Tear-Downs and Demons

Posted on Monday 1 June 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump’s cancellations, which I can’t keep up with;
  • How Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill will impact public schools;
  • How UFOs are interpreted by the religious as demons;
  • Preisner’s “Silence, Night & Dreams”
– – –

I’m not sure I’m keeping up with all the things Trump has planned and then cancelled, all the people he’s hired (he only hires the very best people, remember) and then fired, all his back-and-forths about the war with Iran.

Today, apparently, he’s withdrawn his idea for the $18 billion dollar fund to compensate law-breakers who think they were unfairly prosecuted by the Biden administration. When a judge forced him to remove his name from the Kennedy Center, he renounced control of it. So many musical groups cancelled his 250th anniversary party, he cancelled the party, and will instead hold a rally. (Who were those musicians anyway? All of them obscure to me. Surely there were much better acts at the 1976 celebration?) While his cage match in front of the White House, an embarrassment on many dimensions, is still a go.

Everything Trump does is a tear-down. This is consistent with the conservative project to reverse the social and moral progress of the past two centuries. In favor of base, primitive, Biblical morality.

Slate, Adam Laats, today: Wave Goodbye to the Last Normal Year for American Schools, subtitled “Thanks to Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill,’ the ’26–’27 school year will look wildly different.”
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How Americans Don’t Realize How the World Views the US

Posted on Sunday 31 May 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Andrew O’Hehir: Do Americans realize how much the world hates us?
  • Ross Douthat: The best news in America — rapidly falling crime rates;
  • Short items about the murder of 60 Minutes; Trump’s extreme intelligence, rally on the mall, and mental illness; and cave-man mentality about James Talarico.
– – –

Distracted from being able to write a blog post three times in the past week, a record perhaps. But gathering notes, compiling thoughts, as always.

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Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, today: Do Americans really know how much the world hates us?, subtitled “The global romance with America turned sour years ago. Now the world’s ready for a divorce”

In part about Americans who are trying to flee the country they’re now embarrassed by.

If being an American of approximately liberal inclinations in the 21st century seems to require constant public apologies, some disgruntled Yanks actually are exploring their escape options. Applications for foreign citizenship have reportedly exploded over the past couple of years, for reasons I hardly need to explain. Nearly 20,000 Americans applied for Irish citizenship in 2025, while about 9,000 applied for British citizenship, a considerably more difficult and expensive process. Both were record highs.

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Today’s Words of Wisdom

Posted on Friday 29 May 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Richard Dawkins defends being a “cultural Christian” and suggests being a cultural scientist, appreciating the grandeur of our “increasingly understood universe”;
  • Bertrand Russell suggested that intelligent people are those who see the world as it is, not as they would like it to be;
  • How creationists and flat-earthers are proud of their ignorance;
  • Short items: the right accuses Talarico of child sacrifice and wearing women’s underwear, and Mamdani of being like a KKK Imperial Wizard; how those boat strikes have had no effect on the coke supply; and how a judge rules against Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center;
  • And Jonathan V. Last on how low-IQ Trump is too stoopid to win the war against Iran.
– – –

Free Inquiry, Richard Dawkins, posted yesterday: ‘Cultural Christian’? So what?

Earlier this year Dawkins wrote about being a “cultural Christian,” i.e. a nonbeliever in the supernatural matters of the Christian faith, but raised in a culture permeated with Christian traditions. He likes Christmas carols, and so on. The press misunderstood what he meant — or rather, wanted him to appeal more to believers. Now he writes,
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More About the Contrast between Principles and Tribalism

Posted on Thursday 28 May 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The January 6th rioters feel entitled to reparations by the US government for the inconvenience they’ve experienced from having broken the law and been arrested;
  • Contrasting views of Christianity in Texas;
  • How the GOP fires people who value principles over loyalty to Trump;
  • Free Inquiry’s Ronald A. Lindsay about how the US is a product of the Enlightenment, not Christian principles;
  • Examples from American history: Do contemporary Christians realize that Christianity has always been against the expansion of human rights, to slaves, interracial marriage, women’s suffrage, civil rights, LGBTQ rights?
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They feel entitled??

Slate, Lionel Augustine and Matteson Epstein, today: “I Think I’ve Earned My Peace”, subtitled “There have been many negative reactions to the $1.8 billion slush fund, but perhaps the most illuminating one is from the people hoping to access it.”

On Jan. 6, 2021, Larry Rendall Brock Jr. marched on the Capitol and became one of the riot’s most indelible figures. Many remember him as one of the “zip-tie guys”—he was photographed crossing the Senate floor in tactical gear, white flex cuffs dangling from his fingertips. Before actually showing up in Washington, the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel had discussed, over Facebook, seizing members of Congress. He also floated applying the same interrogation techniques he once used against al-Qaida to “gain evidence on the coup” he thought the members were perpetrating.

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What Scientists Do…

Posted on Wednesday 27 May 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • A revision to climate change predictions doesn’t discredit science, as some people would like to think;
  • Yuval Noah Harari on the global liberal order; the stories of fascism, communism, and liberalism; redemption; and self-correcting mechanisms;
  • Short items about Trump’s Ebola prevention defunding; childish cave-man insults from the right of James Talarico; a sample Jesus’n’Mo cartoon; a defense of child marriage from the Bible;
  • Fb graphic considering the Torah, New Testament, Qur’an, and Book of Mormon as a series of disconnected movie sequels;
  • And a Fb comment about ethics and religion.
– – –

Here is what scientists do. They continually update their provisional conclusions as new data comes in. The motivated-reasoning science deniers insist on misunderstanding this as somehow invalidating the scientific method. And the consensus about climate change.

NY Times, yesterday: Why Scientists Retired the Dire Climate Scenario Used for Over a Decade, subtitled “While global warming is still a threat, the decision to back away from a worst-case outlook raises questions about whether some risks have been overstated.” [gift link]

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Sunday’s Post

Posted on Monday 25 May 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How smartphones are implicated in the decline of fertility;
  • How the latest Star Wars film waters down its franchise, as happens with much popular culture;
  • Crime in LA in the lowest in decades, but voters are still very concerned about crime;
  • How Pete Hegseth doesn’t understand diversity.
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This is Sunday’s post, finished today Monday, since family events took priority yesterday, given the holiday.

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Now smartphones are a cause of declining birthrates?

Washington Post, opinion by Megan McArdle, today: A suspicious decline in birth rates points to a new culprit, subtitled “The infinite scroll could contribute to lower fertility rates and smaller graduating classes.”

The drop in U.S. birth rates is well known, as are the problems that demographic change will cause: closing schools, slower economic growth, climbing budget pressures and a politics that is increasingly locked into zero-sum intergenerational battles — something evident as established homeowners vote to exclude new housing that young people need.

What’s less understood is that this isn’t just America’s future. It’s everyone’s.

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Deep Thinkers

Posted on Saturday 23 May 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Hakeem Oluseyi
  • Lucas Bean, provisionally
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I dwell too much on MAGA (because they are an imminent threat); the very opposite of them are the deep thinkers of our time. The ones making progress in the world.

Big Think, Hakeem Oluseyi: The quantum realm, the cosmological realm, and the multiverse, in 69 minutes

Subtitled: Astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi takes us from the quantum realm to the cosmological and out to the multiverse, answering physics’ most profound questions.

Quantum physics is weird because it breaks every intuition of the physics that we normally experience in our regular world. The rules break. Serenity breaks. Things become probabilistic.

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Primitive Morality, Stories, Politics

Posted on Friday 22 May 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Oklahoma and child marriage: an example of how modern morality is not (and should not be) beholden to the Bible;
  • A Yuval Noah Harari video on how cooperation throughout human history requires common stories, e.g. religions;
  • An economic experiment that overturns the conservative assumption that raising the minimum wage kills jobs;
  • Numerous items briefly noted, about Trump, a Christian sect and pets, daylight saving time, capitalism and socialism.
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JMG, from Oklahoma Watch, today: Oklahoma GOP Rep Opposes Ban On Child Marriage Because Mary Married Joseph When She Was Underage

Senate Bill 504, which removed exceptions in the law that allowed minors to marry with parental consent and court approval, passed the House 51 to 36 after unanimously passing the Senate in March. All 36 no votes were cast by Republicans.

Some against the bill, such as Rep. Justin Humphrey, argued that the government should not interfere with parents’ rights. Others argued the bill would impede the creation of stable families; Humphrey anecdotally cited knowing people who married as minors and “remained married until they’re dead.”

This is precisely the problem with applying primitive Biblical ‘morality’ to the modern world, which *does* have standards of morality, for the sake of non-tribal, non-zero-sum civilization, that are more advanced than the morality of all those stories in the Bible. Note how this guy quotes scripture. Keep scripture out of the government.

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Five Years On; and, More About Morality, in a Way

Posted on Thursday 21 May 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Five years since my heart transplant;
  • That IRS deal and presidential corruption;
  • Paul Krugman describes this as “MAGA corruption reaches the point of no return”;
  • Amanda Marcotte calls the White House ballroom “a symbol of Trump’s failure.”
– – –

It’s almost five years since my heart transplant, on May 26th, 2021. Yesterday and today, another round of visits and tests. Blood tests, echo-cardiogram, EKG, visit with cardiologist, cardiac right/left catheter angiogram (an actual surgery).

Here’s about last year’s visit

Everything’s still fine.

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Morality, and the Bible, Again

Posted on Wednesday 20 May 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How the world is becoming more moral, not less;
  • Trump’s egotistical take on religion;
  • Trump’s laughable phone;
  • Noting Trump’s IRS deal that somehow exempts his family from tax audits forever;
  • And how a Christian nationalist pastor thinks America needs “less freedom.”
– – –

Oh goodie, another essay about morality. And one that apparently challenges the standard conservative complaint that things (the state of society; morality) are getting worse all the time. It’s simply not true.

OnlySky, Jonathan MS Pearce, yesterday: We are becoming more moral, not less. So why all the moaning to the contrary?, subtitled “We shouldn’t rest on our moral laurels, but it’s worth reminding ourselves how far we have come.”

Of course, this begs the question of what “morality” is.

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