Mark R. Kelly
» Founder in 1997 and site-runner for 20 years of Locus Online (Hugo Award winner in 2002). Founder in 2012 and still site-runner of sfadb.com (Science Fiction Awards Database). Retired in 2012 after 30 years as a software engineer for a certain rocket engine factory.
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Monthly Archives: May 2024
Busy Busy Busy; the Duties of an Executor
This week has been busy with medical procedures and doctor’s appointments, all part of that ‘third birthday’ I discussed two days ago. Tuesday: draws for extensive blood-work, at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center on Ashby in Berkeley (photo above), followed … Continue reading
Posted in Personal history
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Guilty Guilty Guilty; Over and Over and Over
Trump found guilty today on 34 charges; we oldsters remember the Doonsbury cartoon about Nixon: “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!”, which is apropos here; With a comment from David Brin, who has been saying the same things about Republicans, over and over … Continue reading
Posted in conservatives, Lunacy, Music, Politics, Psychology
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Third Birthday
Third ‘birthday’; Why American Christians support Israel; More polarities and correlations for my chart; Examples, just from recent days, about Republican ambitions to turn back history; More examples of Christian indoctrination. This week is the third anniversary of my heart … Continue reading
Posted in conservatives, Narrative, Personal history, Religion
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Floating
After three days summarizing recently read nonfiction books, today let’s capture recent items from the news. A conservative blames the unpopularity of an ice cream flavor on Biden; Conservatives are eager to impose Christian indoctrination in Florida and Texas; Paul … Continue reading
Jonathan Gottschall, THE STORY PARADOX
Here’s a nonfiction book from 2021 that I read just a couple weeks ago. It’s similar in heft to the two books just discussed, in terms of length and conceptual depth, perhaps somewhere in the middle below Wilson and above … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Narrative, Psychology, Religion
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Woo-Kyoung Ahn, THINKING 101
Subtitled: “How to Reason Better and Live Better” (Flatiron Books, Sept 2022, 276pp, including 21p of acknowledgements, notes, and index) Here’s another short book, read the same month as yesterday’s Robert Charles Wilson book though it was published a year … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Psychology
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Robert Charles Wilson, OWNING THE UNKNOWN
This is a book about theology, atheism and the idea of God, from the perspective of a science fiction writer. Wilson is a significant contemporary SF writer whose fiction output has slowed in recent years; I reviewed his 2015 novel … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Religion, science fiction
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More Panic, Projection, Nonsense, and Superstition
Takes on the “Biden assassination plot” fantasy, and projection; Why would DeSantis think the Founding Fathers would hate sociology? Tribal mentality from Royce White and Bryce Mitchell; And Christian rejection of the nature of the real world. First for today, … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy
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Idiots, Disingenuous, or Both?
Republicans misinterpret, either naively or maliciously, boilerplate language about use of force by the FBI as a plot by Biden to assassinate Trump; Thoughts about accountability; Testimony from Stew Peters and Steve Bannon, both presumably self-proclaimed Christians, about their plans … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Lunacy, Politics
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For Certain Values of Natural
Conservatives are obsessed over things that are allegedly “unnatural” (especially homosexuality), when what they are really concerned about is any behavior unsuitable to tribal morality, in particular the expansion and growth of the human tribe, for which any sexual behavior … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, The Gays
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