As Others See Us

Posted on Wednesday 24 June 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How World Cup tourists are impressed by the US;
  • And an earlier piece about tourists were impressed by San Francisco, in both cases despite right-wing apocalyptic propaganda;
  • Amanda Marcotte on why MAGA buys Trump’s reflecting pool hoax;
  • Hegseth reverses the vax mandate ban, and fires another top general;
  • MAGA falls for satire;
  • Todd Starnes doubles down on tribalism;
  • Alan Greenspan admitted he was wrong: takes by Roger Lowenstein and Robert Reich.
  • And John Williams: Schindler’s List.
– – –

People are, inevitably, most concerned about their personal lives, without needing to be aware of the outside world. To some extent this piece reveals the psychological bias that leads many people to think life is worse off today than it was in some imaginary glorious past. And it reveals how outside perspective are quite at odds with the apocalyptic take that Trump and MAGA have on America’s big cities, which borders on bigotry.

Washington Post, opinion by Jim Geraghty, yesterday: What’s America really like? Ask the World Cup tourists., subtitled “Foreign soccer fans marvel at features of U.S. life we take for granted.”

Sometimes it takes outsiders, seeing us with fresh eyes, to remind us of who we are and what we have.

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William MacAskill, WHAT WE OWE THE FUTURE

Posted on Tuesday 23 June 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

(Basic Books, August 2022, 333pp, including 83pp of acknowledgements, appendices, figure credits and data sources, notes, and index)

This book, which I read shortly after its publication in 2022, is by a young Oxford philosopher who is at the center of the Effective Altruism movement. The other book on that theme that I read about the same time is LONGPATH by Ari Wallach (review here) which IIRC mentions MacAskill only once, while this MacAskill book doesn’t refer to Wallach at all (while both refer to a core group of other writers, like Nick Bostrom ). Don’t know if that means anything.

I put off writing up this book because struck me as a bit overly earnest. Even tendentious. Almost trying too hard. Actually, I got that impression from the encyclopedic end notes, more from the text, which is straightforward. Set that aside for now.

At the same time I don’t disagree with any of the fundamental perspectives here. Thinking about the future, appreciating the extent of humanity’s past and potential future, looking at the big picture, is what science fiction is all about, and what most people never think about.

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Trump’s Self-Created Crises

Posted on Monday 22 June 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Robert Reich on four messes that Trump created;
  • Items about Hegseth undoing military progress; Tim Barton cites a quotation that doesn’t exist; the news spy chief fires intel experts; Trump’s preoccupation with the number 22; Nancy Mace thinks transgenic means transgender;
  • Revisiting Frank Ocean’s “Pyramids”.
– – –

More family obligations yesterday.

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It’s ongoing. It was avoidable.

Robert Reich, today: The Green Algae President: How He’s Handling Four Messes He Created, subtitled “The mess at the Reflecting Pool as a metaphor for his many other messes”

Referring to the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, Minnesota governor Tim Walz commented on X: “Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.” (Walz could have added: “blamed others for his failure, conjured up a conspiracy, then prosecuted them.”)

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Neil deGrasse Tyson, TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER

Posted on Sunday 21 June 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter
(Simon & Schuster/Simon Six, May 2026, 226pp, including 28pp of acknowledgements, notes, index, and image credits)

This latest by Tyson is irreverent and casual, even lightweight, in the way Tyson’s books often are, though the topics addressed are weighty. It’s analogous to a book I wrote up here three months ago called DO ALIENS SPEAK PHYSICS? by Whiteson and Warner, which also considered topics about aliens, and had several corresponding chapters. (Review here.)

It’s timely that this book came out a bit before the new Spielberg movie, which purports to reveal (yet again) the truth about aliens visiting the Earth. I wonder if Tyson will ever comment on it; I suspect he wouldn’t buy it for a moment.

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Disclosure Day, Initial Take

Posted on Saturday 20 June 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • First reaction to Disclosure Day, with a link to David Brin’s reaction; then noting the film’s religious themes, its appeal to empathy, and its allusions to past Spielberg films;
  • How the reflecting pool fiasco is emblematic of Trump’s strategy: hire loyalists, not experts, and when things go wrong, blame Democrats, and saboteurs;
  • Banning flu vaccines leads to more flu cases, who could have known?
  • Why not ban all books?
  • A mundane example of how capitalism works: when auto break-ins decline, auto glass repair businesses suffer.
– – –

No post here yesterday because we attended a late-afternoon showing of Disclosure Day that pre-empted my usual blog-post-writing interval.

Quick take. It’s a well-made movie, sometimes thrilling and sometimes touching, about a race to disclose or suppress information the US government has accumulated for decades about alien visitations, abductions, spaceship crashes, and whatnot. That is, it takes all the conspiratorial ‘evidence’ for alien visitations at face value and tries to rationalize why the government would be suppressing it. In fact, my understanding is that most of this ‘evidence’ has long been discredited. But Spielberg wants us to believe, as he clearly does.

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Memories of Green

Posted on Thursday 18 June 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump’s surrender;
  • Trump can’t sell his lies in Versailles;
  • Why people see scientists as oddballs;
  • Vangelis’s “Memories of Green.”
– – –

Some of us have memories of the before time. Before all this.

The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last, today: Trump Admits Surrender, subtitled “There were no alternatives.”

President Trump’s G7 remarks yesterday were striking because they represented the administrations first candid appraisal of the Iran war since bombing commenced. For months, every single member of the administration, from Trump on down, has insisted that everything was going great.

Followed by a list of how things were going great, and then a list of opposite things that yesterday “the president essentially admitted.”

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Reflecting Pool Fiasco

Posted on Wednesday 17 June 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How the reflecting pool fiasco is emblematic of Trump’s manner of government;
  • Facebook’s AMV about how the reflecting pool is a miniature Anthropocene;
  • Why Trump keeps talking about voter fraud: he has specific ideas about the kind of people who should rule and those who are mere subjects;
  • Noting a piece on what might happen if AI is fed religion.
– – –

This may seem a tempest in a teapot, a relatively incidental matter compared with wars in the Middle East and whatnot, but it’s making lots of news in the past couple days, and the incident seems to represent the broad manner in which Trump is leading the government. Trump emptied the reflecting pool, had the bottom painted blue (apparently in the naive assumption that the water would then look the same blue) by a no-bid contractor who had once resurfaced a pool at one of his properties. What could go wrong?

The Guardian, yesterday: Algae thwart Trump’s $14.2m attempt to turn reflecting pool ‘American flag blue’, subtitled “Green algae have proliferated amid warm weather after Lincoln Memorial pool renovation turning water green”

The New York Times, 15 Jun 2026: Trump Ordered ‘American Flag Blue’ for the Reflecting Pool. It’s Green Again., subtitled “Algal blooms have hit the site, between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, after a $14.2 million repair project.”

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America’s Continued Decline

Posted on Tuesday 16 June 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Michelle Goldberg on the garish spectacle at the White House;
  • Will Leitch about its absurdity;
  • Conservatives are trolls;
  • US science is also in decline;
  • Paul Krugman’s theory of the vulgar class;
  • And music: Hans Zimmer’s “Chevaliers De Sangreal”, a great piece of conceptual breakthrough music, from The Da Vince Code.
– – –

NY Times, opinion by Michelle Goldberg, yesterday: A Garish Spectacle of American Decline

Only the hackiest screenwriter imaginable would script America’s decline this way.

Think of it: On the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding, America’s increasingly senescent president turned the White House lawn into a tacky, bloody gladiatorial arena while capitulating to Iran. Mike Judge came close to imagining some elements of our debasement in his 2006 satire “Idiocracy,” which depicts a United States led by a professional wrestler whose middle name is Mountain Dew. But if “Idiocracy” captured something of the vibe of Donald Trump’s reign, it was both too early and too lighthearted to nail the sordid specifics, which on Sunday included the fighter Josh Hokit, standing in an octagonal cage wrapped in crypto ads, calling the former first lady Michelle Obama a man.

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Practicalities and Prejudices Trump Principles

Posted on Monday 15 June 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The voters who believe that Trump defends their values;
  • The DHS head is happy to throw out the Constitution in order to fight the minuscule number of voter fraud cases;
  • Trump’s UFC fight reveals his violent worldview;
  • The problematic latest ‘deal’ with Iran;
  • Trump’s list of “media offenders” includes David Pakman, whom I’ve been following, today with his reaction to yesterday’s White House event.
– – –

I have a hunch.

The Atlantic, Katy Osborn and Scott Warren, 13 Jun 2026: The Voters Who Believe That Trump Defends Their Values, subtitled “Why calls to ‘save democracy’ don’t work”

Our research involved conducting in-depth interviews with and observing the daily lives of dozens of people along with their friends, families, and neighbors to better understand how they think about American democracy right now. Our goal was not to persuade or judge, but to figure out why public trust in national institutions has plummeted to historic lows and what might be done to build it back up.

Anecdotes, of course. Aren’t these the kinds of stories you would expect in these states?
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The Barbarians Are Well Within the Gates

Posted on Sunday 14 June 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump’s cage match, planned for this evening; his attack on the weather service; comments from Bill Kristol and Robert Reich;
  • How MAGA-style Christianity isn’t about Christ at all, what with attacks against James Talarico for quoting Jesus;
  • Abbott’s nonsensical claim that Democrats support Sharia Law (does he even know what that is?); Trump’s obsessions and his cultural references.
– – –

Photo from NY Times, today: How Trump Transformed the White House Lawn Into a Fighting Arena

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Among many others:

Deadline, today: UFC Tells Attendees To “Plan Accordingly” As Severe Thunderstorm Watch Threatens To Disrupt Trump White House Cage Match

This has been in the air for days. Naturally, Trump attacked the weather service.
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