direct File that could have made tax filing easy and free for most American taxpayers, too.
President Trump killed it.
Why did he do that?
Because tax preparation companies and Republican lawmakers have a shared interest in torturing taxpayers. The companies want to ensure that Americans remain dependent on their services. The Republicans want people to hate paying taxes.
With details.
\\\
On the same theme, but stepping out.
NY Times, book review by Jennifer Szalai, 25 Mar 2026: Will the Miracle of Capitalism Destroy Us All?, subtitled “A new history by Trevor Jackson argues that the economic system that transformed global living standards depends on endless growth impossible to sustain.”
In 2003, the literary theorist Fredric Jameson wrote that it was “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Trevor Jackson seems to agree, but only to a point. In “The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World,” Jackson says that the prevailing economic system has already gone a long way toward destroying our “finite planet.” He argues that if we don’t find a way to change course, the end of the world won’t be something we have to imagine; it will actually arrive.
As a lot of us have thought this for a while. Those who think we’ll always find new resources to keep the economy growing, and that the population can keep expanding indefinitely, aren’t thinking long-term enough.
The review concludes:
Whether intentional or not, Jackson’s overall message is that the system becomes so self-reinforcing that it pushes individual humans into insignificance. Luther, Newton and Lenin are included in this book merely because they provide “snapshots” of their economic worlds: “The people themselves are not important, which is exactly the point.”
Trump changes his story every day, and a few days ago he claimed the current Iranian regime was more amenable to negotiation, as if to credit himself with some sort of accomplishment. But he’s just making things up. | CNN, 4 Apr 2026: Iran’s ‘new’ regime looks much the same, only harsher
Related: Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, today: Why does the right hate the pope so much?, subtitled “It might be the weirdest fact of this upside-down decade: The church is on the right side of history (sort of)”
I’m not keeping up here in the blog with my revisiting of Radiohead albums. After Hail to the Thief came In Rainbows in 2007, which has nearly as many great songs. Nude, All I Need, Reckoner, House of Cards. Let’s pick this one.
Reckoner
You can’t take it with you
Dancing for your pleasure
You are not to blame for
Bittersweet distractor
Dare not speak its name
Dedicated to all you
All human beings
Because we separate
Like ripples on a blank shore
Because we separate (In rainbows)
Like ripples on a blank shore (In rainbows)
Reckoner
Take me with you
Dedicated to all you
All human beings
Ross Douthat and Bart Ehrman debate about the evolution of human morality; I’m not completely on board with either of them, and have a better explanation;
Examples of the religiously besotted: who think Christ is the King of America; who thinks US troops are fighting for Jesus; who want women barefoot and off the voter rolls;
Trump name-checks God;
The teleport guy triples down.
– – –
Items on religion, beginning with a serious debate between two scholars.
I dismiss Douthat completely; he thinks the world would be a better place if everyone were a Christian, just like him; he thinks that’s what right and true about the world; he was imprinted young. I’m open to Ehrman, who went from believer to scholar (if not entirely skeptic), but I’m still skeptical of him; I had issues with his book JESUS BEFORE THE GOSPELS (review here), and the new one seems similarly credulous about matters of moral evolution (the moral conscience he refers to is the evolved human nature of hundreds of thousands of years; Jesus could not have changed human nature’s moral inclinations in a single generation, and what about the rest of the world?).
(One trouble with experts on any subject is that they don’t always know very much about anything else.)
