Misconceptions about Science and Predictions

Posted on Friday 20 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Jeffrey Epstein, obsessed with eugenics, was wrong;
  • How Paul Ehrlich was not a villain, even though his predictions failed;
  • John Pavlovitz wonders why anyone still supports Trump; I have another idea;
  • Tom Nichols on no Plan B; the disappearing Charlie Kirk banner;
  • Rufus Wainwright’s “Go Or Go Ahead”.
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Evolution is the scientific topic about which even people who don’t reject it utterly still have more misconceptions about than any other branch of science. (Going back to Lamarckism, or the inheritance of acquired characteristics, that people like Lysenko and Stalin so much wanted to be true it became Soviet doctrine for decades.) I think it must reflect the teleological mode of most human thinking.

Slate, Susanne Paola Antonetta, 19 Mar 2026: Jeffrey Epstein, Eugenics Supremacist, subtitled “The files reveal his obsession with genetics. But genes don’t work the way he thought.”

Epstein, culpable for so much, was also a believer in eugenics, the manipulation of reproduction and of genes to create “better” humans. His focus on genes, as reflected in his correspondence, is remarkable. The files show that Epstein constantly asks if various random traits might be genetic, spends thousands on high-end DNA sequencing for himself, and has his assistants hand out 23andMe test kits the way most people hand out business cards.

…

Though, like many things Epstein, the man’s genetic interests were twisted, often revolting, and shockingly uninformed. He felt about genes the way grade-school kids might feel about Santa—genes are wondrous things, capable of delivering just about anything petitioners may desire. Epstein, in his musings in the files, credits genes with controlling things that range from the rear ends of people of Irish descent to honor killings, financial skill, and, weirdly, “Asian family structure.”

(Those links in the last sentence are to the Epstein Files themselves.)

Later in piece the writer explains how Epstein was wrong.

But genes don’t behave as Epstein imagined they do, like codes punched into a computer—they’re neither blueprints nor instructions, though pop culture often presents them that way. The ease with which genes pass on mechanical, protein-coded traits like eye color has misled even scientists into thinking that they pass on other traits straightforwardly as well. But qualities like family structure, math skills, and trivia come far more from life and environment than from protein structures (which are very good at giving you brown eyes). Genes can be expressed or activated, or not—more often they’re not; they mutate and can alter their own function and be altered by environmental forces. Few have any fixed function. As Philip Ball, who wrote How Life Works, puts it, looking to genes to explain who you are is like staring at the dictionary hoping to understand literature. And imagining you can simply add genes to people and create a specific type of person is like shaking up a box of all the letters used in Hamlet and expecting to create another play just as good. For that matter, Shakespeare had three brothers, who shared much of his DNA. One worked in haberdashery, one acted, and one’s path was uncertain—but none wrote.

(Because, I would add, our genes were not *designed.* They’re the result of millions, even billions of years of kludges. Whichever sequences of things worked out, even if entirely by accident, survived, no matter how clumsy they would have seen to any kind of ‘designer.’)

The writer concludes,

It’s not possible to tie even math skills firmly to genes, much less anyone’s family structure. Epstein fell into a historical trap, one in which “making things better for humanity” quickly slides into “better for me.” And terrible for those around you.

It’s a trap baited ultimately with contempt for other humans. I hope the Epstein case draws attention to this dark genetic path. We have seen what’s down that path, and the new genetic supremacists don’t promise any better.

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I will mention, but not delve deeply into, the recent death of Paul Ehrlich, who became infamous, even notorious for his 1968 book THE POPULATION BOMB and his  predictions of mass starvation due to overpopulation.

The Atlantic, Jacob Anbinder, 19 Mar 2026: What Paul Ehrlich’s Fear of Scarcity Did to American Politics, subtitled “Ehrlich’s lurid predictions of imminent planetary doom captivated the public, but they did not come true.”

When the Stanford biologist and science writer Paul Ehrlich died last week at 93, the obituaries that followed were a fascinating exercise in editorial balance. As usual, most hesitated to speak too critically of the recently deceased. But they needed to point out why Ehrlich was famous in the first place: the many bold claims in The Population Bomb, his 1968 best-selling book about the impending crisis of overpopulation. Ehrlich’s lurid predictions of imminent planetary doom captivated the public, but they did not come true. Today the world’s population is leveling off. If anything, Americans might be having too few kids rather than too many. Yet even though overpopulation is an issue as dated as Dacron pants or disco, Ehrlich helped give an imprimatur of scholarly authority to a new kind of politics—a politics of scarcity—that has proved enduring in American life.

In The Population Bomb and subsequent writings, Ehrlich popularized a fundamental concept of environmental science: Natural systems have natural limits that could reveal themselves in catastrophic ways as their “carrying capacities” are approached. Crucially, Ehrlich also believed that the United States and the planet itself were in grave danger of reaching those limits soon if steps were not taken to curb population growth.

My take: Ehrlich was wrong in the same way that Malthus was wrong: both failed to anticipate advances in technology (i.e. food production) and social forces which stemmed the expansion of the population — social forces also driven by science and technology, namely the improvements in health that led to families having fewer children.

What Ehrlich should be credited for, still, is bringing these topics to public attention. A large part of modern environmental consciousness was inspired by him, perhaps, and its relevance is not going away any time soon.

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Jerry Coyne, 18 Mar 2026: Wednesday: Hili dialogue (scroll down)

He quotes NYT and LAT, and has just this comment:

Ehrlich was a good scientist (he studied butterflies) who became The Chicken Little of Biology, and perhaps in love with his fame. His predictions of overpopulations and famine were not met, but perhaps for reasons he couldn’t predict.

The LAT piece is by the notorious conservative Jonah Goldberg. It can also be said that the reason Ehrlich was always controversial, and why conservatives like Goldberg now take glee in claiming he was wrong about everything, is that his warnings implicated big business and its obsession with making money over every other concern. An obsession, and a denial of existential risks, which continues to this day.

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Another cri de coeur …

John Pavlovitz, today: MAGAs Are Destroying America For Spite

How can anyone still support him?

Tens of millions of us still find ourselves asking this question, watching a staggering number of Americans somehow remain unflinching in their devotion to this President. Despite high crimes, sexual assaults, cognitive decline, reckless wars, and an authoritarian agenda, they remain seemingly giddy over his existence.

But Trump’s supporters aren’t necessarily pleased with the actual policies, tactics, or methods, but with the results: pissing off the people they don’t like.

Really? Some of them, I’m sure.

That is all that matters to them.
It’s the reason they vote the way they do.
It’s the reason their support is steadfast through pedophilia accusations and acts of treason and human rights disasters and wanton ignorance.
It’s the reason they remain emotionally infatuated with him despite his breaking every campaign promise.

Trump supporters have always seen his ascendancy as a big “F— You” to his predecessor, to the identity politics that they feel has targeted them, and to an ever-diversifying nation that they see as a threat. More than affordable healthcare, unpolluted food, and economic opportunity, they want someone to stick it to the world on their behalf, and in their rage-addled state, they somehow believe he does that.

It’s a nationwide mental health crisis that seems both beyond repair and belief.

This is part of it, but I think there’s more, and I admit I’m basing my suspicion somewhat on the videos Facebook shows me of interviews with people in MAGA hats screaming about how crazy the Democrats are. Many of the MAGA folk believe that, based on the same selective and biased reporting that drives the news, even the relatively responsible news. This is another factor in how so many people think the world is worse now than it ever was. They think Democrats are obsessed with transgenders and trans athletes — even though in the whole nation there are only something like 10 such athletes. Republicans are obsessed with voter fraud, even though in the whole nation there have been only 70 or 80 instances of improper voting out of 10s and 10s of millions of votes cast. And the earlier classic examples: they’re terrified that Democrats are going to “take away their guns” even though that’s never been proposed (only restrictions on future sales of assault rifles). They’re worried about socialism and communism, even though none of them seem to have any idea of what those terms mean. And so on.

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Briefly noted.

The Atlantic, Tom Nichols: Trump Had No Plan B for Iran, subtitled “And it shows.”

So it goes. It’s not getting any better.

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Boing Boing, Jason Weisberger, 19 Mar 2026: Dept. of Education quietly yanks Charlie Kirk banner after people notice it exists

Unanswered question: what was it doing there in the first place?

For a brief and disgusting moment, the U.S. Department of Education decided that noted bigot, misogynist, and poor debater Charlie Kirk belonged on a banner alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Booker T. Washington as part of a 250th anniversary display celebrating “heroes in American education.”

Then, just as quietly, the banner disappeared.

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Working my way through my CD collection, I’ve come to the great Rufus Wainwright, and this song. From his album WANT ONE, here in a live version.

 

Posted in Evolution, Lunacy, Music, Politics, Science | Leave a comment

Donald Hoffman: THE CASE AGAINST REALITY

Posted on Friday 20 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitle: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes
(Norton, 2019, 250pp, plus color plates, including 45pp acknowledgements, notes, and index.)

This is the first of three books I read in January, all with ostensibly similar themes, but actually quite different from one another in their perspectives and ultimate intents.

This one, for example, isn’t about evolution per se, as the subtitle suggests; it’s about how humans don’t perceive “true” reality, but only perceive reality in the sense of what is necessary for humans to survive and reproduce. OK, fine. I’ve made the same general point before. But he goes farther: he suggests that when we’re not looking at the moon, for example, the moon doesn’t exist. This goes back to certain philosophers, and sounds fatuous, and can only be true in the sense that humanity’s *conception* of what the moon is – filtered through our senses and our priorities for survival – ceases to exist when we’re not looking at it. It can’t mean that the physical object, the moon, that triggered our perceptions in the first place, ceases to exist. Yet he doesn’t want to spell this out; he leaves us with the impression that the actual moon ceases to exist when we’re not looking at it. Which I think is fatuous, and solipsistic.

Now the notion that we only perceive what’s necessary for survival is an old one. Humans are sensitive to potential dangers, and to potential friends and family, and so we are always perceiving things in the worst or best possible way. The rustle in the grass might be a snake; the shape of a cloud or a piece of bark might be a face. But Hoffman is going beyond that, into rather useless pedantry, it seems to me.

It reminds me of the reductionist trap of writers like Alex Rosenberg, who suggested that thoughts cannot actually be about anything, since thoughts consist only of activity between neurons. Just as, I suggested in my review of his book, words of the Bible can’t actually mean anything because they consist only of different arrangements of 26 letters.

Whereas other writers, like Pinker and Carroll, understand that reality exists on levels, or in phases, that can best be understood with language appropriate to each. The basic example being the sequence from physics to chemistry, biology, psychology, history. Chemistry has its own principles that needn’t be reduced to physics, and so on. You don’t understand history through the movements of elementary particles. That doesn’t mean that understanding history makes the elementary particles disappear.

Key Points

  • Hoffman insists that the idea our senses tell us the truth, in order to enhance survival, is wrong. We don’t perceive objective reality.
  • His metaphor is that what we perceive are like icons on a computer desktop; we don’t see the details of how the computer actually works.
  • He focuses on what he calls FBT, Fitness-Beats-Truth, theories.
  • Examples include how what we call ‘colors’ are just different wavelengths of light; how certain illusions (like the Necker cube) imply different understandings (so if we close our eyes, which version of the Necker cube is still there?); common misperceptions have been that the Earth is flat and at the center of the universe.
  • Example of how signs of ‘beauty’ are actually indicators of fitness, for purposes of reproduction.
  • He acknowledges examples of how truth and fitness are different things. Evolution works via algorithms; true perception can be counter-productive.
  • Evolutionary strategies vary depending on the proportion of predator and prey using such strategies.
  • He calls the idea of icons on the computer desktop the interface theory of perception, ITP. The icon hides all the tiresome details that we don’t need in order to make survival decisions. What ‘disappears’ when we cease looking is the icon.
  • He extends these ideas to physics, recalling quantum theory. Reality is local. And so on, predicting that the concept of “spacetime” must go before a TOE (theory of everything) is achieved.
  • Physics must be about something more fundamental than spacetime. Our three-dimensional world is a result of data compression, thus redundancy. Some visual illusions illustrate the principle.
  • And how these ideas extend to colors, and ‘chromatures’, and how some people are synesthetes, another example of how our perceptions are not ‘true’.
  • And so cause and effect are fiction, as are neurons, as our time and space. What to do? Author settles on the idea that consciousness is fundamental. Not panpsychism, but conscious agents that perform perceive/decide/act loops. And how this relates to entropy. And how this conscious realism can bring science and spirituality together. An infinite conscious agent sounds like God, even if it’s not omniscient. But don’t forget the message of the Copernican universe: it’s not about us.

Comments

I found the book generally unsatisfying, a mix of obvious points about how human perceptions can’t be completely ‘real’ (because of our limited senses, mostly), with pedantic points about how reality ceases to exist when not observed. Familiar examples of visual illusions are thrown in. He insists until the end that objects are destroyed when you look away. Perhaps I should have been forewarned by the blurbers on the back cover, none of whom I’ve heard of, except for… Deepak Chopra.

Detailed Notes

Preface, p xi

  • Our senses help keep us alive, but is it because they tell us the truth? Why would our senses tell us the truth? Because of evolution. Those with more accurate senses survived, and so on.
  • But these hunches are wrong. Our perceptions do not reveal objective reality. The idea that they mislead us about reality has been around for centuries: Democritus, Plato. What we perceive are instead metaphors, or icons, of reality, like a desktop icon hiding the details of how a computer works. Evolution has in effect given us simple icons that enable us to survive long enough to raise offspring. Perceiving raw truth would drive the species extinct. We still need to take those icons, our perceptions, seriously [because they work at the level of survival]. Seriously—but not literally. That’s what this book is about. This idea dovetails with discoveries in physics that are equally counterintuitive.
  • The preface then summarizes each of the following chapters.
  • Ch1: the great unsolved mystery of how brain activity generates conscious experience;
  • Ch2: beauty and attraction through the lens of evolution;
  • Ch3: some experts claim our senses do report some truths about reality, at least those that we need to raise kids; (Crick, Marr, Trivers)
  • Ch4: other experts favor the Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) theories, that natural selection drives true perceptions to extinction, with confirmations from computer simulations;
  • Ch5: then why are our senses useful if they don’t report truth? Because what we experience is a kind of virtual world;
  • Ch6: similarly physicists admit that space, time, and objects are not fundamental either; that space-time is a kind of hologram. Something else is more fundamental;
  • Ch7: spacetime is just a data format that serves to keep us alive, and our senses use ‘error-correcting codes’ to detect and correct data errors. Some visual illusions will demonstrate this.
  • Ch8: colors are codes that compress data similar to how photos are compressed digitally. And “chromatures”, textured colors, trigger specific emotions and associations. About synesthetes who perceive the world differently from the norm.
  • Ch9: perceptions take calories, so our senses cut corners, e.g. our vision is sharp only in a narrow central area.
  • Ch10: So what is reality? We don’t know. But perhaps conscious experiences are fundamental, and perhaps consciousness does not arise from matter, as much as spacetime arises from consciousness—as a perceptual interface. [[ ok I can buy that, but interface to what? ]]
  • So the purpose of this book is take off the VR headset—the red pill—and then to take off the next headset, the one we haven’t known that we’re wearing.

Ch1, Mystery: the scalpel that split consciousness

Beginning in 1962, Joseph Bogen and Philip Vogel sliced people’s brains in half, to cure epilepsy. Corpus callosotomy. Generally successful. It also changed consciousness. How the Helmholtz club met at UC Irvine beginning 1995. About consciousness. People have properties that rocks don’t. but the connection between these properties and activities in the brain is not clear. Leibniz in 1714. Thomas Huxley in 1869. William James in 1890. And others. The current question is, what is the biological basis of consciousness? Which presumes there is one. Already, the notion of an ‘elan vital’ had been discredited. Crick wrote his book but had no answer to the fundamental question. Experiments with split-brain patients; they recognize some things with their eyes, other things with their hands. Roger Sperry explained this; it’s about communication between the two hemispheres of the brain. Crick explained this as split consciousness. The two hemispheres have separate consciousness. One side can believe in God, the other not.

We know that specific activities in the brain correlate with specific mental states. Color. A certain type of stroke leaves one color-blind only in one hemisphere. Activity in a certain region of the brain corresponds with touch. Etc. Such regions are called NCCs. Necker cube. Phobias can be removed by manipulating how the NCCs are triggered. But we have no idea how any kind of physical activity gives rise to conscious experience. This is the “hard problem” of consciousness. 14b. We can say what a theory should contain, but no ideas have been proposed. [[ Actually *lots* of ideas have been proposed. ]]  We want laws and principles that apply across species. Hand waving won’t do. Perhaps someday the double helix of neuroscience will be discovered. Or perhaps we simply won’t be able to understand it. Chomsky suggested there might be limits to human understanding. Author suspects he’s right, 16m. Or perhaps we’re hindered by a false belief. And perhaps the false belief is: we see reality as it is.

Of course we already realize we don’t see all of reality, e.g. wavelengths of light. Example of a tomato a meter away. When we close our eyes, the tomato is still there, right? But when we test this against ideas from various fields, and discover this belief is false, 17b. [[ ç ]] Consider that Necker cube. Which cube is still there, A or B? Depends on the observer, perhaps. The cube is a construction of your system of creating a reality… There have been other misperceptions: that the earth is flat, that it stands unmoving at the center of the universe. We believe what things “look as if.” We will see that our perceptions were shaped by natural selection of hide reality and report fitness. Galileo and the church. We must understand the evolution of perception in order to solve the problem of consciousness.

Ch2, Beauty: sirens of the gene.

Hume said it was in the eye of the beholder. Darwin explained that beauty was a judgment of fitness for reproduction. Evolutionary psychology makes new predictions. Begin by considering the perception of beauty in the animal kingdom. Jewel beetles. Beauty involves an unconscious computation. We make such judgments in a fraction of a second: a feeling that varies from hot to not. And if they’re wrong, those genes go extinct. It’s all about fitness. The genes are invisible; we judge the phenotypes. And often trifles. E.g. the limbal ring in the eye. They signal fitness and youth. Makeup. Some species mimic others. Examples. Women and iris sizes. Fertility implies that men should find women most beautiful at age twenty. But teen males prefer *older* women. Anime has depicted female characters with large irises for years. All of this is about parental investment. The greater one’s investment, the fussier your choice of mate. Examples. … there’s a tradeoff between testosterone and commitment. Experiments. The whites of the eyes, unique in humans, reveals the direction of a gaze. Twinkles in eyes. Examples. Kin selection. Inclusive fitness. Altruistic behaviors. … With this background we can move on the bigger question: do we perceive reality as it is?

Ch3, Reality: capers of the unseen sun, p40

Quote by Stephen Palmer about the accuracy of sight.

Author recalls challenging Crick’s ideas in his book. Do we construct our vision of the world, or perceive what’s really there all the time? Do we also construct the neurons? Crick summons Kant. We can’t know the thing in itself, but it’s still there. Things exist even when we’re not looking at them. The tomato again. Our minds are nothing but a pack of neurons. Qualia and conscious experiences. Discussion of David Marr. Who said vision generally matches reality due to evolutionary pressure. Author went to MIT to study with him. Marr died young, at 35. … author went to Irvine. Author recalls standard argument about the usefulness of accurate perceptions. Still, author doubts that our perceptions perceive objective reality. Our lexicon is powerless to describe reality. Example of what a fly perceives. It doesn’t matter as long as it successfully mates. Pinker explained why natural selection may not favor veridical perceptions. How the Mind Works. Quote 50.8. [[ the basic claim I’ve made too ]] Hawking and Mlodinow in The Grand Design. But what is true about a table may not be true about a neuron.

Ch4, Sensory: fitness beats truth, p53

Quotes by Dennett and Dawkins

Does natural selection favor true perceptions? We suppose a peach still exists when we don’t look at it, but we can’t test the idea either way. But we can test similar things, like the spin of an electron. But does evolution favor true perceptions? But fitness depends on the organism, the competition, etc. Payoffs can vary widely. Truth and fitness are different things. But evolution assumes that physical objects exist… But evolution works via algorithms. Evolution applies to languages, and scientific theories. And memes. Maybe even universes, via black holes. These ideas are ‘universal Darwinism.’ We can answer the key questions abstractly with this. Dennett’s universal acid. So in fact, natural selection drives true perception to extinction. We use the abstract algorithm via evolutionary game theory; Example of a particular scorpion. Some animals kill their rivals. There are two strategies: hawk, and dove. Summarized in a matrix, p59. The strategy favored by natural selection depends on the proportion of hawks and doves.

There are other strategies: domination, bistability, neutrality. There can be cycles, like rock/paper/scissors. Triggered by tiny changes; the butterfly effect. The FBT, fitness beats truth, theorem says that fitness drives truth to extinction, 61m. It’s been confirmed in many simulations. Consider how the amount of stuff can be too small or too large for fitness. It’s not true that humans’ larger brains perceive more truth. Actually brain sizes are shrinking, from 1500 cc to 1350 cc over 20,000y. As social complexity has increased. There is an objective reality, but we don’t perceive it correctly, e.g. in our terms of DNA, chromosomes, and so on. We model evolutionary games on graphs. Author’s student did a study that demonstrated some of all this. Is there a mistaken assumption somewhere? … example of state lottery. We don’t need all the details to predict how many people will win, just general principles. It’s not that our senses lie; they guide useful actions. The senses adapt to new contexts. Logic and communications theory deals with sets and messages without caring what their contents are. Trivers and Pinker sum up these conclusions. P74.

Ch5, Illusory: the bluff of a desktop, p75

Quote from The Matrix about the pills.

Suppose perceptual systems are user interfaces, like the desktop of a laptop. Call this the interface theory of perception, ITP. Recall the letter icon. The icon hides all the tiresome details. It lets us get complicated things done easily. So evolution shapes our senses to be user interfaces. We take our senses seriously, but not literally. Consider biohazard signs. Author objects to an objection by Michael Shermer. Author explains. Thus an object ceases to exist when we don’t look, because the object is only an icon. Recall the Necker cube; which cube remains when you don’t look? Answer: no cube. Is this preposterous? Surely a spoon is still there on the table. But different people see different spoons. Same for all objects, even spacetime itself. Something may be there all along, but not a spoon. This may align with Kant; things exist only in our perceptions. We understand this via evolution. Different species might well construct different interfaces, or umwelts. ITP doesn’t deny an objective reality, only that our perceptions describe that reality. Some things exist, others exist even when unperceived. Our problem is that we reify our perceptions. Consider a molecule of vanillin, and its taste. Recall Plato’s allegory of the cave. It doesn’t go far enough. Author counters objections. What are illusions? Perceptions that fail to guide adaptive behavior. E.g, a beetle that woos a bottle.

Consider how the tastes of different animals vary. Coprophages. So how is perception veridical? [[ it seems to me he’s creating a problem that doesn’t exist; things depend on context; our senses are limited, etc. that doesn’t mean real things don’t actually exist. ]] Other examples. What about our perceptions of math and logic? Are there selection pressures for them? Author disagrees with statement by Shermer. Scientific theories are only about interfaces. But can we refute ITP with physics?

Ch6, Gravity: spacetime is doomed, p94

So spacetime is the desktop of our interface and physical objects are its icons. A spoon ceases to exist when we look away. [[ he can’t literally mean this. He means that our conception of a spoon no long exists when we’re not looking at whatever it is we perceive as a spoon. ]] Our icons are similar, but not necessarily always the same.  [[ all of this reminds me of the argument in that book by Alex Rosenberg. ]] Can we test these predictions? Einstein believed that objects still exist… local realism. But experiments in quantum theory are incompatible with local realism; Bell in 1964. Spins of electrons. Entanglement. Various theorems. … Carlo Rovelli has tried to explain this. Others argue on different grounds. Reality differs from one agent to another. Just as fitness values may vary for different people. Thus quantum theory and evobio are consistent, and analogous. 100b. Wheeler and Popper in 1987. The double-slit experiment, with a delayed-choice variation. And gravitational lenses. Wheeler thus undercut Einstein. Or that information, not matter, is fundamental. Our intuitions are wrong. Example of storing computer memory in spheres. Information corresponds to the area of surface of a sphere, not the volume. And spacetime has pixels, of Planck length. This is the holographic principle. The 3d world is a hologram coded on a 2d surface. Quantum theory assumes that information is never eradicated. But general relativity says information that crosses the event horizon of a black hole is erased. This is a paradox. Leonard Susskind resolved with complementarity. Then there’s a firewall paradox. And other ideas to avoid it. … Quantum states are beliefs of observers. So… physics does not proscribe ITP. But spacetime must go before a TOE is achieved. So, what is the bedrock of reality?

[[ This all goes to the idea that humans don’t perceive reality as it is… but not due to evolution, exactly. Mostly due to limited sensory organs ]]

Ch7, Virtuality: inflating a holoworld, p115

So, then, what is physics about? Something more fundamental than spacetime. No one knows what. But it’s an exciting idea, for physicists. Consider ideas of perception. Consider data compression. It’s the way we compress data that gives us a three dimensional world. Consider error correction. Which relies on redundancy. And so spacetime is redundant. Our third dimension is redundancy of the 2 d’s that contain all the information needed. While vision scientists assume vision is veridical. Yet our perception of symmetry does not require symmetry in objective reality. Symmetry is a kind of data compression and error correction. … others disagree. Casual interactions are fiction, 123m. then is consciousness also a fiction? See the PDA loop, p125, for how the fitness-payoff function works. Examples. Hose and snake. Visual illusions. Disks with a missing line, 128. Similar erasure errors p129, and a square. P130 with a cube. We perceive ‘entanglements’ and even glows in the connecting lines, and holographic inflation a third dimension. Similarly, shading of disks gives the illusion of a third dimension. Or curved lines in a circle. According to ITP, these are all codings for messages about fitness.  Similarly photos of a person in jeans… So: spacetime and the objects in them are pre-existing; they are data structures of our own making to track fitness payoffs.

Ch8, Polychromy: mutations of an interface, p136

About color. We see only a narrow band; we delete data. Some of what we don’t see can kill us… but usually after we’ve raised children. We have three kinds of cones, plus rods; each is sensitive to different wavelengths, p137. Much data compression. The brain fixes errors, as in the Olympic rings illusion. Example figures. Other illusions. How we fill in colors we perceive are missing. Some colors align with specific emotions, p143. There are of course many different shades. Plants have photo receptors too. Some plants have more photoreceptors than we do. Of course we associate colors with familiar objects. We most often see colors not as flat areas, but areas of ‘chromatures.’ And some people are synesthetes, who associate colors with words or sounds or many other things. Music. Smells. Letters. Examples of individual artists. The effects are associated with particular genes. It can help with memory. In one way or another, it may help fitness behaviors. And yet another example of how our perceptions are not ‘true.’

Ch9, Scrutiny: you get what you need, in both life and business, p155

We’re alert for fitness, not truth. Yet we’re barraged by information, billions of bit each second. Compressed down. Change blindness. We have a visual spam-filter that ruthless deletes. Our visual focus is quite small. But our eyes keep moving. Saccades. This is applied to visual advertising. Some things ‘pop out.’ Photographers learn to avoid them, or edit them out. We group items together. 162-5. Grouping is a form of data compression. By shape, by color. Our focus can be derailed by movement, e.g. Again, advertisers use these principles. We tend to focus on eyes. Advertising icons can mimic them. And supernormal stimuli can divert us from fitness behaviors. … we remember locations where we found food, especially high calorie food. Recap 173.5. Another technique is scripted attention. As in ads, to focus on the product. We follow the gaze of other people. …He repeats his main thesis, e.g., he doesn’t believe the sun existed before there were creatures to perceive it. Yet for various reasons we do sometimes need to understand the objective reality behind what we perceive…

Ch10, Community: the network of conscious agents, p178

We still can’t fathom the mystery of how our minds understand experience. We’ve been duped into thinking that the brain understands things. We understand cause and effect in many situations, but it’s a fiction. Like playing a video game. Spacetime and its objects are doomed. Neurons are a fiction, etc. we can’t transcend the interface. So what do we do? Start with that PDA loop: perceive, decide, act. But suppose we are conscious agents. What is the objective world? Perhaps we’re simulations in some virtual world. But there’s no actual evidence that this is so. Does our knowing stop at some point? Recall Occam’s Razor. We should rely on a physical basis for consciousness. Or, conscious agents that are not objects in spacetime. Figure p184. Conscious realism. Consciousness is fundamental. But this is not panpsychism. … menu options. Measurable space. Author suggests that every aspect of consciousness can be modeled by conscious agents, 190.2. Kahneman. The simplest agent is ‘one-bit,’ with two experiences and two actions. …  how this relates to entropy. And roots of these ideas in famous philosophers. About science as a method of inquiry. Two realms of human experience; Dawkins disagreed. Science is not an ontology. Author sees how conscious realism can bring science and spirituality together. The idea of an infinite conscious agent sounds like God. Even if not omniscient, etc etc. But all this misses the message of the Copernican universe: it’s not about us. Yet, there are countless conscious agents that may not be human. …

Appendix: Precisely: the right to be wrong.

Mathematical details about conscious agents.

 

Posted in Book Notes, Evolution, reality | Leave a comment

Latter Day Skiffy Flix: STTNG: Encounter at Farpoint

Posted on Thursday 19 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

A couple evenings ago I rewatched the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, called “Encounter at Farpoint,” for the first time since I watched it as the series premiere back in 1987.

Some background and context. I was 11 years old when the original Star Trek series, later dubbed TOS (the original series), debuted in 1966, and I was a fan of the show and then increasingly obsessed with the show when, after it was cancelled by NBC after three years, it went into syndication. Meaning that reruns of the original episodes were shown, often five times a week on weeknights at 5pm or 6pm, on local channels (different in every city) and not the networks. The early 1970s were long before the internet, and only a couple books had been published about the show, including THE MAKING OF STAR TREK by Stephen Whitfield, in 1968, which covered only the first two seasons, and two books by David Gerrold, including THE WORLD OF STAR TREK, in 1973 or so. In the meantime an obsessive fan of the show like me would take notes and compile lists of the episodes and their writers and guest stars and the names of the planets in each episode and each episode’s stardate. (How frustrating that a few episodes had no stardate!) Others had similar ideas and published “concordances” for the show, first in the fan press and later from professional publishers.

Years and years passed; by 1987, when TNG premiered, four of the Trek movies had been release, using the cast of the original series.

By that time the powers that be at Paramount decided the time was ripe for another TV series, and so many of the original producers and writers, like Gene Roddenberry, David Gerrold, and D.C. Fontana, were brought in to create the concept for a new show. It had a completely different cast, and a completely new Enterprise, being set some 95 years after the original show. The pilot, this episode, was approved, and the show went into production, then shown in syndication — that is, not on one of the networks, CBS or NBC or ABC, but on local channels, in most of the nation. (I don’t remember what local channel in LA I saw it on.)

By 1987 I had a VCR and, if I recall correctly, taped all the TNG episodes so I could rewatch them at my leisure. (Again: this was ages before streaming.) (By that time Paramount was releasing VCR episodes of TOS, generally two episodes per tape, and I bought a few, but nothing like a complete set.) TNG was on for seven years, and as I recall I saw every episode except for one. For some reason, I missed one, one I can’t even identify now.

But by 1994 or so when the show ended, I had moved on to so many other things that I never did watch all those videotapes I made of the TNG episodes. And eventually they got thrown away, as all my videotapes did. (By the ’90s everyone watched DVDs, not videotapes, and a few favorite movies I’d had on videotape I bought again on DVD. I still have lots of DVDs.) In all the years since 1994 the only time I’ve rewatched any of the TNG episodes was, oddly, when I was in the hospital about five years ago, and one of the channels on its internal TV system was showing TNG reruns. I watched five or six. After 25 years, mostly unfamiliar.

And oh by the way — I have sampled but have never followed any of the other Trek series. Not Deep Space 9, not Voyager, not Discovery, not Picard, not Lower Decks. OK, I did watch the Animated Series way back in 1973 or so, and in fact I bought the DVD set of that, but have still not rewatched it. Perhaps I will. I did watch a few episodes of the latest show, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, until it started getting silly. And I watched two or three episodes of Star Fleet Academy. Too many better things to watch.

(I’m not sure what to think of the obsessive fans who have watched all the shows. Some 960 episodes altogether, according to Google. I’ve been obsessed in my own way, about various things over periods of time, so I’m not going to judge. There are only so many things anyone can do.)

Still, with my partner away on a trip beginning last weekend, something prompted my curiosity and I decided to find out if TNG was available for streaming anywhere.

Yes, on Amazon Prime. So I watched that premiere episode. It was initially broadcast as two parts, but is an hour and half as a single episode.

There is so much documentation online about this episode, and all the others that followed, that I don’t feel compelled to write a detailed plot summary, as I have for the early ’40s and ’50s and ’60s movies that I’ve called Skiffy Flix on this site. Links about this episode are shown below. I’ll just record some of my reactions to watching it.

  • First, the new Enterprise. The movies had already upgraded the original Enterprise, generally in ways that made it look swoopier, more aerodynamic. Which is pointless of course, in space. The original Enterprise had a geometric symmetry (which I discussed here) that, to me, suggested some higher-dimensional alignment, perhaps in they way in went into warp drive — but this is idle speculation. That movie and TV designers kept making the Enterprise more aerodynamic, and then imagined other starships as merely being pieces of the Enterprise reassembled in different configurations (just one warp nacelle instead of two, for example), indicated to me a lack of imagination, and the fallacy of projecting local circumstances to situations they do not belong. This new Enterprise was apparently much much larger (though it’s hard to tell given that the relative proportions of this to the original were roughly the same) but with an attenuated rear end. The purpose of the curvy sections holding up the nacelles? Mindless aesthetics, as far as I can tell. (And of course there’s no “holding up,” since…)
  • This episode made a big point about the ability of the saucer section of the Enterprise to separate from the lower section, a point which had been established in the original show, but IIRC, never used until one of the movies. (Don’t remember which one.) Not sure I ever understood the point. It’s not as if either section could descend into the atmosphere of a planet. Only the lower section had warp drive. The saucer had impulse drive, which limited it to sub-light velocities. Again IIRC.
  • About this episode: I had forgotten that this was when the character Q was first introduced. In fact my vague recollection of this episode was that it involved an Enterprise visit to some sophisticated starbase, or something. That must have been a different episode.
  • The episode is in part the origin story of all the characters, showing or recalling how they first meet or met, in a way TOS never depicted. Data even has to explain himself as an android (to an elderly McCoy, in a cameo appearance by DeForrest Kelley).
  • It’s significant that there’s a conversation between Riker and Picard about the advisability of the latter beaming down the planet. This was a major complaint by David Gerrold in his book THE WORLD OF STAR TREK, that it’s implausible for the captain of the ship to beam down every week into potentially dangerous circumstances. Of course the rationale for that was, especially in the ’60 with limited budgets and casts, producers would use their lead actors in every possible scene. In this way TNG advanced the concept over TOS.
  • The most striking element is the conceit that, as Picard keeps explaining to Q, humanity has evolved over the past 400 years, has ‘grown’, and is no longer the quarrelsome, violent species that once existed. It’s striking because, as has become apparent in recent decades, it’s so naive. There’s no evolution of human nature possible in 400 years, and if anything we see progressive movements undermined by conservative ones over and over, in a kind of inevitable cycle (that personally I’m not sure humanity will ever escape). Still, this was a premise that series creator Gene Roddenberry kept insisting on, to the point that he drove writers away with the stricture that there could be no true conflict between characters. Where is the drama then? How do you write stories in which people are not in conflict with each other? (Well, perhaps stories that are only about alien puzzles to solve. But those aren’t dramatic.)
  • The bottom line about this episode is that it’s about yet another test of humanity. I say yet another because it was an old idea in science fiction. Aliens demand that humanity explain itself, or demonstrate its fitness, in order to join the galactic community, or even to survive. (The most famous earlier example I can think of is Robert A. Heinlein’s HAVE SPACESUIT — WILL TRAVEL, in which the protagonist is confronted by a galactic council demanding the same defense of humanity. Oh, and the 1950s film The Day the Earth Stood Still.) But then Trek was seldom notable for original ideas. Roddenberry and his writers drew on a history of written science fiction going back to the 1930s that entailed galactic empires, other planets with strange species, hostile aliens, friendly aliens.
  • The best thing Star Trek did was to introduce these ideas to a mass audience. They’ve become part of popular culture.

Links, the last two with detailed plot summaries:

Wikipedia: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Wikipedia: List of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes
Wikipedia: Encounter at Farpoint
Memory Alpha: Encounter at Farpoint (episode) with a very detailed plot summary

Posted in Personal history, science fiction, Skiffy Flix, Star Trek | Comments Off on Latter Day Skiffy Flix: STTNG: Encounter at Farpoint

Increasing Willful Ignorance and Intolerance

Posted on Thursday 19 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How energy independence, which even Fox News once thought could avoid the quandary we now face in the Strait or Hormuz, is now regarded as a scam by the likes of JD Vance;
  • How Trump and MAGA are all for religious freedom… for Christians, but definitely not for Muslims;
  • While MAGA Christians want to repeal the 19th amendment and be much more intolerant toward ‘Satanic’ nonbelievers;
  • The White House Cage Match, and a Newsmax Host’s eagerness to punch people: are conservatives prone to settling disputes with violence? (Also yesterday’s item about guns);
  • The kids are all right, say new studies, better than previous generations, and the various psychological reasons many people believe otherwise.
– – –

We have only conservatives to blame.

Media Matters, Allison Fisher, 18 Mar 2026: Fox personalities used to claim that energy independence would shield the US from potential retaliatory action by Iran — such as closing the Strait of Hormuz, subtitled “As gas prices rise, the network has scarcely invoked the concept of ‘energy independence,’ mentioning it a fraction as often as it did during the start of the Russia-Ukraine war”

Hmm, why would that be? Perhaps because the current administration thinks energy independence is a scam.

JMG, via Poke and New Republic: Vance: Take Comfort That Gas Prices Are Worse For US Allies Because “They Focused On Green Energy Scams”

They’re not scams; they’re what are necessary to avoid all the ill effects of continuing to use fossil fuels. He’s a dolt, pandering to conservative resistance to anything new and strange.

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More on Christian intolerance, out loud. NYT summarizes recent examples.

NY Times, Editorial Board: Trump’s Hypocrisy on Religious Freedom

Religious freedom for Trump and American conservatives is only about Christians.

The Trump administration holds itself up as a defender of religious freedom. It has created a Religious Liberty Commission, increased funding for faith-based schools and changed vaccine policies to allow more religious exemptions. It ordered a Christmas Day missile attack in Nigeria on what President Trump described as a terrorist group that was killing Christians. The administration has punished universities in the name of preventing antisemitism. “I’ve done more for religion than any other president,” Mr. Trump claimed at the National Prayer Breakfast this year.

Yet there is an exception to this effort. Mr. Trump and his Republican Party appear uninterested in protecting the religious rights of Muslims. Instead, they are often hostile to Islam.

Recalling the Muslim ban. Tommy Tuberville, Brandon Gill, Randy Fine, Andy Ogles. Once again, the first lesson of comparative religion for American conservatives: all religions except your own are crazy and dangerous. (And the others likely think the same about yours.)

To me, they’re all equally crazy and dangerous. Examples.

Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 18 Mar 2026: ‘Good Christian Sexism’: Dale Partridge Seeks To Repeal The 19th Amendment In The Next Decade

He has a book coming up, called “19 Reasons to Repeal the 19th Amendment,” which is what gave women the right to vote in 1920.

Mantyla concludes noting this:

In addition to some “good Christian sexism,” Partridge’s comments reveal some fundamental misunderstanding about how our government works. The 19th Amendment is part of the Constitution and therefore could not be repealed or ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court—it would take the kind of state-by-state fight that led to the amendment’s ratification. Good luck with that.

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Again I’ll note my position about this: MAGA Christians do not actually believe in the American Constitution and its Amendments, nor Democracy, and they don’t entirely believe in their Bible either, since they are very selective in what they quote. They’re actually just primitive tribalists who would impose their blinkered values about the world on everyone else, since they think maybe they can. I’m sure other pious groups around the world wish they could do the same, in the name of *their* religion.

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One more.

JMG, quoting a speech given to “loud applause from a large audience”: MAGA Christian Nationalist: Tolerance Of Nonbelievers Is From Satan, “We Need To Be A Lot More Intolerant”

Look how he spins it:

“We are way too tolerant as a people and a nation. There’s biblical precedent for that. They didn’t tolerate this kind of behavior in ancient Israel. They didn’t tolerate it in Jesus’s time. Jesus was very direct about this kind of stuff.

“We teach this incredibly nice, sanitized version, I would say an effeminized version, of Jesus. This is a man who made a cat o’ ‘nine tails and went in to kick the tables over and screamed at people and called them vipers for sinning, for doing terrible things against the law of God.”

You know what? I *don’t care* whatever biblical precedents there might be for whatever he believes, and nor do most Americans. We live by the Constitution, not by the Bible or any other ancient religious text. They never seem to understand this.

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Two more.

JMG, from Axios: Trump: WH Cage Match Is “Hottest Ticket I’ve Seen”

and

JMG: Newsmax Host: Punching People Makes Things Better

See the connection? How do we not see these people as brute savages, whose only recourse to settling disputes is violence?

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Ending on an upbeat note, another example of how the world is actually a better place than many people, especially conservatives, think.

Scientific American, Melinda Wenner Moyer, 17 Mar 2026: The kids are all right, subtitled “Surprising studies show young people are doing better than previous generations in many ways”

Long piece with both anecdotes and studies. (I’ll note it’s a truism that “kids these days” never meet the standards of their forebears; this has always been true; it’s another example of the “good ol’ days” fallacy.)

If you were to ask most people how kids are doing these days, you’d probably get an earful of complaints and concerns. Compared with children from past generations, kids today are often portrayed as being less mentally healthy, less resilient and less empathetic. “America’s Children Are Unwell,” read a New York Times headline last November; online magazine Parents recently ran “How to Know if Your Kid Is a Narcissist—and What to Do about It.” In a 2025 Common Sense Media survey of 1,300 nationally representative parents, 61 percent said they believe kids today lag behind past generations in their morals and values, and more than half said youth today are less resilient and independent.

Although quality data are sparse, the research that does exist suggests a different narrative—one in which kids are faring better in many ways than those of previous generations. Studies suggest youths are more empathetic and less narcissistic than in the past, as well as more open-minded and inclusive. Drug use is down, youth violence has dropped and teen pregnancies have declined. IQs have gone up, and kids exhibit more self-restraint and patience than they did 50 years ago.

With detailed consideration of various reasons why. No simple answer. Cognitive biases, social media, exposure to the world, the way we focus on the negative…

This new, more positive discovery didn’t get nearly as much media coverage as the one published in 2011, which Konrath found frustrating. “I have to say that I’ve noticed good news is not as popular as bad news,” she says. Recent science supports her assertion: a 2025 study found that negative and alarming articles about children are more likely to go viral than nuanced and balanced stories.

This is what media literacy — and real world literacy — is about, and it’s an individual project. An individual responsibility.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Psychology | Comments Off on Increasing Willful Ignorance and Intolerance

The War, the Economy, and Religion

Posted on Wednesday 18 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Yet more commentators on the stupidity of this war with Iran, from Adam Lee, Suzanne Maloney, and Susan B. Glasser;
  • How the economies under Biden and Trump aren’t that much different;
  • Brief items about why conservatives need guns, Christian Nationalists who admit they mean to impose their morality on everyone, how the transgender plague is driven by demons, hurricanes, tricks, and Christian theology;
  • And two examples of the first lesson of comparative religion, for conservatives.
– – –

Adam Lee on the war.

OnlySky, Adam Lee, 18 Mar 2026: The colossal stupidity of war with Iran, subtitled “An unwinnable war without a goal and with consequences for the world.”

If anyone still doubted that Donald Trump will be remembered as the worst president of all time, he’s doing his best to eliminate that doubt.

Last month, America and Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior Iranian military officials. (We also accidentally bombed a school, killing over a hundred children.)

This is all the more hypocritical because isolationism used to be one of Trump’s defining policy stances. As a candidate, he railed against politicians whom he said would get us bogged down in wars:

Followed by quotes of X/Twitter posts from 2012 and 2013 in which Trump predicted that Obama would start a war since his “poll numbers are in a tailspin” (which probably wasn’t true).

Now he’s tossed that promise aside, just like he’s discarded every other principle he ever paid lip service to. He’s committed all the evils he promised, plus all the evils he denounced.

The sheer stupidity, incuriosity, and smugly self-satisfied ignorance of this administration defies belief. Even Trump doesn’t know why we’re at war. He and his henchmen have offered a fog bank of shifting justifications about why he did this—to bring about regime change? to end Iran’s nuclear program? to heed Israel’s wishes? or something else entirely?

Lee goes on to point out how nations less reliant on fossil fuels will be less impacted by this war. (But then it’s been obvious for decades that the world needs to transition away from fossil fuels, for many reasons; Trump simply denies all those reasons, because he wants to recreate the world he grew up in, as conservatives are wont to do.) Lee doesn’t at all approve of the Iranian government, “a cabal of fanatical, violently repressive theocrats” who deserve to be replaced. But you can’t do it by bombing the country, as past interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown. But some people do not learn from the past.

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And by the way, the US had a treaty with Iran, under Obama. Trump tore it up because, well, Obama.

NY Times, guest essay by Suzanne Maloney, 18 Mar 2026: The Alternative to Obama’s Nuclear Deal Was War. Why Did Trump Tear It Up?

In 2015, President Barack Obama and the leaders of Britain, China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia and the European Union reached an agreement formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that imposed restrictions across the spectrum of Iran’s nuclear activities.

The product of years of diplomacy, the plan elevated a technically complex national security challenge into a fierce political debate split largely along partisan lines. A few months before the deal was signed, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, addressed a joint session of Congress — at Republicans’ invitation — to campaign against it.

Critics said it wasn’t harsh enough. It wasn’t perfect. (Is anything?) The alternative was war. Well, here we are: Trump tore it up, and started a war!

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Another take. We’ve seen this comparison before.

The New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser, 12 Mar 2026: The War Trump Doesn’t Want to Talk About

Subtitle: “We won,” the President who’s treating the conflict with Iran like a video game says, but “we’re not finished yet.”

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On another topic.

NY Times, guest essay by Jason Furman (chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017), 18 Mar 2026: If You Hate Trump’s Economy, I Have News for You [gift link]

As a candidate, Donald Trump called the economy under President Joe Biden a “nightmare.” As president, he says the United States is “bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before.” Democratic rhetoric has shifted just as sharply, from Vice President Kamala Harris touting the U.S. economy as “the strongest in the world” during the 2024 campaign to Democrats today decrying an “affordability crisis.” And that was before gas prices jumped more than $0.50 a gallon in the wake of the Iran strikes.

While the narrative on both sides has done a 180-degree turn, the economy itself has not. It didn’t change after tariffs were rolled out. It didn’t change after A.I. became more widely adopted. The economy over the last year has looked a lot as it did in 2024. I don’t expect it to change because of the latest disappointing numbers on jobs, fluctuations in the gross domestic product or the start of the Iran war, either.

…

While the narrative on both sides has done a 180-degree turn, the economy itself has not. It didn’t change after tariffs were rolled out. It didn’t change after A.I. became more widely adopted. The economy over the last year has looked a lot as it did in 2024. I don’t expect it to change because of the latest disappointing numbers on jobs, fluctuations in the gross domestic product or the start of the Iran war, either.

Why? Part of this is partisan motivated thinking: whatever the other side did, or is doing, must be bad. More fundamentally, the economy is enormously complex and not easily swayed by this or that change in strategy or policy. Nor do presidents have the micromanagement powers many voters think they do.

That the 2025 numbers looked much like the 2024 numbers should not be that surprising. The American economy, like an ocean liner, is extremely hard to turn. The best guess of what will happen next year is that the economy will continue doing what it did last year.

…

Perhaps the most common mistake is to overrate the importance of the president. Sometimes presidents can make a big difference, but usually the aggregate economic effects of their policies are smaller — for good or ill — than their supporters or detractors would have you believe.

Concluding:

This does not mean presidents don’t matter for the economy. I believe the economy would be even better today were it not for Mr. Trump’s reckless tariffs and his Middle East adventures. It means, however, that we should probably be more honest about judging the economy and more explicitly admitting that our opinion is based on much more than interest rates or inflation or even our own economic circumstances.

My take on the Trump economy is that I haven’t felt any personal pain at all, but then I’m stable, not trying to buy a house or a car, and not struggling to make ends meet the way many young families might be. My take is just that Trump promised many things — cut prices in half! yadda yadda — that of course have never happened. (Because he has no direct control over them, but his MAGA fans don’t understand that.)

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Briefly noted.

  • They’re quite upfront about it.
  • Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 17 Mar 2026: William Wolfe Admits Christian Nationalists ‘Are Going To Impose [Our Morality] Upon You’
  • The other problem is that he’s so certain what God’s morality is. “If you don’t like it, I’m sorry, but this is good and right and just if it lines up with God’s standards and I am going to enforce my morality on you inasmuch as our morality is God’s morality.”
  • Is all of Leviticus God’s morality? If not, how does he decide which parts are, and which aren’t?

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The first lesson of comparative religion, for conservatives, with two examples.

Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True: Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Scientology

He discusses the latest cartoon from the long-running Jesus and Mo strip, shown above.

And:

NY Times, Robert Draper, 16 Mar 2026 (on today’s front page): ‘It Doesn’t Need to Be Here’: The Right Vilifies a Muslim School in Alabama, subtitled “A local campaign against the small school reflects growing Islamophobia in conservative enclaves in America and among G.O.P. officials.”

Do I need to spell this out? All religions seem crazy, even dangerous, to people who follow other religions. The lack of self-awareness about such prejudices continues to astound me, especially in this age of global information. But it’s true of most people, the most conservatives ones anyway, on Earth.

Posted in conservatives, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on The War, the Economy, and Religion

Is Trump Insane, Delusional, or Merely an Inveterate Liar?

Posted on Tuesday 17 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump claims a former president supports his actions in Iran; the four living former presidents all deny it;
  • Many on the extreme right sound insane to the rest of us, with examples;
  • Trump is pressuring the media to support his war, as authoritarians do;
  • Yet another example of how Trump is only transactional, without principles;
  • John Pavlovitz on how MAGA Americans will feign ignorance of the Trump administration, jut as Germans did about the NAZIs.
  • A report on the health of Democracies around the world is unsurprising concerning the US;
  • Anne Applebaum on how everyone but Trump understands what he’s done;
  • Philip Glass’s Monsters of Grace.
– – –

Today’s story about crazy Trump.

NY Times, 16 Mar 2026: Trump Claims an Ex-President Confided His Regrets on Iran. But Who?, subtitled “The New York Times reached out to people close to President Trump’s predecessors. They disputed Mr. Trump’s claims.”

President Trump claimed on Monday that a former president told him privately that “I wish I did what you did” in attacking Iran and killing its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Mr. Trump would not identify which of the four living predecessors he was referring to.

“He said, ‘I wish I did what you did,’” Mr. Trump said. “I don’t want to get into ‘who,’ I don’t want to get him into trouble.”

All of the four living ex-presidents have denied any such conversation. Is Trump delusional? Insane? Lying by rote as he always does?

This story has been all over the media, and Facebook. One wag on Facebook suggested that 47 had a conversation with 45.

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A lot of people on the right sound insane to many of the rest of us. They are steeped in fantasy and privilege and religious zealotry, and not grounded in reality.

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Stepping out.

Salon, Sophia Tesfaye: Trump wants to punish media for his unpopular war, subtitled “The president and FCC Chair Brendan Carr are threatening journalists and broadcasters for their coverage of Iran”

This is what authoritarians do. And it’s happened before.

NY Times, Michelle Goldberg, 16 Mar 2026: Trump Is Trying to Bully America Into Supporting His War. It Won’t Work.

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Trump and his supports have no principles. They only make deals. They are purely transactional.

Via JMG, NY Times, 16 Mar 2026: U.S. Considers Withholding H.I.V. Aid Unless Zambia Expands Minerals Access, subtitled “A draft State Department memo outlines ways the Trump administration may ratchet up pressure on the African country by ending health support ‘on a massive scale.'”

That people in Zambia may die is irrelevant to them. And you see these kinds of stories almost every day.

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As I said yesterday.

The Bulwark, Andrew Egger: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, subtitled “First insult them for years. Then demand their help.”

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A while back I mentioned the title of a book that would well apply to the current situation: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

John Pavlovitz: How Will This End for MAGA Americans? The Same Way It Did for NAZI Germans: Feigned Ignorance

As horrifying and sad as it is watching the worst inhumanity of the past repeating itself in the place we call home, it does allow us to look back and get some idea as to where we’re likely headed.

For students of History, the last two years here in America have been one long experience of Déjà vu of the worst kind: a growing assemblage of governmental red flag overreach, incendiary rhetoric designed to dehumanize an entire segment of the population, a steady failure of both systems and sanity, and the mass delusion of otherwise reasonable people who gladly enabled a fragile lunatic’s sickening rise.

For those of us fortunate enough not to have had our brains rotted and our souls devoured by the decade-long death cult of an orange imbecile here in America, we’ve endeavored to understand how people around us succumbed to a hollow ruse that either intelligence or empathy should have seen through.

We’ve repeatedly beaten our heads against the wall trying (and failing) to find new ways to reach into the stupor of their blind adoration and pull them into moral clarity, none of which proved successful.

And, we’ve attempted to predict just when (if ever) they would awaken from this ten-year racist fever-dream and come to terms with the multitude of horrors they’ve co-authored with their votes and their undying allegiance.

If recent history is any indication, we’d better not hold our breath.

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This report has been anticipated.

Slate, Christopher Ingraham: They’ve Been Measuring the Health of Democracies for Years. Guess What Their New Report Says About America.

You can guess. The graphs look like this:

Once again, MAGA Americans won’t notice, or care.

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And finally, a big piece by Anne Applebaum.

The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum, 17 Mar 2026: Everyone but Trump Understands What He’s Done, subtitled “Allied leaders know that any positive gesture they make will count for nothing.”

Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.

He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.

And it goes on with the progress of the Iran war and whether something might finally be breaking in Trump. Ending:

The result: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has declared that Canada will not participate in the “offensive operations of Israel and the U.S., and it never will.” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius says, “This is not our war, and we didn’t start it.” The Spanish prime minister refused to let the United States use bases for the beginning of the war. The U.K. and France might send some ships to protect their own bases or allies in the Gulf, but neither will send their soldiers or sailors into offensive operations started without their assent.

This isn’t cowardice. It’s a calculation: If allied leaders thought that their sacrifice might count for something in Washington, they might choose differently. But most of them have stopped trying to find the hidden logic behind Trump’s actions, and they understand that any contribution they make will count for nothing. A few days or weeks later, Trump will not even remember that it happened.

As I’ve said before, what startles me is not that there are such people like Trump in the world, but that so many other people support such a person and don’t care or don’t notice.

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I’ve been working my way through my Philip Glass CDs, some of them that I’ve only listened to once or twice when I first bought them without really absorbing them. Here’s one, recorded in 2007, called MONSTERS OF GRACE, which is remarkable mostly for its orchestration. I’ve been listening to it repeatedly for three days. There’s no complete recording on YouTube, but here’s the second track, which provide a good sample flavor. (Except that the four vocalists, who sound very familiar from at least one earlier Glass work I can’t place, aren’t in this track.)

Posted in conservatives, Lunacy, Music, Politics | Comments Off on Is Trump Insane, Delusional, or Merely an Inveterate Liar?

Clueless, Stupid, and Cruel

Posted on Monday 16 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The status of Trump’s war in Iran;
  • Paul Krugman explains that America is not respected around the world;
  • And how George Orwell foresaw this;
  • Robert Reich on Trump’s stupidest cabinet member: Pete Hegseth;
  • How Hegseth doesn’t understand “no quarter” any more than he understands “rules of engagement”;
  • Brief items about Peter Thiel’s antichrist fixation; grandparents who remember what vaccines were for; the pointless voter fraud bill; how conservative Christians aren’t helping their cause; how the Trump administration is now forced to hire migrant workers (to replace those who were deported); and about the DOGE dolts who mindlessly slashed DEI programs and didn’t actually save any money.
– – –

Recently in the Iran war: Trump has declared the mission complete, or nearly complete, or maybe complete in a few more weeks, but even if it’s complete now, he’s thinking of bombing them some more just for fun. Also, he’s asking all the American “allies” he has insulted with tariffs this past year for help clearing the Strait of Hormuz, and they have declined or not responded, while dolts like Newt Gingrich suggest using nuclear bombs to clear a new pathway that avoids the Strait. These people are clueless.

Thus.

Paul Krugman, 16 Mar 2026: No, America is Not Respected, subtitled “Thanks to Trump, we’re held in contempt even by our closest allies”

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Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan: SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS

Posted on Monday 16 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: A Search for Who We Are
(Random House, Oct 1992, xvi + 505pp, including 85pp of notes, permissions acknowledgements, and index.)


This is perhaps Carl Sagan’s most substantial book, on the grounds that it’s through-written as a single composition; it’s not a compilation or fix-up of previously written magazine pieces, as THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD was, or an edited series of lectures, as THE VARIETIES OF SCIENTIFIC EXPERIENCE WAS, or aligned by chapter to episodes of a TV show, like COSMOS was, or a book aligned to an earlier book, like THE PALE BLUE DOT was.

And on the grounds that it takes a wide perspective, a sort of 10,000 foot view of a period of history not examined by most books about evolution, or the cosmos, or human history. It’s about the history of life up until humanity’s ancestors came on the stage, and so it outlines how and why life on Earth came to be, and how things like competition and violence necessarily came to characterize life on Earth.

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The Most Dangerous Vision

Posted on Sunday 15 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

A brief post today, after a long afternoon/evening watching the Oscars. (On the West Coast, what with pre-shows, it ran from mid-afternoon to nearly 8pm.)

So instead of linking news or opinion items today, let me note a nascent thought of mine that’s emerged in recent weeks. I’ll begin with a reminder that every post like this, every post other than objective linking and quoting, is a first draft of sorts, a record of today’s thoughts that might undergo rethinking tomorrow, or next week, or next month. Just as what I opined yesterday, or last month, or five years ago isn’t necessarily what I’d say today. (Usually, when I look back at old posts, I’m bothered only by inexact wording, not ideas I’ve completely abandoned. For some of these ideas it’s important to state things precisely, lest people read into them things I didn’t mean. You know the examples.)

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What Western Civilization is Actually About

Posted on Saturday 14 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Francis Fukuyama, responding to Marco Rubio, on how Western Civilization is more about the Enlightenment than religious faith;
  • And Boston Globe via Steven Pinker on that Tennessee congressman’s anti-Muslim screed;
  • Briefly noted items about Trump’s shoe tests and their Soviet odor, Trump’s disconnect with reality, video games, non-Protestant events, forcing student-led prayer, destroying DC architecture, more about the Beha book, dismantling a renowned science lab, Trump’s sons cashing in on drones, weakening limits on a cancer-causing gas, and the eternal sea of misinformation about vaccines.
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Persuasion, Francis Fukuyama, 3 Mar 2026: What “Western Civilization” Really Means, subtitled “It has less to do with faith — and more to do with the Enlightenment — than Marco Rubio thinks.”

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