Lc&Cs: Disinfo’s Popularity, Villainous Facebook, and the Complexity of Modern Life

Posted on Saturday 9 October 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Links from this past week, with comments, about how Facebook finds disinformation popular and therefore profitable, how its users search out disinformation to confirm their preconceptions, how Republican disinfo about COVID is killing off its base, about Trump True Believers’ authoritarian reasons, and about the complexity of modern life.

[Image from Salon.]

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PKD: The Man in the High Castle

Posted on Friday 8 October 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

I am going to begin posting relatively *brief* comments about books I’ve read lately, to keep up with what I’ve been reading. My extensive book summaries with comments take a long time to set up; by waiting to post anything about a book I’ve read until such a complete post is ready is a kind of “perfect is the enemy of good”. I can do shorter posts and keep up, and these shorter posts might actually be more useful to readers, than my lengthy summaries and comments have been.

But already I’m writing too much. Today’s post is about Philip K. Dick’s THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, published in 1962, winner of the Hugo Award, and a few years ago basis for a TV series… which I had not seen. I reread the novel a couple weeks ago.

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Ls&Cs: The Fading of Religion, and Human Progress Despite It

Posted on Thursday 7 October 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Here are several links about religion I’ve captured in recent weeks mostly to the Patheos.com website, which is a collection of blogs from all points of view along the religious spectrum. The ones I tend to read, of course, are those devoted to pointing out the latest religious hypocrisies, especially among politicians, and those by people who once believed and left the church, and are happy to explain why, often in great detail. (They are the smart ones who have figured it out, as I keep saying.) Precisely the sites that believers will ignore. As they will ignore this post.

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Thinking About SF: Classic Erosion

Posted on Wednesday 6 October 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

What do Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Star Trek TOS, and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series have in common?

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Ls&Cs: Just a Few Rocks to Look At

Posted on Tuesday 5 October 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Catching up on one last batch of links and comments collected but not yet posted since I came home from the hospital in June. Not all of them political.

And, let’s try something new: placing some kind of relevant photograph above the “more” fold, so the front page of this site looks more interesting than dry blocks of text. — In fact, I’m going to go back and edit several recent posts to add photos. Just a few for now. (For most of these, I am shamelessly linking to the photographs embedded in the linked articles. The one right here is an exception.)

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Aug-Sep Ls&Cs: Revising the Decline of Credulous, Mansplaining Fossil Fuel Flat-Earthers and Klan Refugees

Posted on Monday 4 October 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

From early August through early September — back at the beginning of the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, when Covid deaths in the US hadn’t yet reached 700,000.

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Ls&Cs: Scopes Coal Social Media Fasting and Prayer

Posted on Monday 4 October 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Southern resistance to vaccines, and the Southern inferiority complex (entailing the Scopes trial); Republican commitment to fossil fuels despite climate change; false claims via social media; fasting and prayer.

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Science Ls&Cs: Time for Critical Blue Ozone Fitness

Posted on Sunday 3 October 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

The unfittedness of the universe for life; languages that do or don’t have a word for the color blue; telescopes as time machines; how scientists solved the ozone layer; critical thinking.

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Links & Comments: Today’s Headlines; Other Recent Links

Posted on Friday 1 October 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

About our national decline; how vaccine mandates are mostly working; violence in support of Trump; skewed news coverage; and public resistance to a health mandate in 1847, about doctors’ washing hands.

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Links and Headlines: Dark Skies; Misinformation; Critical Thinking; Empathy; Headlines

Posted on Thursday 30 September 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

There have been a handful of SF novels over the years that include as breaks between the prose sets of futuristic news headlines, to indicate the state of the future world without having to explicate it in detail. Gunn’s The Listeners did this; I’m thinking John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and The Shockwave Rider did this, though I haven’t looked closely at these books in years. (I’ll update/correct these comments as necessary.)

I’m thinking to refine some posts here simply to provide headlines that indicate the current zeitgeist, without needing explanation. But not for today, exactly.

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