“We think and dream and fuss and project entire worlds into existence”

Posted on Saturday 11 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • A new NYT newsletter called Gravitational Pull;
  • Remembering Roger Williams, an early American advocate of religious liberty;
  • And about early American philosophers Jonathan Williams and Benjamin Franklin;
  • And revisiting Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, after 30 years; it’s still beautiful.
– – –

So what is this?

NY Times, The Morning newsletter, Melissa Kirsch, today: Gravitational Pull, subtitled: “We think and dream and fuss and project entire worlds into existence. Meanwhile, the earth’s orbit continues and the sun goes on shining.”

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Human Limitations and Potential

Posted on Friday 10 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Rethinking categories and provisional conclusions;
  • XKCD on holes;
  • A new Atlantic column on The Wonder of Everyday Life;
  • A Star Talk video about the limits of human intelligence.
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Rethinking again the categories of posts I do here, while working on a new set of overview pages to supplement or replace my decade-old Provisional Conclusions. I tend to collect links about reality illiteracy (e.g. flat-earthers) and tribalistic morality (conservative yearning to retreat to a simpler past), but also about modernity and secularism, and about reality.

Let’s do a couple three on the last theme. But I only have a few minutes…

Here’s one that explores the idea of scale. A key component of ‘reality illiteracy’ is that humans evolved in an ancient environment where, over hundreds of thousands of years, human nature developed intuitions at local scales. We’re intuitive about distances of a few miles or down to an inch; we’re intuitive about time scales from moments to a generation. But the real world is vastly greater, in all dimensions, as humans have been able to deduce from the evidence of the physical world around us.

Here’s an example. We think of things as deep, or high, without really being aware of relative depth or height.

XKCD, from a couple days ago: Holes

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Religious Presumption and Denial of Reality

Posted on Thursday 9 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Dale Partridge wants the white race to again subdue and enslave the Africans;
  • Red Joseph thinks gays are impossible;
  • Recalling Howard Zinn, who told the history conservatives would deny;
  • Will conservative historians 50 years from now erase MAGA, as an embarrassing episode from the 2020s?
– – –

Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, yesterday: Dale Partridge Calls For The Return Of ‘European Christian Colonization Of African Nations’

For the last several weeks, far-right Christian nationalist pastor Dale Partridge has been preaching on the Curse of Ham, a controversial theological theory long used to justify slavery and racism.

Originating in Genesis 9, the theory posits that black people were perpetually cursed by God to serve and be ruled by white people because Ham, one of the sons of Noah, looked upon his father when he was passed out drunk and naked in his tent.

Partridge claimed that “the African peoples … and some of the people from India” are the modern-day descendants of Ham and that they have been assigned by God to be ruled over and dependent upon whites, Europeans, Asians, Jews, and Arabs, who are allegedly the descendants of Ham’s brothers, Shem and Japheth.

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The End of Reading?

Posted on Wednesday 8 July 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The decline of reading, and all that that means;
  • And how MAGA folk don’t understand why the rest of us aren’t pretending anymore. It’s about conscience.
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Things that generations take for granted can change and be gone.

The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch, today: The End of Reading Is Here, subtitled: Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history. [gift link]

The article begins by recalling the Library of Alexandria.
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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.
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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Some overviews then.

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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.
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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:
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