“American” Intelligence?

Posted on Thursday 24 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump wants AI to be not “woke”; how will he enforce that? And he doesn’t like the word “artificial”;
  • A reel by Yuval Noah Harari about a realistic threat of AI;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on the various deflections Republicans are bringing up to stall release of the Epstein files.
– – –

So Trump issued executive orders today to fund AI and to make sure it’s not “woke.” Oh, and he doesn’t like the term “artificial” intelligence.

NY Times, 23 Jul 2025: Trump Plans to Give A.I. Developers a Free Hand [gift link]

Subtitled: With executive orders and an “A.I. Action Plan” to promote American dominance of the technology, President Trump declared that the United States needed to win the A.I. race.
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I visit you in another dream

Posted on Wednesday 23 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How conspiracy theorists think most people agree with them;
  • How Trump’s administration is purging climate data;
  • How JD Vance thinks some Americans are more worthy citizens than others;
  • Paul Krugman on ICE and New York City;
  • Three items from JMG: repealing greenhouse gas regulations; how Homan doesn’t believe the polls; how a confirmed judge has an agenda at odds with the Constitution.
  • And Bruce Springsteen’s “Paradise.”
– – –

This is interesting. Why would this be? Because these people live in bubbles? Put another way, because they don’t get out much — of their bubbles? They don’t read books or any media outside what their bubble endorses?

Ars Technica, Jennifer Ouellette, 22 Jul 2024: Conspiracy theorists don’t realize they’re on the fringe, subtitled “Gordon Pennycook: ‘It might be one of the biggest false consensus effects that’s been observed.'”
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Posted in Morality, Politics, Psychology | Comments Off on I visit you in another dream

It’s Always About the Gap Between Ideology and Religion, and Reality

Posted on Tuesday 22 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

And whether humanity can “grow up” and thrive by living in reality and not fantasy.

  • Infrastructure note about More tags;
  • Paul Krugman on why the right would see AI as “communist” — because it’s reality-based;
  • (Aside: another arc of history is how the discoveries of objective facts about the universe have steadily undermined the religious and ideological fantasies that humans have lived by)
  • Should people cut off contact with their MAGA relatives? (With a perspective of my own.)
  • Amanda Marcotte on MAGA’s tantrum about the new Superman being woke;
  • How Stephen Miller thinks immigrants didn’t build the Empire State Building (he’s wrong).
– – –

 

Today I spent more time than I expected to insert “more” tags into posts that I had not already done so… without realizing I had not done so since April. It took a surprisingly long time, because I also discovered that some image links had gone bad — ones from Salon. I went back to the original articles and got revised image links and updated my posts. Why would they change the image links…? Anyway, I fixed quite a few, but I’m sure there are others I didn’t see.

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A Paul Krugman piece from a few days ago about whether AI would be communist.

Paul Krugman, 17 Jul 2025: The Road to MechaHitler, subtitled “Reality still has a well-known liberal bias”

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Sciency Things, and Presidential Pettiness

Posted on Monday 21 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Tom Nichols on presidential pettiness;
  • How the Trump administration is using a strength of science to discredit it;
  • Ethan Siegel on what we’ve learned for 35 years of the Hubble Space Telescope;
  • A breakthrough in a grand unified theory of mathematics;
  • How brain scans reveal optimists are alike, and pessimists are unique; and my thoughts on whether this maps to conservative/progressive values.
– – –

Some sciency things today. Oh, OK, and a couple about Trump.

From Tom Nichols (whom I’ve reviewed and mentioned many times).

The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 21 Jul 2025: Presidential Pettiness, subtitled “Donald Trump seems to have no theory of governance beyond personal gain and retribution.”

Years pass, Trump keeps doing the same thing, the commentators comment, pointing out the same things, and his fans don’t care, and nothing changes. But we can’t become complacent. People in the future will look back on this generation and see which people let Trump get away with all this. They will look back the same way they look back at the “good Germans” who supported Hitler.

So I will offer several paragraphs by Tom Nichols, and leave it at that.

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Posted in Lunacy, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Sciency Things, and Presidential Pettiness

Pat Frank: ALAS, BABYLON

Posted on Monday 21 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(First published 1959. Edition here: HarperCollins/Perennial Classics, 1999, 323pp, including author biography and publication history by Hal Hager)

Next up in the group of apocalyptic novels I read in June, following Butler’s PARABLE OF THE SOWER, is this. It isn’t as famous as two other near-contemporaneous novels, ON THE BEACH from 1957 and FAIL-SAFE from 1962, since popular movies were made from both of them. (I think there was a TV version of this one.) The author was a journalist whose work took him into contact with military people who strategized various nuclear war scenarios. He was asked what would happen if nuclear war broke out. He said, “Oh, I think they’d kill fifty or sixty million Americans–but I think we’d win the war.” This was in the 1950s. Frank was similar to George R. Stewart, author of EARTH ABIDES (my review here), in that while both wrote other books and were moderately well-known in their day, they are remembered decades later only for one book each.

The previous time I read this it reminded me of a Stephen King novel. Continue reading →

Posted in Book Notes, science fiction | Comments Off on Pat Frank: ALAS, BABYLON

Stories Mislead You About the Reality of the World

Posted on Sunday 20 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Crime on TV v crime in reality;
  • Conspiracy theories on TV v conspiracy theories in reality;
  • If stories mislead about reality, then what is science fiction about?
– – –

 

I’ve mentioned before that my understanding is that there are more crimes depicted in movies and TV shows, especially the latter, than there are in real life, though I don’t have citations for relevant statistics. But here’s an item from today’s NYT Magazine that, offhandedly, supports the notion.

NY Times Magazine, John J. Lennon, 16 Jul 2025: Everyone’s Obsessed With True Crime. Even Prisoners Like Me., subtitled “As the genre has boomed on cable, the incarcerated have found themselves watching more and more of it.”

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Stories, Traditions, and Science

Posted on Saturday 19 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Why does MAGA hate science?
  • Why do right-wing folks think Democratic policies have failed?
  • And Paul Krugman on the top 10 political websites on Substack.
– – –

A significant essay, for my concerns.

Salon, Kirk Swearingen, 19 Jul 2025: Why MAGA hates science so much, subtitled “Billionaires hate the rest of us — and Trump’s loyalists would rather suffer, even die, than face the truth”
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Posted in conservatives, Politics, Science | Comments Off on Stories, Traditions, and Science

Only Certain People Count

Posted on Friday 18 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Today’s news about Stephen Colbert;
  • Conservatives have finally managed to cut funding to PBS and NPR;
  • David Brooks on Trump winning the race to the bottom;
  • Sure enough, EPA is firing hundreds of scientific experts;
  • Fareed Zakaria on how Obama deported more people than Trump, and why;
  • And the weird claim about Trump’s 90% approval rating.
– – –

The big news today (aside from yesterday’s big news about Epstein) is about CBS announcing it will not renew the contract of Stephen Colbert when it expires next May.

The Atlantic, David A. Graham, 17 Jul 2025: Is Colbert’s Ouster Really Just a ‘Financial Decision’?, subtitled “CBS no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt.”

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Incompetence, Greed, or Sabotage?

Posted on Thursday 17 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Elizabeth Kolbert on the Texas floods and the administration’s undermining of climate research;
  • How the Trump administration wants to discourage wind and solar projects;
  • Recalling the Scopes trial, 100 years ago this month, and America’s continued antipathy toward science and long-term thinking;
  • Short items about Alligator Alcatraz and how to tell if someone is a criminal; and floating the execution of Trump foes;
  • And some personal reactions to The Bear episode about the wedding.
– – –

I observe yet again that I don’t see much difference between the behavior of the current US administration and what the behavior of an outside agency would be, one bent on undermining, even sabotaging, critical government functions meant to secure Americans’ health and future and its status in the world.

The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert, 12 July 2025: Flash Floods and Climate Policy

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Is the universe friendly, or hostile?

Posted on Wednesday 16 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • David Wallace-Wells on the Epstein scandal, with items by Zack Beauchamp and Shawn McCreesh;
  • How simple-minded Trump characterizes his adversaries as “evil”;
  • How Trump’s economic agenda is driven by simple-minded lies and misunderstandings;
  • How the question “Is the world a friendly place” underlies the range of human nature that determines our politics;
  • And Robert Reich conducts a poll asking when Trump and his followers think American was “great”.
– – –

 

NY Times, David Wallace-Wells, 16 Jul 2025: The Epstein Story Is Both Conspiracy Theory and Genuine Scandal [gift link]

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Posted in History, Human Nature, Philosophy, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on Is the universe friendly, or hostile?