Is Science Fiction Becoming Obsolete?

Posted on Thursday 27 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Jill Lepore on how Silicon Valley misreads classic science fiction;
  • Kibble: Trumps wants to rename everything; Reich calls Trump petty and incompetent; how the Supreme Court is less and less interested in facts; and about ICE’s new electronic glove torture devices that leave no mark;
  • Mahler 6, Michael Tilson Thomas.
– – –

I have a nascent theme about why science fiction may be obsolete, and/or why it’s increasingly less popular than fantasy. Maybe all the good ideas are used up; maybe all the good ideas are turning out to be increasingly less plausible; or perhaps it’s that fantasy appeals to basic human nature and its indefatigable beliefs in ghosts and demons and magic and gods. On the second point is what I called five months ago The Most Dangerous Vision, the idea that perhaps all of science fiction’s best ideas are turning out to be obsolete or implausible. Time travel, faster-than-light travel. And now I would say this would be because our speculations about the future and about the universe have been hemmed in by our intuitive thinking that is scale-blind and realm-blind. Without realizing it we ‘flatten’ the universe by thinking everything new and strange must conform to the protocols of human existence. If a person has a father, so must the universe, and so on.

Let’s look at this. (In addition, Lepore was also on KQED’s Forum two days ago, audio and transcript here, concerning her new book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.)

Scientific American, Brianne Kane, yesterday: Silicon Valley reads a lot of science fiction. It often gets it wrong, subtitled “Historian Jill Lepore explains what tech leaders miss in their favorite stories—and why the fight over AI data centers may be where the machine stops” Continue reading →

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Self-Destruction and Magical Thinking

Posted on Wednesday 26 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Self-destruction: Of the US military, of the Kennedy Center;
  • How MAGA’s religious freedom doesn’t apply to Muslims;
  • Dimwits: Darline Graham, advocates for “conservative-based” science; a GOP nominee who thinks humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time;
  • Liars, vanity projects (Trump already has a secret bunker), woke paintings;
  • Mahler’s 6th, by Michael Tilson Thomas.
– – –

Today in American self-destruction. There seem to be a couple such items every day.

NY Times, yesterday: Hegseth’s Purge of Top Generals Leaves the Army Rudderless, subtitled “The leadership vacuum comes as the Army is trying to adapt to a new kind of war dominated by deadly drones.”

I don’t quite see how learning to deal with drones is related to firing a bunch of senior military officials.

Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Human Nature, Music, Politics, Psychology, Religion | Comments Off on Self-Destruction and Magical Thinking

Cognitive Overload?

Posted on Tuesday 25 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Is humanity suffering information overload?
  • Why people hate data centers;
  • Why people hate the government;
  • Is this all about the increasing complexity of the world, and the limits of human cognition?
  • Comments about Trump and Canada from Robert Charles Wilson and Jim Wright;
  • And evidence from The Good Liars about those who believe Trump is God.
– – –

Another running theme here, alongside the aspects of reality that lie outside human intuition and human understanding, is that the increasing complexity of the modern world has gone past similar limitations of intuition and understanding. For some.

OnlySky, Susan Fourtané, yesterday: The cost of information overload, subtitled “Our brains’ ability to process information hasn’t kept pace with the tools that deliver it.”

Every day, we consume more information than any previous generation in history. News alerts arrive by the minute. Social media feeds refresh endlessly. Emails pile up; if we dare to not check email for one day, we fear the results could be catastrophic. Podcasts compete for our attention during our commute. An AI assistant can fill up our agenda with meetings and tasks which become overwhelming in their own right; we feel bad if we want to cancel them to take the afternoon off because we feel mentally exhausted.

Continue reading →

Posted in conservatives, Decline, Education, Evolution, Human Nature | Comments Off on Cognitive Overload?

Penn Jillette, GOD, NO!

Posted on Tuesday 25 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales”
(Simon & Schuster, August 2011, 231pp)

This is an odd book that is superficially about religion and atheism and the author’s own version of a “ten commandments,” but is more about the author himself, entertainingly so, than a serious theological treatise.

Jillette (that’ 2 Ls, 2 Ts) is the talking half of the magician duo Penn & Teller, whose current show, Fool Us, we catch on Friday evenings if our dinner schedule permits. And we saw them once, at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas, where their show is filmed, 20 some years ago. I like them, or at least Penn, the one who talks, because he doesn’t take himself serious, he’s funny, and he wants you to understand that magic is just tricks. He contrasts himself with some other magicians who want to spook you into believing that something supernatural is going on. At their Rio show, the pair ends by performing an elaborate magic trick and then showing you exactly how they did it. Which is as much fun to see as the actual trick.

Jillette is also known, via a couple books, as being an unabashed atheist, in a self-deprecating way. All in good fun. This book is his answer to an invitation to create an atheist Ten Commandments. He does so, with a lot of stories and rambling along the way.

Continue reading →

Posted in Book Notes, Humor, Religion | Comments Off on Penn Jillette, GOD, NO!

The Proper Study

Posted on Monday 24 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The proper study of mankind, if not in the way Alexander Pope meant;
  • Powers of Ten, and the range of human intuition and understanding;
  • If Pluto is a planet, so are dozens of other spherical bodies.
  • A passionate performance of Mahler’s 5th.
– – –

I’m steadily tweaking and updating my Outline of Themes. It needs much work. Three items today. This illustrates the second:

The first: the primary issue goes back to that famous Essay on Man by Alexander Pope, which famously begins:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.

Continue reading →

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Kevin, Sean, Darline

Posted on Sunday 23 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Noting Kevin Kelly’s substack;
  • David French, Sean Duffy, Harvard, and fear of corruption;
  • World hunger is declining;
  • How is Sharia Law worse than Christian Nationalism? (asking for a friend);
  • Ignoramous Darline Graham pivots to a safe conservative target: trans kids.
– – –

Nothing vital today. Let’s note this.

Boing Boing, Mark Frauenfelder, 18 Aug 2026: Kevin Kelly: AI will be a microscope we point at our own minds

I noted the anniversary of his book Out of Control a couple months ago, but didn’t highlight the fact that he has a substack, KK. Add it to my rotation? For a while. It already takes me an hour a day to visit my usual sites. His latest post is Without a Theory of Intelligence.

Continue reading →

Posted in conservatives, Education, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Kevin, Sean, Darline

The War Within Human Nature for Human Survival

Posted on Saturday 22 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The growing movement of Americans who don’t think all people are created equal;
  • Trump tries to intimidate the source of a report he doesn’t like;
  • Under Trump, protected wild horses are being slaughtered;
  • Trump is doing everything he can to drain Harvard’s funding;
  • And how Trump is trying to crush California’s environmental policies;
  • Two responses from Robert Reich about Trump: he’s mad; his worldview.
– – –

Seldom is there such a confluence of examples, in one day, of one of my ongoing premises.

CNN, John Blake, today: Some Americans don’t believe all people are created equal. Their movement is going mainstream, this author says

My premise is simply that an original base human nature, one that is tribal, racist, and selfish, resides within all of us; some of us have inherited a gradually evolving enlightened human nature, that has grown along with the growth of a global society; and modern life is a sort of see-sawing back and forth between which of these perspectives prevails at any given moment. The OT represents the former; parts of the NT (some of what Jesus said; nothing of what Paul said) and the US Constitution and many other documents represent the latter. MAGA represents the former, even as they claim to worship Jesus and the Constitution. They seem completely un-self-aware, or maybe are just dumb.

The article:
Continue reading →

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The Transition

Posted on Friday 21 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Fareed Zakaria responds to Ezra Klein about The Odyssey;
  • Briefly: Trump running out of people to blame; How liberal families look pretty much like conservatives ones; The vacuousness of Darline Graham;
  • Wojciech Kilar’s score for The Portrait of a Lady.
– – –

Working some infrastructure pages recently. For today, more of the same, more or less.

Here are two of my favorite writers, in discussion: Fareed Zakarian responding to Ezra Klein.

Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria, today: What Odysseus can teach us about liberalism, subtitled “The challenge is to preserve human dignity while recovering our capacity for heroic ambition.”
Continue reading →

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Ideology and Fertility

Posted on Thursday 20 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The complex reasons behind the drop in fertility;
  • Mike Johnson is literally illiterate;
  • Texas Christians are trying to define Muslims out of existence;
  • Trump is trying crush California’s environmental policies, of course;
  • Robert Reich explores who’s benefiting from the explosion in the national debt;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on Natalie Harp, if we still care;
  • Von Karajan does Bruckner 7.
– – –

Testing provisional conclusions. Is this just about primitive tribal priorities for survival, in a world that doesn’t actually need more children? Or something else?

The Atlantic, Olga Khazan, today: Another Big Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives, subtitled “People on the right tend to have more kids than people on the left. Why?”

…several academics told me that research conducted in the past few years has shown a fairly strong association between ideology and fertility. The latest evidence comes from a June report by the Institute for Family Studies, a think tank that promotes marriage and family life, which polled more than 7,000 Americans aged 18 to 54 and found that self-identified conservatives had 1.4 kids, on average, to liberals’ 1.09, a statistically significant difference. The study also found that liberals were more likely to not have children. The ideological fertility gap remained even after controlling for other variables that may influence family size, such as religion, race, income, age, marital status, and education.

Several theories. Liberals are more anxious about the state of the world. Liberals and conservatives have different values. And both sides tend to live in bubbles. The rest of the article expands on these.

Continue reading →

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Wiping out databases; sycophants; misogyny; revenge; Waymo

Posted on Wednesday 19 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • What authoritarian regimes do: suppress inconvenient evidence;
  • Much concern about Trump sycophant Natalie Harp;
  • More about Trump’s misogyny;
  • Trump is all about revenge;
  • How Democrats are resisting Waymo, a promising new technology.

This is not a surprise. This is what authoritarian regimes do to hide their mismanagement and irresponsibility.

The Guardian, yesterday: Trump 2.0 has deleted or altered nearly 400 US datasets, endangering public health, education and more

Why? Short answer is in the subtitle: “Health data appears to be most affected by administration’s attempt to wipe findings that don’t align with its priorities, tracker shows”

Continue reading →

Posted in authoritarianism, conservatives, Human Nature, Psychology, Technology | Comments Off on Wiping out databases; sycophants; misogyny; revenge; Waymo