Grasping Reality, or Not

Posted on Tuesday 31 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Robert Reich on how Trump thinks he’s winning, but isn’t;
  • Matt Gaetz thinks the US Army is engaging in an alien hybrid breeding program;
  • How some pardoned Jan. 6th rioters have engaged in crime sprees;
  • Paul Krugman wonders why Trump’s behavior doesn’t deserve the label ‘treason’;
  • How anything is forgiven if you accept Jesus, according to Franklin Graham; John Pavlovitz responds;
  • How Trump’s threats to Iran suggest that America is abandoning morality;
  • Christian presumption in Texas and Indiana;
  • Radiohead’s “There, There”
– – –

Once again, conservatives seem to lives guided by wishful thinking, rather that grasping reality.

Robert Reich, today: Trump’s Magical Thinking, subtitled “He says he’s winning in Iran. He’s losing bigly.”
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Education Conservative Style: Robots

Posted on Monday 30 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Conservative ideas of education: replace teachers with robots;
  • Takes on Stephen Miller, white supremacists, Trump voters, college Republicans, taking away the car keys, and Pete Hegseth by Tom Nichols and Paul Krugman;
  • Radiohead: “I Might Be Wrong”
– – –

This is a pretty easy one.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, today: Why MAGA fears human teachers, subtitled “Melania Trump’s robot stunt opens a new front in the GOP’s war on education”

Describing Melania Trump’s appearance with a humanoid robot, as in the photo above.
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Skiffy Flix: Red Planet Mars

Posted on Sunday 29 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Now we come to one of the strangest SF movies of the early 1950s, and ultimately the most risible.

This is a 1952 movie about an American astronomer — played by Peter Graves, later of Mission: Impossible and Airplane fame — who sees telescopic photos of Mars and concludes that an intelligent civilization lives there. So he manages to send a signal (via Morse Code) and gets replies that indicate an advanced civilization there that has developed all sort of high technology dwarfing anything on Earth. This news crashes the world economy. Meanwhile, a Russian agent living in the Andes, of all places, intercepts his signals and… maybe is faking the Martian replies. But the movie wants to have it another way, to salve religious sensibilities.

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Cognitive Health and Reading

Posted on Sunday 29 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Cultural norms changed about exercise, and maybe they can change to address the harms of social media — by reading more;
  • How the faithful grasp at straws to find societal reassurance;
  • More about JD Vance and demons;
  • How the government is purging information about gender identity;
  • Rufus Wainwright’s “Greek Song”.
– – –

Here’s another item that’s about, in part, reading.

NY Times, guest essay by Cal Newport, 27 Mar 2026: There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate [gift link]

The essay begins with a reminder that cultural norms change.

Today we take for granted that diet and exercise are vitally important for our health and well-being. But we didn’t always think this way. Much of this awareness emerged in a remarkably short time during the middle of the last century.

In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack after playing golf in Denver. This event shocked the nation. The president was just 64 years old and projected American strength and vitality. The surgeon general at the time said that hearing the news about the heart attack was like learning about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

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David Brin, THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY

Posted on Saturday 28 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
(Addison Wesley, April 1998, 378pp, including 42pp of notes, follow-up, acknowledgements, index, and about the author.)

Here is a book that has sat my shelves for over a quarter century, unread. At the same time, I see enough of Brin’s commentaries on Facebook, and in his weekly blog posts, to know where he’s coming from. So for this book, I’ve given a sort of ‘inspectional’ or ‘summary’ reading, not a close reading of every chapter. This means I’m trying to spot the subjects he discusses, and focus in only on those I find especially pertinent to my own interests. And there were a couple of those. The most interesting core of the book is Chapter 5, about human nature and the maturity thesis. “We must choose it because it’s our only hope.”

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Again, No Kings

Posted on Saturday 28 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Noting the rallies held today, bigger than those last time;
  • Pieces today about how MAGA is entering the ‘acceptance’ stage of death, and how there’s no way to redeem Trump’s dismal second presidency;
  • Who are the 100 million people Bovino and Bo French want to deport?
  • How the “great man” theory of history might actually apply to Trump, since ‘great men’ aren’t necessarily good, and how progress in the world doesn’t necessarily include moral progress;
  • Philip Glass’s and Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing.
– – –

No, I didn’t attend any of the No Kings rallies today, but that’s because I’ve never attended any kind of protest or rally (I’m just not that kind of person), and now I’m old enough that I wouldn’t be able to be on my feet comfortably, especially in the hot sun, for hours and hours. But I’m following the news. From Fb:

Two pieces today.
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Reading and Introspection

Posted on Friday 27 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Assessing American literacy, and the claim that being able to read a New York Times article puts you into the “hyper-literate educated elite”;
  • How Trump doesn’t read, at all.
  • How powerful tech oligarchs think introspection is dumb;
  • The new homophobia is part of yet another swing of human nature, which reading and empathy and introspection might overcome, if conservatives did not reject them;
  • Short items: Hegseth rejects women and blacks from promotions; MAGA promises to outbreed the “hideous” left; Trump gets another bogus award.
  • Rufus Wainwright, “Go or Go Ahead,” studio version.
– – –

Facebook, 25 Mar 2026: D.J. Grothe’s post

If you have the basic literacy skills to read and comprehend a New York Times article, you’re in a “weird, out of touch, elite bubble.” Widespread low levels of literacy are bad for our republic and make people vulnerable to the worst sorts of people taking advantage of them. (I’ll also say that algorithmic attention capture, as well as epistemic collapse — or what political scientists call “truth decay” — where there’s widespread declining agreement on basic facts, and a public sphere where social media competes with the institutions that used to provide the public basic information about the world, make it very hard for a society yo govern itself, although both of these are supercharged by lower levels of literacy even as they also promote lower levels of literacy, in a vicious cycle.)

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What Is American Exceptionalism, Really?

Posted on Thursday 26 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Lydia Polgreen on how the problem isn’t Trump, it’s America;
  • David French wonders if America is so rich, why are Americans so miserable?
  • Faith that climate change isn’t real;
  • Short items: that classic poll against Arabic numerals; how people who lose elections don’t trust elections; yet another Jewish plot; a bloodthirsty prayer; another conservative convicted of what conservatives rail against; Biblical worldview;
  • Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely”.
– – –

It’s not just Trump. It’s some deep undercurrent in American culture.

NY Times, opinion by Lydia Polgreen, today: It’s Not Trump. It’s America. [gift link]

Like a lot of other Americans, I’ve oscillated in these dark times between two emotional poles. At points, I tell myself that Donald Trump is a uniquely malevolent figure who has seized levers of power that no previous president had ever dared to grasp. The story doesn’t stop state violence in the streets or illegal military operations abroad. Yet it has its comforts. Once Trump passes from the scene — as the laws of nature, if not politics, require — some kind of restoration of the American democratic and constitutional project can take place.

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Skiffy Flix: Invaders from Mars

Posted on Wednesday 25 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

This is a 1953 film that holds special significance for me since it was likely the first science fiction movie I ever saw, even if I saw it only in part at the time, which would be 1965 or 1966. As with Lost in Space, which had debuted in the Fall of 1965, I saw this movie at a neighbor’s house one afternoon. Neither was the kind of show or movie my parents would have on TV at home.

The story opens with a boy, David MacLean, who uses an alarm clock to wake up at 4am to stargaze with his telescope through his bedroom window. The alarm wakes his parents too, who come to investigate. David says, but Dad! Orion is at zenith! And it won’t happen for another 6 years! He pronounces it OH-rion, not oh-RI-on, as astronomers do, and it’s impossible for Orion to appear at zenith (from this presumably middle America town), and if it did it wouldn’t happen only every six years. That’s Hollywood astronomy for you. (To be fair, there’s a small town in Illinois near where my parents grew up that pronounced Orion the same way.) His father uses the scope to look at Rigel (he pronounces it ‘regal’, not RYE-jel) and Bellatrix, and his mother turns on the ceiling light, which would ruin the boy’s night vision. Bad parents! (These are the kinds of things I remember after decades, more than the exact plot.)

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Can I? Must I?

Posted on Wednesday 25 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • RFK Jr. illustrates the hypocritical standards of conservative motivated thinking: “Can I believe it?” (one example is fine) vs. “Must I believe it?” (no amount of evidence will do);
  • David Brin ridicules NASA’s new plan to build a Lunar base;
  • Laura Miller on how tech barons like Elon Musk love science fiction but misunderstand it completely;
  • Short items: Trump only knows what his staff shows him; Veterans are horrified that Trump is treating the war like a joke; Beware anyone who claims God has told them what to do.
  • Radiohead: Exit Music (For a Film).
– – –

Psychological biases and fallacies are most clearly demonstrated by conservatives.

Washington Post, Editorial Board, 24 Mar 2026: RFK Jr.’s hypocritical quackery, subtitled “FDA scientists warn that some popular peptides are ineffective and potentially dangerous.”

Beginning with the point:

No amount of rigorous academic research or testing ever seems good enough to quell Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s doubts about vaccines. Yet for products he favors, anything goes.

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