- Michael Shermer on UFOs;
- Fareed Zakaria on civilizational erasure;
- Hillary Rodman Clinton on MAGA’s war on empathy;
- And Bruckner 4.
Michael Shermer has a new book out called TRUTH, which re-assembles topics and themes from his earlier books (I’m half way through it.) But those topics and themes are still important. Here’s what isn’t said to be an excerpt, exactly, though it might be.
Washington Post, Michael Shermer, (29 Jan 2026): I’ve reported on UFO sightings for decades — and come to this conclusion
As I’ve said, and as David Brin and others keep saying, the evidence that strange things in the sky are alien visitors is no better now than it was in the 1950s and ’60. The photos — even those presented by the US government a few years ago — are just as blurry, despite the overwhelming preponderance of pocket phones with great cameras over the past couple decades. That fact, combined with the psychological needs of some people to want to see UFOs as aliens, explains them away. But it takes people like Shermer to keep reminding us of the situation.
I have been following and writing about UFO phenomena and the people who believe they represent alien visitation since the 1990s, and until recently the topic was always largely treated by the public and media as fringe and beneath serious consideration. That began to change in 2017, when The New York Times published a front-page story about the Pentagon having established the secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to learn what was really going on with all these sightings, many of which happened over military facilities.
He goes on to address the evidence. Very few sightings qualify as unidentified. According to astronauts, the space environment is prone to optical illusions. Shermer addresses three ideas, that UFO and UAP sighting are
1. ordinary terrestrial (balloons, camera/lens effects, visual illusions, etc.), 2. extraordinary terrestrial (Russian or Chinese spy planes or drones capable of feats unheard of in the U.S.) [or] 3. extraordinary extraterrestrial (alien presence).
And concluding that most sighting are in the first category. The second?
That hypothesis is highly unlikely. It is simply not possible that some nation, corporation or lone individual — no matter how smart and creative — could have created an aircraft of any sort that would be centuries ahead of the West’s present technologies.
The third?
It’s not impossible, but it is highly improbable. While intelligent life is probably out there somewhere, the distances between the stars are so vast that it is extremely unlikely that any have come here, and what little evidence is offered by UAP believers comes in the form of highly questionable grainy photographs, blurry videos and stories about strange lights in the night sky.
What’s actually going on
is a deep, religious-like impulse to believe that there is a godlike, omnipotent intelligence out there who 1. knows we’re here, 2. is monitoring us and is concerned for our well-being and 3. will save us if we’re good. Researchers have found, for example, an inverse relationship between religiosity, meaning and belief in aliens; that is, those who report low levels of religious belief but high desire for meaning show greater belief in extraterrestrials. They also found that people who self-identified as either atheist or agnostic were more likely to report believing in ETIs than those who reported being religious (primarily Christian).
And finishing,
I have come to the conclusion that aliens are sky gods for skeptics, deities for atheists and a secular alternative to replace the rapidly declining religiosity in the West — particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, where, not coincidentally, most UAP sightings are made.
This is what I concluded decades ago. And what most scientists and rational people have done.
This article goes to the larger issue of human perception, and how scientific ideas are accepted or rejected to extent that they support primitive tribal myths.
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Another thought piece for today. Zakaria takes the big picture.
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Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria, 30 Jan 2026: The real ‘civilizational erasure’ is happening in America, subtitled “Trump’s expansion of state power undermines the West’s core achievement: limits on authority.”
Donald Trump, JD Vance and other MAGA luminaries often proclaim that the grave danger facing the West is “civilizational erasure,” which they claim is happening in Europe: Through its dangerously misguided approach toward identity and immigration, Europe is destroying the West’s distinctive legacy.
But the West’s defining character has not been tribal or religious solidarity — that describes most of the world. The West’s precious, almost unique, achievement has been the limitation of state power. Since Magna Carta in 1215, the West gradually placed constraints on rulers — through rights for citizens, independent courts, a sovereign church and the sanctity of private property. That inheritance is what made the West democratic and prosperous. It is also what made it stable: Citizens could dissent, businesses could invest and civil society could flourish because power was bounded by law.
The second Trump administration has moved sharply to erode these traditions.
With examples. My comment: most people won’t notice or care.
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And then, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The Atlantic, Hillary Rodham Clinton, 29 Jan 2026: MAGA’s War on Empathy, subtitled “This crisis in Minneapolis reveals a deep moral rot at the heart of Trump’s movement.”
Long piece. I confess that when I link pieces like this, I don’t always take the time to read them through thoroughly. I skim them over a minute or two trying to find their essential point, and some quotable bit (whether it supports my preconceptions or not).
A couple samples from this piece:
That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith. Trump and his allies believe that the more inhumane the treatment, the more likely it is to spread fear. That’s the goal of surging heavily armed federal forces into blue states such as Minnesota and Maine—street theater of the most dangerous kind. Other recent presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without turning American cities into battlegrounds or making a show of keeping children in cages.
“The cruelty is the point,” as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer memorably put it during Trump’s first term. The savagery is a feature, not a bug. By contrast, as Serwer noted recently in these pages, the people of Minnesota have responded with an approach you could call “‘neighborism’—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.” To my ears, that’s as Christian a value as it gets.
And
I know empathy isn’t easy. But neither is Christianity. When Jesus called on us to turn the other cheek and pray for those who persecute us, it was supposed to be hard. We fail more than we succeed—we’re human—but the discipline is to keep trying.
It’s especially challenging to feel empathetic for people with whom we disagree passionately. I certainly struggle with this. You may remember that I once described half of Trump supporters as “the basket of deplorables.” I was talking about people drawn to racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia—you name it. “Some of those folks, they are irredeemable,” I said. I still believe intolerance and hatred are deplorable. Slandering a peaceful protester and cheering his murder is deplorable. Terrorizing children because their parents are undocumented is deplorable. But as a Christian, I also aspire to see the goodness in everyone and believe that everyone has a chance at redemption, no matter how remote.
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Listening this evening: Bruckner 4.
