Falling Birthrates as Tribal Panic

Posted on Tuesday 7 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Another examination of the roots of falling birthrates, a global reality; I see the concern about it as tribal panic;
  • Briefly noted: make gun violence great again!; more about the latest GOP scare tactic; more about those who spread false history; how claims of voting by non-citizens may be evidence of clinical paranoia; and how MAGA cares about nothing unless it’s about America and winning.
– – –

So what is this about? Anything new here? This issue has been discussed before.

Slate, Jill Filipovic, yesterday: We Need More Good Men, subtitled: Conservatives often lay the blame for declining fertility at women’s feet. They’re wrong.

The writer begins with a personal anecdote about her decision, married and 39 and living in a small upstate New York town, not to have a child. Continue reading →

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The New Commie Threat

Posted on Monday 6 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Robert Reich on the Commie threat, a tired Republican charge, recalling McCarthy;
  • Lazy Republican thinking about communism and current kids these days;
  • Twisted thinking about religious liberty;
  • A video of Paula White, presidential spiritual advisor;
  • Stephen Miller, divine providence, and mental illness;
  • Recognizing The Good Liars and the work they do to challenge MAGA folks;
  • And how folks who don’t align with tribal Christian values are “divisive radicals,” at the Smithsonian.
– – –

Anything more about the 250th? Or about Trump? Of course there is!

Robert Reich, today: Why Is He Using the Communist Trump Card?, subtitled “He’s run out of other cards.”

(The image is of an anti-communist comic book published in 1947.)

Trump has run out of cards to play in the midterm elections, which is why he’s now talking about the “communist menace.”

Continue reading →

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Toby Ord, THE PRECIPICE

Posted on Monday 6 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
(Hachette, 2020, 468pp, including 225pp of resources, acknowledgements, appendices, further reading, notes, bibliography, and index.)

Here is book about existential risks, a topic on which I have several books, though this one and a couple other recent ones address the subject in the context of Effective Altruism. That is, part of EA would be to decide how to direct resources to avoid future calamities, with the usual cost/benefit considerations. Ord, along with MacAskill and Singer and many others, were mentioned in the Rutger Bregman book I read recently (review here). This one seems more specifically focused on risks.

*

Key Points

  • Author defines the “precipice” as the moment in history when it became possible for the human race to destroy itself, and places that moment at the explosion of the first atomic bomb in 1945. (And it roughly coincides with the beginning of the Anthropocene.)
  • This book is about existential risks, which he defines rather precisely. Not just garden-variety catastrophes, from which a small population of humans might eventually recover.
  • He places the current situation in the context of humanity as being some 200,000 years old, as having gone through three great transitions, the agricultural revolution some 10,000ya, the scientific revolution, only about 400ya, and the industrial revolution, a couple hundred years ago. Each brought problems, but average human conditions are better now than they’ve ever been in history.
  • And, there are potentially centuries ahead for humanity, given the average mammalian species lasting about a million years. If we leave the earth, millions or billions more years are available to us.
  • So it’s imperative now to avoid risks while we can take action to avoid them.
  • How existential risks are different from extinction or the collapse of civilization. He recalls Jonathan Schell, and invokes the term “longtermism.” This entails the economic concept of ‘discounting’, which places relative values on people alive today vs all those billions who may be alive in the future.
  • Then he steps through various natural risks: supervolcanoes, stellar explosions, the death of the sun; anthropogenic risks: nuclear weapons, climate change, environmental damage including resource depletion; and then future risks: pandemics, AI, various dystopian scenarios such as totalitarianism.
  • Part Three starts quantifying things, and comes up with a 1 in 2 change that humanity will survive to achieve its potential. Then considers how to prioritize risks, considering importance, tractability, and neglectedness.
  • Then a general strategy for humanity. Reach existential security; conduct a “long reflection”; and achieve our potential. The middle step is in MacAskill too. How expanding into space would or would not solve anything. What role a world government would have. What technological progress can do. With examples of what not to do, and what we can do right now.
  • The final chapter contemplates our potential: how long humanity might endure; some comments about scale; the quality of human life; and the choices we can make along three dimensions: time, space, and experience.

Continue reading →

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A Muted July 4th

Posted on Sunday 5 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • San Francisco fireworks hidden by fog;
  • Trump’s July 4 speech.

Last night, the DC fireworks being delayed, and the SF fireworks obscured, we were left watching Trump’s July 4th speech.

The fireworks shot off the Golden Gate Bridge were yet again shrouded by Pacific fog, as they are almost every year, from our viewpoint in the Oakland hills. (Actually, the SF fireworks are usually shot off from the Marina area; this was only the third time in history that the Golden Gate Bridge was shut down for a couple of hours, for this reason.)

We thought we might walk down to a prime viewing site, on a street below us, but by 9:15 it was clear that the fog would block all views. So we just sat at home and watched TV. At the same time, while there’s no official fireworks in Oakland, there have always been dozens or hundreds of local, likely illegal, fireworks, seen from our vantage out along the flats of Oakland.

As for Trump’s speech.

Continue reading →

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The 250th, Patriotism, and the Sin of Pride

Posted on Saturday 4 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

On the bright side,

  • 25 reasons to be optimistic about the future;
  • 5 questions that will determine America’s next 50 years;
  • Connie Willis relates some potential optimism in the decline of MAGA;
  • Why Americans are living longer;
  • Nicholas Kristof on Nordic happiness;

On the dark side,

  • The dangerous idea that the United States was chosen by God;
  • Trump treats half the American population as enemies, now calling them “communists”;
  • Why church and state should be kept separate, as the founders wanted;
  • Thought: didn’t the earliest settles to North America flee the same kind of religious persecution that MAGA is eager to impose on others?
– – –

Today is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, by the US, to separate itself from English rule.

*

Some overviews then.

Continue reading →

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About the Appeal of Stories

Posted on Friday 3 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How the great books appeal both to literary standards and our lizard brains;
  • With my speculations about the appeal of science fiction;
  • July 4th. The Guardian on how the US is a global citizen gone rogue; how the stain on America is the narcissist Trump;
  • Brief items about the MAGA indifference to Trump’s billions in personal gains, the jingoistic view that only the USA benefits from the greatness of Jesus; and Republican idiocy about wind and solar power.
– – –

What is the appeal of stories? Both in books and at the movies?

The Atlantic, Boris Kachka, today: The ‘Have It Both Ways’ Theory of Great Books, subtitled “Many literary classics have a way of appealing to our lizard brains while making us question why we’re so compelled by them.”

A standard answer goes to the roots of tribalism and the human understanding of cause and effect in the natural world. We tell stories to relate cause and effect, e.g. thunder is caused by the god Thor tossing lightning bolts. And we tell stories to valorize heroes and leaders who unite the tribe. Why the appeal of stories about danger and violence? As lessons about the risks of the world. Or as rehearsal to situations we might face. A kind of abstract, inverse, play. What about science fiction stories? But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. To the article:
Continue reading →

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What Is This About Democratic Socialists?

Posted on Thursday 2 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Jonathan Chait thinks they’re bad;
  • Jerry Coyne echoes his animus;
  • Robert Reich sees a different trend, more exciting than democratic socialism;
  • While Paul Krugman thinks “most of us are social democrats”, which seems to exhibit the way these words are variously used;
  • The books on the new Air Force One are fakes; how the reflecting pool is especially captivating; how the Capital is a mess; how Christians spread false Christian Nationalist history (with many links to examples).
– – –

OK, so what are Democratic Socialists and why do even some Democrats think they’re bad? Jonathan Chait seems skeptical.

The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait, today: There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists, subtitled “The DSA was formed in opposition to the very thing it has become.”

Continue reading →

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Lost Potential

Posted on Wednesday 1 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The families conservatives want;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on the Republican motives to strike down the Fourteenth Amendment;
  • Brief items about mandating the Bible in class; yet another study finds no link between Tylenol and autism; a conservative wants to sterilize foreign visitors; how the Qatari-gifted Air Force One was, actually, built in America; how MAGA takes the latest SCOTUS loss as an existential crisis;
  • And David Wallace-Wells on the need to retrofit the planet.
– – –

For all that conservatives resent big “nanny state” government, they’re eager to micromanage social trends that don’t align their expansionist, tribal values.

NY Times, Jessica Grose, today: The Gap Between the Families We Have and the Ones Conservatives Want [gift link]

The panic about Americans having fewer babies continues unabated. But we know this: Marriage and fertility rates in this country and across much of the world have been declining for years, with no signs of reversing. Prominent American conservatives keep saying that the problem is that it’s not 1950. That’s when it was typical to get married in one’s late teens or early 20s, to someone only of the opposite sex, and a majority of families had a male breadwinner with more legal rights than his wife.

(The answer, of course, Continue reading →

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The Conservative Ethos: Tribalistic, Xenophobic, Autocratic

Posted on Tuesday 30 June 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How the Supreme Court repeatedly gives Trump the license to discriminate (never mind “all men are created equal”);
  • Robert Reich on the Court’s decision to let Trump fire officials in government agencies whenever he likes;
  • Robert Reich on how the 14th amendment survived the Supreme Court, though only barely;
  • Items about the conservative distaste for foreigners (again…);
  • How Elon Musk thinks cuts to USAID didn’t cause any deaths (he’s wrong);
  • Brief items about Nuclear Family Month, Hegseth’s purges, Vance’s claims about the “deep state” and Nixon; and two idiots on the right.
– – –

This is from three days ago.

The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 27 Jun 2026: The Court That Will Believe Absolutely Anything Is ‘Race-Neutral’, subtitled “The majority gives Trump yet more license to discriminate.”

Trump-administration officials have made no secret of their desire to purge the United States of nonwhite immigrants. Donald Trump has declared, “If you import The Third World, you become The Third World,” a common refrain repeated by his advisers. Trump has also said that immigrants have “bad genes,” that they are genetically predisposed to crime, and that they are “poisoning the blood of our country”—coming, as they are, “from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”

And yet conservatives claim to worship the Constitution and the Declaration, which come with phrases like “all men are created equal,” which even taken figuratively, they clearly do not believe.

Continue reading →

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Are the Best Years Behind Us? No.

Posted on Monday 29 June 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The US is better off than 50 years ago, yet people feel worse (another version of this recurring story);
  • Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1.
– – –

Yet another story on this general theme. It’s about human nature, not the actual state of the world.

Vox, Bryan Walsh, today: The US is better off than it was in 1976. So why does it feel worse?, subtitled “America’s 250th birthday feels bleak. The numbers tell a different story.”

The current generation does not remember this.

America in the summer of 1976 was not in a good place.

The president who presided over the country’s bicentennial, President Gerald Ford, only had the job because the previous president and vice president had resigned in disgrace, making him the sole US president who was never actually elected. The Vietnam War had ended in defeat and disgrace when Saigon fell the year before, after the deaths of nearly 60,000 American service members. Inflation hit double digits in 1974 and stayed ugly, unemployment sat near 8 percent, and economists had to invent a word — stagflation — for an economy that seemed to encompass the worst of both worlds.

Continue reading →

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