Category Archives: Uncategorized

Lines from Angels in America: The World Only Spins Forward

Posted on 6 June 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Just a few about what the angels are, what they want, and in what sense the play is about angels and their relationship with America. Part One: Millennium Approaches Joe, a Mormon lawyer living in New York, has this take … Continue reading →

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Equus, part 2

Posted on 30 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Scene 25. The psychiatrist, concerning the worship of a 17-year-old stable boy raised in isolation by his religious mother: I only know it’s the core of his life. What else has he got? Think about him. He can hardly read. … Continue reading →

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Recent Links Saved from Facebook

Posted on 14 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Steven Pinker’s favorite books http://www.vulture.com/2018/03/steven-pinkers-10-favorite-books.html include title by Gamow, Dawkins, Deutsch, and his wife Sean Carroll’s correctives to Jordan Peterson’s fandom Cleaning your room is good; using pseudo-intellectual babble about archetypes to identify culture with masculinity is… Posted by Sean … Continue reading →

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The Instinct Can Be Fought: TOS #24: “A Taste of Armageddon”

Posted on 14 August 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

The Enterprise attempts to initiate diplomatic relations with a planet conducting a computer war with its neighbor planet, a war in which theoretical causalities voluntarily go to die in disintegration chambers. This is one of Trek’s best ethical conundrums, a … Continue reading →

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Linkdump: May to June 2017

Posted on 6 June 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m far behind on posting “Links and Comments”, and think I should try to do so daily. For now, I’m catching up on everything I’ve copied to my notepad documents for blog use, listing them in reverse chrono order, with … Continue reading →

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Accumulated Links I Don’t Have Time to Comment On In Detail

Posted on 25 May 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Slate: Donald Trump Doesn’t Share America’s Values. The Transcript of His Call to the Philippine President Proves It. \\ The Blaze (which I never look at but I saw via a relative’s Fb post): Fake academic paper published in liberal … Continue reading →

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March for Science

Posted on 21 April 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ve never marched for any cause — it’s not my style — but I think tomorrow’s “March for Science” is as worthy as anything could be, despite the inevitable casting of science as some sort of partisan issue. It’s the … Continue reading →

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E.O. Wilson on the Ephemerality of Life

Posted on 15 March 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

In discussing the human advantage of long-term memory [in the book I’ll post notes about shortly], enabling us to plan and imagine possible futures, he reflects that, with every death, an entire library of experience is lost. He recalls his … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Reason; Christian victimhood; dead progressives; dystopias; Republican blondes; the fight for reason; fake history

Posted on 21 February 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

From an Elizabeth Kolbert essay in next weekend’s New York Times Magazine: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds, subtitled “New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.” One way to look at science is as a system … Continue reading →

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Zuckerberg and Harari

Posted on 18 February 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Mark Zuckerberg’s new Facebook manifesto has been much in the news lately; Vox’s Ezra Klein characterizes it as Mark Zuckerberg’s theory of human history. “History is the story of how we’ve learned to come together in ever greater numbers,” Zuckerberg … Continue reading →

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