- There an overlap between science fiction and horror I just realized today;
- On its 250th anniversary, America looks backward and forward;
- Brief items about Head Start, Trump the Mafia Boss, Anthony Fauci’s mortal sin (challenging Trump), the new pro-teen pregnancy movement, and the triumph of girls in Boy Scouts.
I came across this same quote from H.P. Lovecraft twice today. A coincidence. Meaningful? No. But coincidences can make one pause and think about something you might otherwise pass over.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
According to Google this is the opening line from one of HPL’s earliest stories, “The Call of Cthulhu,” from 1928. And the whole opening is this:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Lovecraft wrote what some have called ‘cosmic horror’ and what occurred to me today after seeing this quote is that it fits right into my recent thinking about different ‘levels’ of reality, and how many questions make sense at some levels and not others. Humanity tends to project human values on the entire universe, unable or unwilling to think outside the box of human experience (as science fiction tries to explore).
Which is to say, perhaps there is a connection between certain kinds of science fiction and certain kinds of horror, which I have not until now considered.
Furthermore: Lovecraft cast this as horror because he seemed genuinely threatened, or frightened, by such potential “terrifying vistas of reality.” Just as some conservatives reject any science that would threaten their storybook religions.
And here’s a science fiction connection: some science fiction writers at the dawn of the space age were genuinely worried that the vast gulfs of space might drive astronauts insane. Ballard, Malzberg.
And yet these worries have not panned out. Rather, astronauts and civilians have been awed and overwhelmed by the experience of being in space. See Frank White’s THE OVERVIEW EFFECT and Deana L. Weibel’s THE ULTRAVIEW EFFECT.
This fear of the unknown on the one hand, and awe of newly known on the other, aligns with the conservative/progressive spectrum of human nature. Just as everything seems to. Conservatives fear things that others accept and deal with.
(I read virtually all of HPL about 15 years ago. Everything fits into about four volumes. I’ll have to revisit.)
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We now return to our usual programming. Though this first item is not unrelated to the above.
OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, today: America’s 250th: Looking backward and forward, subtitled “America has been divided for 250 years. If we make it to 500, will we be still having the same arguments or will we have outgrown them?”
Which prompts me to wonder if inward/outward isn’t as appropriate as backwards/forwards.
Now that the firework smoke has cleared, we can begin to evaluate America’s 250th birthday. The event can be approached in two ways—what it showed about where America came from and what it suggested concerning where America is headed: looking backward and looking forward.
The looking backward aspect is complicated by the presence of two expressly and organizationally competing narratives about America’s past: America 250 and Freedom 250. America 250 was the official, bipartisan, congressionally chartered committee established in 2016 to plan national, nonpartisan historical and educational events across the country. Freedom 250 was a public-private partnership and task force established under an executive order by President Trump to organize an alternative set of events, including the Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Both of these organizations sponsored events celebrating the nation’s semiquincentennial.
Freedom 250, we’ve seen, is an effort to whitewash history, and insist that the founders intended a Christian nation, despite all the evidence they did not.
The writer goes on to speculate about America in 2276. Perhaps I’ll return to this.
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- Next target for destruction.
- NY Times, today: Trump Administration Plans to Upend Head Start by Deregulating It
- Subtitled: “The White House tried but failed to block funding for preschool for poor children. Instead, it will seek to strip away standards on health, literacy — and brushing teeth.”
- Regulations and standards are for communists, presumably.
- Like a Mafia boss.
- JMG, from WSJ, today: WSJ: “The Boss Wants This Money,” How Trump Shakes Down Corporations And Megadonors For Tens Of Millions
- John Pavlovitz, yesterday: The Mortal Sin of Anthony Fauci
- “A reader outside of the US messaged me today and asked me to explain to him the Right’s incessant attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci.”
- He challenged Trump. “Antony Fauci has sinned against their God.”
- Slate, Jill Filipovic, 28 Jul 2026: The Pro-Teen-Pregnancy Movement Has Taken Over the Trump Administration
- Subtitled: “I thought we’d already seen the worst possible way to teach sex education. MAGA has found a way to make it worse.”
- Like trickle-down economics, it never worked. Now MAGA *wants* teens to get pregnant (and married) early on. Expand the tribe.
- The evidence-based world reaches far different conclusions than the MAGA-based tribal, intuitively-superstitious world.
- NY Times, guest essay by Erica Song, 25 Jul 2026: The Boy Scouts Let in Girls Almost a Decade Ago. It’s Been a Triumph.
- Lots of photos. Quote:
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What I know from six years of leading Troop 163 is that these girls invigorate scouting rather than weaken it. They have modeled, for the boys and girls in neighboring troops, what it looks like to earn your rank without shortcuts.
These young women will grow up to be doctors, engineers, leaders, colleagues. The boys in scouting will grow up alongside them, and some of those boys will one day work with them and for them. Teaching our children to struggle and achieve together is not a social experiment. It means we are preparing them for the real world.
