Steven Pinker, WHEN EVERYONE KNOWS THAT EVERYONE KNOWS…

Subtitled: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life
(Scribner, 2025, xv + 364pp, including 64pp of notes, references, and index.)

This latest Pinker book, which follows ENLIGHTENMENT NOW and RATIONALITY, seems at first glance a bit more abstruse or academic without quite the thematic verve that distinguishes most of his books. Yet upon review it is, rather like Harari’s NEXUS, nevertheless full of fascinating revelations and insights that make it key to Pinker’s oeuvre. In fact, it shows that Pinker’s concerns about the human mind, human nature, the nature of rationality and so on, extend into sociology and the many ways humans interact. (Rather like the way Harari’s exploration of information extends into politics.) All of his books, with only an exception or two, are of a piece.

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The Slow Motion American Train Wreck

  • Rebecca Solnit on how the US is destroying itself;
  • The significance of Victor Orbán’s loss;
  • How Trump thinks religion is about power, not morality;
  • Trump’s grotesque AI image depicting himself as a Jesus figure.
– – –

I’ve gradually become aware of another savvy political commentator and essayist, Rebecca Solnit, to set along with the three of four others I check out daily. (Richardson, Reich, Krugman, Pavlovitz.) David Brin posts highly about her. This piece was linked from Facebook this morning, and captures the moment. She has a Substack, Meditations in an Emergency, since Jan. 2025. She’s published a number of short books, of which I just bought a couple.

The Guardian, Rebecca Solnit, yesterday: The United States is destroying itself, subtitled “The daily news can’t adequately convey the administration’s sabotaging of our government, economy, alliances and environment”

I’ve mentioned more than once that the actions of the Trump administration are not unlike what a group of infiltrators or saboteurs would do to undermine everything that has until recently made America great. Solnit:

The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.

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Are All Weddings the Same?

We attended a wedding yesterday, in Alameda, between my partner’s older son’s wife’s sister, and a man from a non-Catholic family, who had converted, and gotten baptized a year ago, in order to marry into my partner’s older son’s wife’s family, a Vietnamese family, that is resolutely Catholic. Got that? The ceremony was held at the St. Joseph Basilica in the middle of Alameda, led by Catholic priests, and went an hour and 15 minutes. So many of their rituals must be rote by them, performed and recited over and over again.

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Skiffy Flix: The War of the Worlds

This is about the 1953 movie, surely one of the best known and highly-regarded SF movies of the ’50s, along with THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, FORBIDDEN PLANET, and perhaps INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS.

I wrote about the novel back in 2021, along with some comparison to this film. I watched the DVD of the film again last night.

(My DVD cover is similar to but not exactly like the one shown here. On mine, “The Original Invasion” appears at the top, and there’s no Korean(?) text beneath the title.)

Couched among other skiffy flix of the era, this film is an example of the Hollywood-ization of a classic novel to fit the pattern of what audiences excepted a science fiction movie to be at the time. With so many resemblances to other sf movies of the era.

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Those Who Do, Those Who Can’t

  • How some of us reach for the stars, while others are mired in oppressive religious fantasies;
  • How both sides think God is on their side, and wondering what religions are trying to accomplish;
  • Rebecca Boyle on what we’re seeing new about the Moon, from Artemis II;
  • Brief items about why we keep going back to the Moon, why Vance is stumping for a dictator, the Christian right’s victim complex, how Trump gives old people a bad name, how employees respond to that religious message, and how the US is losing the world’s respect.
– – –

As I begin this post the Artemis II mission, named Integrity, while the spacecraft itself is called Orion (if I’m following this correctly), is about 20 minutes from splashdown. Here’s an essay on the chasm between those who understand and do, and those who believe and don’t, and can’t.

Free Inquiry, Ronald A. Lindsay, 9 April 2026: Reaching for the Stars, But Mired in Oppressive Fantasies

So, the news this week featured headlines about how the Artemis II crew had traveled farther away from the Earth than anyone else in prior lunar missions. An amazing achievement, and a testament to the rigorous application of scientific principles and evidence.

In the same time frame, however, we had reminders of how much of humanity remains trapped in detrimental religious fantasies.

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Our Demented Administration

  • A majority of Americans favor impeachment;
  • Now the Trump administration is threatening the Vatican;
  • Yet more evidence that they’re white supremacists;
  • Revisiting the question if Trump is suffering dementia;
  • Long piece about how Trump is stuck in the era of the 1980s;
  • Brief items: The administration delays published news about vaccine benefits; the USDA secretary sends a Jesus email to 100,000 of her workers; comment on Fb about why MAGA thinks protesters are being paid;
  • Radiohead’s “Dollars and Cents”.
– – –

Newsweek, updated today: Donald Trump Impeachment Backed by Most Americans: Poll

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Another Nothing-burger Trump Deal

  • Trump’s ‘deal’ with Iran seems to have accomplished none of his objectives, and is worse than the Obama deal that Trump cancelled;
  • Comments from Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, Media Matters;
  • Which spills over in the contrast between Artemis II and Trump’s funding priorities;
  • The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel on the best and worst of humanity this week: Artemis, and Trump;
  • Former NASA research scientist Kate Marvel on the chaos of science funding;
  • How MAGA men loathe tradwives;
  • Another piece about how religions survive by influencing the youth early on;
  • Radiohead’s “Daydreaming”
– – –

The general tenor today.

The Atlantic, Nancy A. Youssef, today: Trump Made a Deal That Gives Him Nothing He Wanted, subtitled “U.S. declarations of victory ring hollow.”

President Trump said he went to war to ensure that Iran never acquired a nuclear bomb. The war ended—for now, at least—with a demonstration that Tehran possesses an arguably more powerful weapon of deterrence against future attacks, one that is cheaper to use, gives Iran enormous sway over the global economy, can bring in revenue, and can’t be negotiated away: the Strait of Hormuz.

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TACO and Cognitive Surrender

  • The world worries about presidential insanity and nuclear war until Trump backs down, yet again;
  • AI and “cognitive surrender”;
  • With some perspective about electronic calculators and other forms of new technology over the millennia;
  • And how the surrender of critical thinking aligns with the credulity of religious faith;
  • Paul Krugman on MAGA’s war against science; that Trump and Hegseth think “overwhelming violence is Biblical” is a problem with the Bible.
  • “The moral arc of the universe bends toward finding out.” (via Mary Doria Russell)
  • Ennio Morricone: Once Upon a Time in America.
– – –

No surprise really: Trump put off his threats against Iran. This is after he said, just this morning, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” And reports of senior military officials considering disobeying his orders. But nothing from Republican politicians.

Washington Post, today: Trump agrees to suspend attacks for ‘two weeks’ if Iran opens Strait of Hormuz, subtitled “Amid threats to bomb civilian infrastructure, the president said he had received a 10-point proposal from Iran that formed a ‘workable basis’ for continued negotiations.”

Just 90 minutes before President Donald Trump’s 8 p.m. deadline to “wipe out a whole civilization” with massive strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure and bridges, he granted a two-week extension for diplomacy to continue.

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Artemis, and the Weirding of American Religion

  • The Artemis mission, the dark side solecism, the flat earth crazies;
  • Paul Krugman echoes my thoughts from yesterday: will America as we knew it end Tuesday?
  • The weirding of American religion, what with claims of teleportation and demons;
  • Brief items about demonic activity, US agencies celebrating Easter, ignoring the Constitution to fund religion, and how reality eventually catches up.
– – –

NY Times, Live Updates: Artemis II: NASA isn’t going to the dark side of the moon.

I’m following news about the Artemis II mission, and am relieved that not once on the TV news coverage (I mostly watch NBC) nor on NPR have I heard the solecism “dark side of the moon.” Despite the Pink Floyd album, there is no dark side of the moon, any more than there is a dark side of the Earth. There may be a dark side to either at any given moment, but there is no permanent dark side to either. When people say that about the Moon, what they mean is the *far* side, which because of gravitational lockage we never see from Earth. That’s why the face of the moon as seen from Earth always looks the same. The Earth rotates, the Moon rotates, and the Moon just happens to rotate in the same amount of time it takes to orbit the Earth. (Because physics.)

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Skiffy Flix: The Thing From Another World

This is a 1951 black & white science fiction movie set in the Arctic, and it’s one of the most famous of the 1950s science fiction films. (This original version has been eclipsed over the decades by a 1982 remake directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell, with pulsing music by Ennio Morricone and gruesome special effects that turned off many viewers at the time. But that’s another discussion.)

This version is directed by Christian Nyby with music by Dimitri Tiomkin and a credit to John W. Campbell Jr., who wrote the 1938 novella “Who Goes There?” that the movie is based on. (That story ranks first in my latest weighted poll of science fiction novellas, as shown and discussed on this page.)

The film opens with distributor RKO’s logo, a Eiffel Tower atop a clear, slowly spinning globe, and then the logo, two crossed rifles, of production company Winchester Pictures.

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