Category Archives: Human Nature

The Roots of All This is an Unchanging Human Nature in a Changing World

Posted on Monday 10 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Heather Cox Richardson explains why the right to vote, not the Second Amendment, is the key to maintaining our rights; Robert Reich wonders where the lawlessness of the Trump regime will end; Paul Krugman sees the end of Pax Americana; … Continue reading →

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Flooding the Zone with Shock and Awe

Posted on Saturday 8 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

How to deal with it; I’m trying to put things into a broader perspective of their deep motivations, which are always about basic, tribalist, human nature; Trump is taking over Kennedy Center because he objects to drag; Plastic straws, racist … Continue reading →

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A Nation vs. a Collection of States

Posted on Thursday 6 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Quite a number of interesting items stacked up. Let’s just start working them. How sending education “back to the states” is problematical for the same reason you don’t run a nation like a business; How Trump creates problems he then … Continue reading →

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Living in History

Posted on Tuesday 4 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Still rainy, still with cold, sleeping half the day it seems, reading a bit. I roused myself about two hours ago and here’s what I came up with. Heather Cox Richardson on the obvious: that Republicans are letting an un-elected … Continue reading →

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RIP Wordpad

Posted on Monday 27 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Windows has deprecated WordPad, which makes my life more difficult; David French on a German thinker, Carl Schmitt, and the friend-enemy distinction, and how it informs current American politics; Latest thoughts from Heather Cox Richardson, about the cancellation of foreign … Continue reading →

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Heather Cox Richardson, DEMOCRACY AWAKENING, post 3

Posted on Sunday 26 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Summary thoughts about this book. (Earlier posts with review and comments: post 1; post 2.) Richardson tells the story of the past century, of the previous four years (before the book was published in 2019), and of the nation’s first … Continue reading →

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Heather Cox Richardson, DEMOCRACY AWAKENING, post 2

Posted on Sunday 26 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Continuing my fairly detailed summary notes of this book. The second part of this book is about the ascendance of Trump, finishing with the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The third part of the looks … Continue reading →

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Heather Cox Richardson, DEMOCRACY AWAKENING, post 1

Posted on Sunday 26 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “Notes on the State of America” (Viking, Sep 2023, xvii + 286pp, including 30p of notes and index) Heather Cox Richardson is a historian who has become well-known, in addition to several earlier books, for her newsletter called Letters … Continue reading →

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Zack Beauchamp, THE REACTIONARY SPIRIT

Posted on Tuesday 14 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “How American’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World” (PublicAffairs, July 2024, 262pp including 16pp of acknowledgements, selected bibliography, and index.) Here’s another recent book, which I bought mainly because I’ve seen the author’s name quite a number of … Continue reading →

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Human Nature and Existential Crises

Posted on Monday 13 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Yesterday I had an item and some comments about how the inability of many people to recognize existential dangers like climate change may in fact doom the species. (And explain the Fermi Paradox.) Too many people live in fantasy cultural … Continue reading →

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