TACO and Cognitive Surrender

Posted on Tuesday 7 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • 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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Meanwhile I’ll note some comments from earlier in the day.

Robert Reich, 6 Apr 2026: Trump has really, seriously, frighteningly lost his mind, subtitled “His latest threat is bonkers”

Paul Krugman, today: Our Darkest Hour, subtitled “The civilization we destroy may be our own” (Video and text)

The Atlantic, David A. Graham, today: Trump Threatens to Destroy an Entire Nation, subtitled “The president’s position is that if he wants to wipe out a ‘whole civilization,’ then that is his decision to make.

That’s as much as I’ll dwell on this today.

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Two related items.

The Guardian, 2 Apr 2026: Pupils in England are losing their thinking skills because of AI, survey suggests, subtitled “Two-thirds of secondary school teachers report a decline in core abilities such as writing and problem-solving”

Pupils using artificial intelligence are losing their capacity for critical thinking, according to a survey of secondary school teachers in England.

Two-thirds said they had observed the decline among children who they also said no longer felt the need to spell because of voice-to-text technology.

“Students are losing core skills – thinking, creativity, writing, even how to have a conversation,” one teacher told the National Education Union poll.

“AI is destroying what ‘learning’ – problem-solving, critical thinking and collaborative effort – is,” said another. A third anonymous contributor added: “Children no longer feel the need to spell as voice-to-text replaces knowledge.”

And

Ars Technica, Kyle Orland, 3 Apr 2026: “Cognitive surrender” leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds, subtitled “Experiments show large majorities uncritically accepting ‘faulty’ AI answers.”

When it comes to large language model-powered tools, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes faulty service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect reasoning or factual flaws in responses. On the other side are those who routinely outsource their critical thinking to what they see as an all-knowing machine.

Recent research goes a long way to forming a new psychological framework for that second group, which regularly engages in “cognitive surrender” to AI’s seemingly authoritative answers. That research also provides some experimental examination of when and why people are willing to outsource their critical thinking to AI, and how factors like time pressure and external incentives can affect that decision.

In “Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender,” researchers from the University of Pennsylvania sought to build on existing scholarship that outlines two broad categories of decision-making: one shaped by “fast, intuitive, and affective processing” (System 1); and one shaped by “slow, deliberative, and analytical reasoning” (System 2). The onset of AI systems, the researchers argue, has created a new, third category of “artificial cognition” in which decisions are driven by “external, automated, data-driven reasoning originating from algorithmic systems rather than the human mind.”

This last paragraph is, of course, alluding to the title and categories of Daniel Kahneman’s foundational book (partly reviewed here).

Perspective: when electronic calculators came out in the early 1970s (I remember a high school science teacher brought one in, a Texas Instruments I think, to pass around class, in 1972 or so), no one bothered to divide by hand anymore, or calculate square roots, though there were pencil and paper techniques for both. So now children don’t learn to spell because voice recognition and correction software exists to spell for them? That might be slightly different. Literate adults, I think, *should* be able to spell themselves, if only because correction software only works to a point and isn’t available everywhere. Also, ability to spell is a sign of intelligence; that’s how we can conclude things about the MAGA/anti-science crowd that waves around placards at protests, and posts screeds on Facebook, with obvious misspellings.

That said, there’s an inevitable shift in human society as tools replace more and more individual human effort. As has been happening for millennia. (The Greeks worried that capturing words on scrolls would undermine the human ability to memorize.)

And yet, the points about critical thinking are genuinely worrisome, because that means people are abandoning, even renouncing, their ability to think and to solve problems when given easy answers by the machines (that aren’t always correct). I like the term “cognitive surrender,” because I would extend that term to what I’ve thought for some time about religion. A person who is inculcated from an early age to believe in religious myths, to think there’s virtue in believing things without evidence, and especially to take as real various fantastical stories (as in the Bible) that violate any number of scientific principles that have been discovered and proved over and over again in recent centuries, has essentially abandoned reason in favor of fantasy. They surrendered cognitively. And that’s why they’re subject to conspiracy theories and beliefs in demons and teleportation, as in recent stories. They can’t tell reality from fantasy.

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Briefly:

And thus, there’s no need for studying reality; just believe what you want to ‘believe’. Whatever makes you feel good.

Paul Krugman, today: MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science, subtitled “When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength”

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JMG, today: MAGA Pastor: Trump And Hegseth Are “Ordained By God, Praying For Overwhelming Violence Is Biblical”

This is a problem with the Bible. Why do so many people think it’s the fount of all wisdom, just because it’s the oldest book still in print? That nothing has been learned since it was written?

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Mary Doria Russell today on FB

The moral arc of the universe bends toward finding out.

She credits someone named Alex Norris, but I don’t know which Alex Norris that is.

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And now I’m into Ennio Morricone. Beginning with his score for the 1982 version of The Thing, the other night, as I was writing up the 1951 version; then Marco Polo; today Once Upon a Time in America.

This doesn’t seem to be the full soundtrack, but it’s a taste.

Posted in conservatives, Human Nature, Lunacy, Music, Politics, Psychology | Comments Off on TACO and Cognitive Surrender

Artemis, and the Weirding of American Religion

Posted on Monday 6 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • 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.)

Surely I must have mentioned this before, but in the 1970s there was an ambitious British TV show called Space: 1999, perhaps designed to appeal to bereft Star Trek fans. Its absurd premise was that a huge explosion on the Moon somehow blew the Moon out of its orbit around the Earth and sent it into deep space. (That wouldn’t happen. Something crashing *into* the Moon, maybe.) But what I remember is a title card in the first episode, identifying the setting as “The Dark Side of the Moon.” I instantly gave up on the show’s credibility, and only watched one or two episodes, and have never seen any more.

Anyway. Two more points. Again and again news coverage claims the Artemis II astronauts are or will be farther from the Earth than any previous astronauts, without explaining. I’m thinking, since several Apollo missions included an astronaut who remained in the capsule (while the other two descended to the surface in their lander), and who orbited the whole time, going around the back side of the moon, what does it means for the Artemis astronauts to be farther from Earth than they were? It can’t be by very much, given the distances involved. Perhaps just the slightly varying distances between Earth and Moon, during those voyages. Also, the claims were that the Artemis astronauts would see parts of the backside of the Moon no humans had ever seen directly before.

How could this be? Well, the NBC guy on this morning’s Today Show — Robert Bazell? No, Tom Costello — at least explained the last item. It’s because the Apollo astronauts were orbiting much lower, much closer to the moon, while Artemis is passing behind the moon from 10s of thousands of miles out. Thus they’re seeing an expansive view in a way the Apollo astronauts never saw.

And one thing they saw was this huge crater:

Following is a pic from the actual mission. “Everything to the left of the crater is the far side, the hemisphere we don’t get to see from Earth because the Moon rotates on its axis at the same rate that it orbits round us.”

From Facebook: NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Post, today.

I should mention that unmanned probes over decades have orbited the moon and mapped it extensively. When I was growing up we had two globes in the house: one of the Earth, one of the Moon. The backside has been seen and mapped for decades. Just not seen by direct human eyes.

The second point today. New views of the Earth and the Moon from Artemis II have brought out the flat earth crazies, who insist they’re all fakes. It’s partly that they’re prone to conspiracy theories — all those authorities and elites out to trick them — and partly due to what Ziya Tong calls “scale blindness.” As illustrated by a comment I saw on FB, and I’ll have to paraphrase from memory. About those views of the Earth. “Where are the all the thousands of planes in flight? Where are all the satellites in orbit?”

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Paul Krugman echoes my thoughts from yesterday.

Paul Krugman, 5 Apr 2026: Living in Hell

America as we knew it may end Tuesday.

Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. Sunday morning update. Yesterday, I talked about how awful Trump’s message about glory to God and all of that was, but it’s looking much, much worse today. I’ll quote Trump in a second.

But let me do a Heather Cox Richardson here and talk about history for a second. …

He recalls Abraham Lincoln. Then quotes that quote from Donald Trump.

If Trump is actually going to give the order for massive war crimes, for destruction of civilian infrastructure, power plants, bridges, which will, among other things, lead to a lot of deaths in Iran, will the military obey it? A year ago, I would have said no.

But what we do know now is that, first of all, there turns out to be at least a significant MAGA component inside the officer corps. And we know that Pete Hexeth has been systematically corrupting, dismantling the military over the past 14 months. Generals who raise ethical concerns have been fired. Officers who even just want to be intelligent about warfare, and not believe that it’s all about warrior ethos and lethality have been fired, so it’s quite possible that there’s a quorum of officers who will follow instructions to commit war crimes.

…

It’s entirely possible that basically by this time Tuesday, America will have established itself as one of the world’s great villains. I don’t want to be here, but, you know, be warned. This is happening. This is real.

It’s the most astonishing, awful thing that I’ve ever seen, and we’ve all seen a lot of awful things. Take care, I guess.

Krugman doesn’t think so, but I think Trump will TACO.

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Today from Paul Krugman: The Terrorist in Chief

Terrorism, according to ICE — yes, that ICE — “involves violence or the threat of violence against people or property to further a particular ideology.” The official website goes on to declare that “Terrorists do not care who they hurt or kill to achieve their goals.”

If you haven’t read Donald Trump’s Truth Social post from Sunday, above, take a minute to do so. Don’t rely on sanewashed descriptions in the media. And then tell me that Trump doesn’t perfectly fit his own officials’ definition of a terrorist.

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Items about the weirding of American religion.

Slate, Molly Olmstead, today: The Headlines About a FEMA Official’s Waffle House Alien Experience Don’t Tell the Full Story, subtitled “There’s been a weirding in American religion, and it goes up much higher than Gregg Phillips.”

There’s no question: Gregg Phillips, a top Federal Emergency Management Agency official, believes he was teleported 50 miles to a Waffle House in Georgia.

When CNN first reported the story on March 20, based on older podcast clips, skeptics wondered if things had been misconstrued. He was joking, surely. Or perhaps it was hyperbole. But no: Phillips, who leads FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, has since made it abundantly clear that he believes he experienced a supernatural transportation, twice. (In the podcast episode he used the word “teleporting.”) Once, his entire car was “lifted up” while he was driving and was carried to a ditch outside a church 40 miles away. “I know what I’ve experienced,” he wrote on Truth Social on March 23.

Similarly, the following week, a clip circulated of Vice President J.D. Vance claiming that UFO sightings are actually glimpses of demons in the sky. That also was not a misrepresentation of Vance’s words: He appears to believe that aliens visit Earth, and that those aliens are actually demons.

These stories lent themselves to eye-catching headlines. Teleportation? Demon UFOs? Critics of the administration saw in them proof that the MAGA movement is led by kooks, rather than qualified, levelheaded professionals. But there’s something that the stories about these clips have missed, beyond the individual-level absurdity. Phillips and Vance may sound, to the scientifically minded, ridiculous. But the bigger story, if you look at the landscape of American belief systems today, is that they’re actually remarkably conventional.

And

But sociologists who study belief in America have found that there has been a kind of weirding of American faith in recent years. According to Joseph O. Baker, a professor of sociology and anthropology at East Tennessee State University, there’s been a growth in the belief in paranormal matters thanks to the decline in conventional religion.

This was the theme of Nicholas Humphrey’s LEAPS OF FAITH, back in 1995; review here.

Long piece, concluding,

To be clear, Christianity is not to blame for any partisan action; it can and is used to justify a wide range of behavior or beliefs, including progressive ones. But the destruction of traditional guardrails on much of the practice of Christianity has meant that the notions that used to seem odd and fringe are now mainstream. This great weirding of American Christianity has made it normal for people in power to talk of demonic UFOs and teleportation. It may also continue to scramble our political conversation for years to come.

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And these.

  • The New Republic, today: You Can Smell It Now: The Trump Presidency Is in Total Free Fall, subtitled “A loyal army of followers, a huge disinformation network, and a party of soul-selling cowards can crowd out facts for a long time. But eventually, reality catches up.” | As I’ve said: eventually reality catches up.
Posted in Lunacy, Politics, Religion, Space | Comments Off on Artemis, and the Weirding of American Religion

Skiffy Flix: The Thing From Another World

Posted on Sunday 5 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

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.

Then we are in the arctic, amidst wind and swirling snow. The location is a base of the Alaska Air Command (according to the Wikipedia entry for the film) and the story opens as a visiting reporter, Scottie, enters the Officer’s Club looking for a story. Men inside play cards. A message come from the local Nobel laureate, Dr. Carrington (whom we later see is a somewhat fussy man with a goatee) that a magnetic disturbance suggests that some large plane has crashed nearby. Men from the Air Command fly — using a transport aircraft with skies on its front wheels — to Carrington’s outpost. (These appear to be live-action shots, not models or special effects.)

There we get a bit of love interest, as was common even among SF films of the time. Captain Henry from the Air Command base discovers that an old flame, Miss Nicholson, is Carrington’s assistant. They exchange banter about their last meeting, which Henry barely remembers, and flirt about whether they might give it another try.

A combined crew from both base and outpost, along with a pack of dogs, fly some 48 miles east, to the location of the anomaly. They find a clear round patch in the ice, with a airplane-like fin sticking out of it. They try blasting it loose with thermite, but that only destroys whatever is under the ice. But then they get another reading and discover a humanoid creature a bit away, as if an alien thrown away from the wreckage, under the ice.

They cut a block of ice holding this creature and carry it back on their plane to Carrington’s base. They put it in a room with a window smashed open to keep it cold, but one of them throws a plugged-in electric blanket over the ice, which thaws it out. By morning, the creature is gone.

Then follows a long sequence in which the everyone but Carrington wants to find and kill the creature, while Carrington wants to study it. Men and dogs are killed. Carrington discovers the creature is vegetable-like, which results in a crack about it being a “carrot.” Despite Carrington’s pleas (near the end the creature simply knocks him aside into a crumple on the floor — Hollywood’s judgment on eggheads and trying to understand), the creature is eventually cornered and destroyed via kerosene and an electric grid inside the station.

The movie ends as the reporter gets a connection to Anchorage, and submits his dramatic report, ending: “Tell the world. Tell this to everybody, wherever they are. Watch the skies everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!”

That last line was, of course, the title of the Bill Warren book I blogged about on April 1st.

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This is actually a pretty intelligent movie, to a point, that suffers a couple three crucial limitations or flaws. First, if not exactly a flaw, this 1951 film is directed in a manner like many 1940s films, in which all the actors speak their dialogue very quickly, as if they’re in a rush to get somewhere once filming wraps. It was just the style of the ’40s; see e.g. His Girl Friday. This manner gradually disappeared in just the next few years.

Second, the creature at the end is revealed to be just a man in a crude suit (see image above). To make it worse for the movie’s reputation, that actor was James Arness, who went on to have a great career starring in the TV series Gunsmoke for 20 years. This early role came to be rather an embarrassment on his resume.

And third, despite Carrington’s pleas, the creature doesn’t seem to act very intelligently at all. It breaks out of its cell, and cuts their power supply. Nothing about what a real intelligent creature might do, like… try to communicate? It’s primitive science fiction that considers alien life simply as monsters to be destroyed.

And it’s especially ironic since the source material, John W. Campbell, Jr.’ “Who Goes There?”, was much more intelligent and speculative about what the motives of this alien creature might be. Further, the shape-shifting theme of the original story was dropped from this film, and while Carpenter’s 1982 version used the shape-shifting theme gruesomely, both versions dropped Campbell’s mind-reading theme. In both cases, Hollywood dumbed down what was originally a deep, thoughtful, and clever science fiction novella.

Posted in science fiction, Skiffy Flix | Comments Off on Skiffy Flix: The Thing From Another World

Eve of Destruction?

Posted on Sunday 5 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Is Trump about to start World War III? Will big US cities be here in two days? (Look up “Eve of Destruction” on YouTube. It’s from 1965, and notice how many of the images are familiar in 2026.)

How far does Trump have to go before his fans see how unhinged he is? Before the rest of the US government does something? Before he is removed from office?

Washington Post, today: Trump threatens Iran with ‘Hell’ over Strait of Hormuz in profane post, subtitled “Trump escalated threats against Iran’s power plants, bridges and other infrastructure in an expletive-laden post on Truth Social on Easter morning.”

*This* morning.

President Donald Trump escalated his threats to target Iran’s infrastructure if it does not open up the Strait of Hormuz, warning the country will be “living in Hell” in an expletive-filled message on social media Sunday. He later suggested that the United States could target “every power plant” in the country — an attack that experts warned could amount to war crimes.

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform. “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

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One more.

The Guardian, today: ‘Unhinged madman’: US politicians react to Trump’s expletive-laden threat to Iran, subtitled “Marjorie Taylor Greene and Bernie Sanders among those responding with alarm to Trump writing ‘open the fuckin’ strait, you crazy bastards’”

Some US politicians have reacted with alarm and questioned the US president’s mental state after Donald Trump issued an abusive, expletive-laden threat to Iran in which he called on the regime to “open the fuckin’ strait [of Hormuz], you crazy bastards”, as he threatened to further attack the country’s energy and transport infrastructure.

Of course, they can’t just press a button and ‘open’ the strait. It’s full of mines that would take weeks to remove, even with Iran’s help. But don’t bother Trump with details.

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This is actually not a religious story. Well, yes it is, mostly.

NY Times, guest essay by P.G. Sittenfeld (who “delivered a version of this essay to his fellow prisoners at Ashland Satellite Prison Camp in Kentucky”), today: Resurrection Is Everywhere

If you were to pause the Christian story of Easter at the moment Jesus dies on the cross, it would look like a victory for power and cruelty. But soon there’s the empty tomb, the angel of the Lord proclaims, “He is risen,” and a resurrected Jesus tells his disciples, “I am with you always.”

In other words, death isn’t death. That is the radical, provocative, hopeful message of Easter. I believe that same familiar notion of resurrection applies to events in our lives, too.

He goes on with his own story (he was a Cincinnati City Council member convicted of public corruption) and many more religious allusions, but to me what he demonstrates is in the last sentence of what I just quoted. Things die all the time; it’s part of nature. But things grow anew as well, as happens every Spring. Stars live billions of years and explode; their remnants, complete with heavier elements formed in the explosion, collapse to become new stars and new planets. But these are not “resurrections” in the sense that something dies and comes to life as itself. (Furthermore, if Jesus sacrificed himself for humanity’s sins, what was the point of him being resurrected? Didn’t that negate the sacrifice? He’s still up there in Heaven answering prayers, right? But Christian theology does not bear close examination.)

The whole Easter story is such an obvious analogy to these ideas of Spring and renewal that happen everywhere and are observed by every culture in various ways. Also, it’s notable how religion conflates so many ideas, some obvious and others wholly implausible, with the implication that, if you accept one, you accept the whole package (e.g. how the traditional arguments for the existence of God (e.g. the Cosmological argument) are taken by believers to prove that their religion is one true one).

Thus eggs, and flowers, and so on. Fine.

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Example of how the motive to privatize everything (to keep the government small) is actually driven by big business and their Republican servants. Certainly not for efficiency, or reducing costs to consumers.

NY Times, opinion by Binyamin Appelbaum, 4 Apr 2026: Trump Killed the One Thing That Made Filing Taxes Easier

This tax season, as you wade through the absurdly expensive and complicated process of filing income taxes, remember to thank the Trump administration.

Filing taxes should be really easy and completely free. It is in most other developed countries. And in 2024, the Biden administration debuted a pilot program called Direct File that could have made tax filing easy and free for most American taxpayers, too.

President Trump killed it.

Why did he do that?

Because tax preparation companies and Republican lawmakers have a shared interest in torturing taxpayers. The companies want to ensure that Americans remain dependent on their services. The Republicans want people to hate paying taxes.

With details.

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On the same theme, but stepping out.

NY Times, book review by Jennifer Szalai, 25 Mar 2026: Will the Miracle of Capitalism Destroy Us All?, subtitled “A new history by Trevor Jackson argues that the economic system that transformed global living standards depends on endless growth impossible to sustain.”

Review of The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World by Trevor Jackson.

In 2003, the literary theorist Fredric Jameson wrote that it was “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Trevor Jackson seems to agree, but only to a point. In “The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World,” Jackson says that the prevailing economic system has already gone a long way toward destroying our “finite planet.” He argues that if we don’t find a way to change course, the end of the world won’t be something we have to imagine; it will actually arrive.

As a lot of us have thought this for a while. Those who think we’ll always find new resources to keep the economy growing, and that the population can keep expanding indefinitely, aren’t thinking long-term enough.

The review concludes:

Whether intentional or not, Jackson’s overall message is that the system becomes so self-reinforcing that it pushes individual humans into insignificance. Luther, Newton and Lenin are included in this book merely because they provide “snapshots” of their economic worlds: “The people themselves are not important, which is exactly the point.”

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Briefly noted.

  • Trump changes his story every day, and a few days ago he claimed the current Iranian regime was more amenable to negotiation, as if to credit himself with some sort of accomplishment. But he’s just making things up. | CNN, 4 Apr 2026: Iran’s ‘new’ regime looks much the same, only harsher
  • Related: Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, today: Why does the right hate the pope so much?, subtitled “It might be the weirdest fact of this upside-down decade: The church is on the right side of history (sort of)”

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I’m not keeping up here in the blog with my revisiting of Radiohead albums. After Hail to the Thief came In Rainbows in 2007, which has nearly as many great songs. Nude, All I Need, Reckoner, House of Cards. Let’s pick this one.

Reckoner
You can’t take it with you
Dancing for your pleasure

You are not to blame for
Bittersweet distractor
Dare not speak its name
Dedicated to all you
All human beings

Because we separate
Like ripples on a blank shore
Because we separate (In rainbows)
Like ripples on a blank shore (In rainbows)
Reckoner
Take me with you
Dedicated to all you
All human beings

Wikipedia

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Lunacy, Music, Politics | Comments Off on Eve of Destruction?

God-Botherers

Posted on Saturday 4 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Ross Douthat and Bart Ehrman debate about the evolution of human morality; I’m not completely on board with either of them, and have a better explanation;
  • Examples of the religiously besotted: who think Christ is the King of America; who thinks US troops are fighting for Jesus; who want women barefoot and off the voter rolls;
  • Trump name-checks God;
  • The teleport guy triples down.
– – –

Items on religion, beginning with a serious debate between two scholars.

NY Times, Ross Douthat with Bart Ehrman, 2 Apr 2026: Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? A Debate., subtitled “A ‘Christian Atheist’ joins Ross Douthat.”

Very long, with video. I noted it a couple days ago but haven’t taken the time to read it (or watch it). But then I saw this take:

Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne, 3 Apr 2026: Bart Ehrman schools Ross Douthat on Christianity and how to find Biblical “truth”

Coyne summarizes and quotes. Both have recent books. Douthat, a reliable defender of faith for NYT, has Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious from a year ago. Ehrman has Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West just published in March.

I dismiss Douthat completely; he thinks the world would be a better place if everyone were a Christian, just like him; he thinks that’s what right and true about the world; he was imprinted young. I’m open to Ehrman, who went from believer to scholar (if not entirely skeptic), but I’m still skeptical of him; I had issues with his book JESUS BEFORE THE GOSPELS (review here), and the new one seems similarly credulous about matters of moral evolution (the moral conscience he refers to is the evolved human nature of hundreds of thousands of years; Jesus could not have changed human nature’s moral inclinations in a single generation, and what about the rest of the world?).

(One trouble with experts on any subject is that they don’t always know very much about anything else.)

Continue reading →

Posted in conservatives, Religion | Comments Off on God-Botherers

Psychics and Literacy

Posted on Friday 3 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • If psychics are real, why hasn’t even one shown up to find Nancy Guthrie?
  • Pete Hegseth keeps blocking military promotions for blacks and females;
  • And he’s holding a Protestants-only Good Friday service;
  • Big Think on the persistence of intuitive superstitious thought — an example of Harari (see previous post);
  • Trump is “well-read”?
  • How Trump contorts the English language to obfuscate;
  • Learning is perishable: the comeback of smoking.
– – –

It seems that Pete Hegseth is firing generals who challenge or raise doubts about his plans for a ground invasion of Iran. It seems that Trump ignored the advice of 40 years that any attack on Iran would lead to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. I’ve gathered these from comments on Facebook; neither of these has gelled into a linkable item from any trusted media source. Though the latter might be a reasonable conclusion, based on the evidence of years.

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For all you people who harbor a secret suspicion that there must be something to these psychics. After all, they’ve been around for so long.

Skeptical Inquirer, Benjamin Radford, 31 Mar 2026: Nancy Guthrie Disappearance Highlights Psychic Failure

As March 2026 comes to a close it has been two months since the abduction of Nancy Guthrie, the octogenarian mother of Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie, from her home in Tucson, Arizona. Guthrie was last seen on January 31, and reported missing the next day.

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Yuval Noah Harari: NEXUS

Posted on Friday 3 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
(Random House, Sept. 2024, xxxii + 492pp, including 88pp of acknowledgements, notes, and index; but no bibliography)

This is Harari’s fourth big book, following SAPIENS, HOMO DEUS, and 21 LESSONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY. The subject of this one may seem a little more abstruse than the others, and maybe it is, but in fact the book is chock full of interesting stuff and typical askance Harari insights.

As usual, I’ll boil down key points and plant them here. Actually, I’ll two levels of key points. Then below those, I’ll data-dump the 12,000 notes I took on the book as I read it, with some pertinent quotes along the way.

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Key Points, 50,000 foot level:

  • Information is not just statements about reality; it includes stories and errors and fantasies. There are both naive (more information is better) and populist (information as power) views of information; neither is correct. Stories enable cultures to grow; documents enabled bureaucracies and the further expansion of cultures.
  • Errors are inevitable. Self-correcting mechanisms were created in support of what became science; religion lacks these, and has splintered into countless sects.
  • Computers and AI increase engagement of all sorts of information, and can create their own fantasies.
  • Information is used differently in democracies, which have self-correcting mechanisms [[ balance of powers, the vote ]], while totalitarian systems prefer to route all information through a central hub, making them more fragile and especially vulnerable to control by AIs.
  • If humans are so smart, why are we so self-destructive? Because our information networks privilege order over truth.

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American Priorities under MAGA

Posted on Thursday 2 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Reactions to Trump’s speech last night about Iran;
  • And how his cult defends him no matter what he does;
  • They imagine outlawing the Democrats;
  • The oxymoronic Trump library;
  • How Trump’s case against the 14th amendment did not go well before the Supremes;
  • And how American priorities under MAGA are about war, not care for citizens.
– – –

Trump gave a rare prime-time speech last night, in part to defend his war against Iran. I didn’t watch it, but Tom Nichols and others did.

The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 1 Apr 2026: Maybe Trump Should Not Have Given This Speech, subtitled “His address raised more questions than it answered about the war in Iran.”

His address did not come across as a wartime speech but instead was a disjointed series of complaints, brags, and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired. After his 19 minutes on the air—brisk by Trump’s standards—Americans could be forgiven for being even more concerned now than they were only a few days ago.

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The New Space Race

Posted on Wednesday 1 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Today’s launch of Artemis II, and my background supporting the space program;
  • A revelation about Bill Warren’s KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES!
  • Noting the popularity of Project Hail Mary;
  • Noting a GoodReads list;
  • Radiohead’s The Gloaming.
– – –

So America’s latest moon rocket launched this afternoon, a relief to those of us who witnessed a space shuttle explode on launch some 40 years ago, and have watched every launch since then with trepidation.

I’ve always followed America’s space program approvingly; I grew up with it, in the 1960s and 1970s, and then went to work in 1982 supporting it. It was a thrill, part of witnessing a kind of manifest destiny of humanity to expand into space, maybe making all those exploratory dreams science fiction (even of Star Trek) possible. Of course we all knew at the time it was in part a political stunt, a ‘space race’ between the US and the USSR to demonstrate technological superiority, a battle in the so-called cold war. Once the US landed on the moon in 1969, Russia just sort of gave up and pretended not to care. Even as they kept trying, to the point of building a copy-cat space shuttle, the Buran, and trying to fly it once or twice. But they never went to the moon.

Now the race seems to be between the US and China. Given increasingly understood realities of space travel and the difficulties in establishing any kind of base on Moon or on Mars, it’s not so easy to be as idealistic these days as many of us were in the 1960s. Also, given the pervading incompetence of the current administration and its incomprehension of the obvious technical issues behind various announced plans (see this post and David Brin’s comments), it’s hard to be optimistic that the current NASA has an idea of a cohesive set of goals for this mission or any others. Still, I support such efforts — they’re better than spending the money bombing other nations — and I’ll continue to follow them.

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Here’s a book that I was about to throw out the proverbial window, as virtually useless, until I accidentally discovered its secret, just this last evening.

The book is Bill Warren’s KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES!, subtitled “American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties.” Warren was a well-known ‘fan’ — he as an entry in SFE — back in 2003 when I bought this book from the publisher McFarland’s table at Worldcon that year — that would be in Toronto. A big fat book of 837 pages. I carried it and others home on the plane back to LA.

Over the years I’ve gone through periods of watching or rewatching old science fiction movies from the 1950s, which I’ve semi-affectionately, semi-derisively, called “skiffy flix” on this blog. And when I’ve done so, I consult the Bill Warren book, often in frustration. Its first sin is that there is NO TABLE OF CONTENTS that lists the movies covered. The table of contents at the front indicates only years, from 1950 to 1957. Recently, just in the past couple weeks, watching Invaders from Mars or It Came from Outer Space, I checked this book, turning to the index at the back, and found many references to these movies, but only to incidental references to them in the text. No primary entries. I checked the preface to the volume and read how Warren wasn’t trying to be encyclopedic, but was a book about his personal experience of watching these old movies. OK, but, really, no entry for Invaders from Mars??

But I discovered the secret! It’s there in plain site, but not evident enough. The book is *two* volumes bound together. Volume 1 and Volume II. The index at the back of the book covers only the second volume, which begins after the first volume ends on page 467. (Where the bookmark is in the photo.) The index for volume 1 ends at page 467, which was in no way apparent from the beginning of the book. Well, yes it was, on the Table of Contents, if you look carefully enough at the page numbers there and in the whole book. The index to volume one does have bolded page numbers for the main entries for films like Invaders from Mars and so on, which previously I had been unable to find.

I blame the publisher. Yes, there are tiny-print acknowledgements on the opening page and on the copyright page about this being two volumes, but I’ve looked at this book for 20 years and had not noticed that is was two books with two separate indexes.

Anyway. Warren’s commentaries are extensive and deep, once I’ve now been able to find them.

I don’t necessarily agree with him; I have a 50-years-on perspective of whether science fiction movies make sense or not. But his comments are deep reveals into how those movies were made, and how they did or did not make sense at the time.

(My next movie post will be about The Thing.)

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This new movie is very popular. Even some of my relatively hard-to-please FB SF associates like it. Perhaps I will go see it. And yet, getting to a core issue here, the book itself, while also popular, has not had much impact among the SF professionals and critics who vote on awards.

NY Times, 19 Mar 2026: A ‘Hail Mary’ for Earth, Built on Solid Science, subtitled “Andy Weir discusses his science-fueled novel ‘Project Hail Mary,’ which has been adapted into a film that opens in theaters on Friday.

I mention this just to reiterate the distinction the popular and the critically acclaimed. You see this in the Oscars every year, of course.

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I also came across this list, on GoodReads (a reader review compilation site), that ranks 21st century SF novels by averages of reviews.

Best Science Fiction of the 21st Century

The list is an odd mix of popular favorites and critical favorites. Will follow up on this.

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The Gloaming.

 

Posted in Music, Politics, science fiction, Skiffy Flix, Space | Comments Off on The New Space Race

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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