What Education Is For; the End of Rational Discourse

Posted on Sunday 3 May 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The obvious reason conservatives are under-represented in universities;
  • Adam Kirsch on Jürgen Habermas and the weightlessness of online existence;
  • Conservatives’ double standard on speech about Trump and speech about everyone else;
  • Short items on the popularity of “true-crime,” how Trump’s arch is another item on the tyrant’s checklist, how American is an empire in decline, someone in the administration who thinks you need to show ID at restaurants, and how the administration’s solution to problems is to fire people.
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We keep hearing complaints from conservatives about how they are under-represented in universities. The reason why is obvious.

NYT, Letters, 2 May 2026: What Is Higher Education For?, subtitled “Readers respond to Bret Stephens’s column about the recent Yale report on reforming academia.”

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Michael Shermer: TRUTH

Posted on Sunday 3 May 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters”
(John Hopkins University Press, Jan. 2026, 370pp, including 50pp of acknowledgments, notes, and index)

The title of this latest book by Michael Shermer, following CONSPIRACY (2022) (reviewed here), perhaps begs a question. Readers of Shermer will presume he’s talking about ‘truth’ as objective knowledge, what is verifiably true, and so on. And not what a religious believer, for example, would claim as ‘truth.’ But in fact Shermer discusses various kinds of truth, not just objective truth — but then shows how subjective truths, religious or personal or whatever, are not objective truths.

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Anthropology as another perspective on the world

Posted on Saturday 2 May 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How anthropology informs an understanding of the world;
  • Short items on Trump’s latest science purge, defenses of white supremacy, Trump’s lie about the some YMCA, and Trump’s sons getting rich off government contracts
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Well, to the degree that any course of study expands your understanding of the world and the universe, and gets you out of your limited experience, and keep you from ossifying into the presumption that what you know is the only thing worth knowing, then anthropology is as good as any. But of course, that’s the opposite of conservatives’ preferred insularity.

Washington Post, opinion by Thurka Sangaramoorthy (anthropology chair at American University), 27 Apr 2026: This degree changed my life. And it’s essential to a changing America., subtitled “Anthropology taught me how to translate human experience into knowledge institutions can act on.”
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Is Islam the Best Alternative to Modernity?

Posted on Friday 1 May 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • What Trump’s latest attempted assassin reveals about modern American life;
  • How right-wing influencers are now praising Islam, as an alternative to liberal modernity;
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Trying to get a handle on the latest would-be presidential assassin.

Slate, Luke Winkie, today: Donald Trump’s Attempted Assassin Had Shocking Motives—Especially What They Weren’t, subtitled “A decade of MAGA has really done a number on us.”
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The Law vs. Tribal Priorities

Posted on Thursday 30 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The Supremes eviscerate the Voting Rights Act, and the partisan flexibility of the law;
  • King Charles visits while Trump claims America is not an idea but an inherited Anglo-Saxon culture;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on the same point;
  • Brief items about Trump’s ballroom obsession, someone who thinks the death penalty is a blessing, the administration penalizing disabled people who live with their families, someone who thinks LGBTQ protections are anti-Christian, a long list of thinks Trump is and Jimmy Kimmel is not, and how MAGA are repulsed by people who are different.
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What strikes me about the law, i.e. the judicial system, is how easily laws and principles and even past supreme court decisions, which presumably are established precedents, can be bent or even overturned toward the ideological preferences of the politicians and the justices and judges currently in power. (The law, while presuming to cite established precedents as if they were scientific conclusions, is actually nothing like science or mathematics.)

More going back in time, and undoing progress made in previous generations.

Slate, Richard L. Hasen, yesterday: The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Just Issued the Worst Ruling in a Century, subtitled “This evisceration of the Voting Rights Act requires us to take SCOTUS reform more seriously.”

Because the decision is transparently in support of the current administration’s naked support for white supremacy. This is why the decision is so cleanly split between the ‘conservative’ justices and the ‘liberal’ ones.
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Dead Scientists, Fine-Tuning, and the Vacuum of Space

Posted on Wednesday 29 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • PolitiFact on the mystery of the missing scientists;
  • AMV on the fine-tuning argument and the limitations of academic credentials;
  • Idiotic arguments from Facebook folks who think the Artemis mission was faked.
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A couple follow-up items today.

This item at PolitiFact (the fact-checking website founded by the author of this book that I reviewed) delves into the missing scientists story, which most commentators have already dismissed. But let’s see what PF has to say.

(The photo is of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M.)

PolitiFact, Loreben Tuquero, 28 Apr 2026: Fact-checking claims about missing, dead scientists: Were they researching UFOs, nuclear weapons?

I’ll skip the summary of coverage so far, and go to the major points of the article.
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Twilight of the Gods?

Posted on Tuesday 28 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Pondering how to live in a era without religious assumptions;
  • A related theme in Arthur C. Clarke’s The Songs of Distant Earth;
  • Timothy Snyder on superpower suicide; distrust of the current administration; confused thoughts about racism from the right;
  • And Philip Glass’ opera Kepler.
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I understand, mostly from secondary sources, that folks in small towns across America typically greet newcomers by asking, which church do you belong to? That being more important and fundamental than, say, what job you have (“what do you do?”) or even, where do you come from. But is this still true? I don’t know. I do know it’s certainly not true in big cities. Except perhaps at certain political rallies. Well, probably not even there. Everyone at such rallies assumes they’re all the same side.

OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, today: Living in a future ‘After God’, subtitled “We live in an era without religious assumptions, but do we know how to live without them?”

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Will Humanity’s Cognitive Limitations Lead to the End of Human Civilization?

Posted on Monday 27 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Belief in unfounded health care claims about solar energy; how so many people believe unproven claims about raw milk and vaccines;
  • How the Trump administration is ending the EPA and paying to cancel wind farms;
  • Chris Barkley on Trump’s 7-step process to avoid answering difficult questions;
  • And another reflection on The Last of the Mohicans and its score.
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Has humanity reached a saturation point? Has society, and technology, become so complex that the average person cannot understand it and so resorts to simplistic, false, explanations for things?

    • Salon, Anna Clark, today: Unfounded health claims are powering a solar backlash
    • Subtitle: Solar restrictions popping up across the US “often rooted in misinformation or unfounded fears”
    • Comment: Fear of progress, i.e. change. “To some, in Michigan and beyond, this growth feels dangerous. They pressure public officials to stop, stall or otherwise complicate new solar projects with an array of arguments that now go beyond just land use to include public health.”

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Is Reality a Hoax or a Conspiracy? No.

Posted on Sunday 26 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Many items about the apparent assassination attempt last night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and how many people on social media detected signs of a staged attack;
  • Why posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms doesn’t work, as conservatives think it should;
  • Jerry Coyne explores evidence about whether reality has a liberal bias, and my take on that;
  • Listening again to Philip Glass & Robert Wilson’s Monsters of Grace.
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Within an hour or so of my finishing yesterday’s post, which ended about how many people, even Trump supporters, think the 2024 assassination attempt was staged, another apparent assassination attempt occurred at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in of course Washington DC. And while mainstream news coverage is fairly uniform, Facebook (and elsewhere on the internet, apparently), has been full of speculations and even claims that it was staged.

First, links to some reasonably consistent coverage, remarkable because many of these news correspondents *were there*! All of these posted today or late last night.

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An Assortment of Current Events

Posted on Saturday 25 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Trying to catch up on numerous items from recent days, briefly.

MAGA and confederates • Firing the National Science Board • A Texas court defies the Supremes about posting the ten commandments • America’s moral code • The new Navy Secretary believes in witches, but he’s loyal to Trump! • Both Trump and the Pope are compromised • RFK and Trump triple-down on their phony percentage calculations • Democrats should bring back USAID • Michio Kaku thinks some mysterious deaths of scientists is a big deal, while a writer for the Atlantic thinks it’s a statistical illusion • The Indiana Lt Gov. thinks Democrats are led by demons • Ben Shapiro thinks posting the ten commandments in schools isn’t theocracy • Trump wants to rename Mt Kilimanjaro, for himself • DeSantis bans climate change efforts • A revealing photo of women’s tennis champions • More examples of deep superstition in the guise of religious belief • And how some of Trump’s base thinks his 2024 assassination attempt was staged.

*

  • Washington Post, today: Trump ousts National Science Board members
  • Subtitle: Members of the independent board that guides the National Science Foundation said they received a notice from the White House that their positions were being terminated.
  • No reason given. More tearing down, now of what has been a useful, nonpartisan agency since 1950. Who is Trump actually working for?

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