(Houghton Mifflin, Feb. 1986, hardcover, 311pp)
This is the US first edition hardcover, which I bought when it came out (it’s the first printing too), though the book was published in Canada the year before, in 1985. It’s 40 years old! It’s more than half as old as NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR!
When I sat down in June to read or reread a number of apocalyptic novels, this was the one I had first in mind, though of course it’s more of a dystopia than an apocalypse. Continue reading
Here’s a piece that might seem cheeky, or offensive (to the easily offended), but is actually a reasonable concern, given how history works and how people create the stories they need.
Free Inquiry, Ronald A. Lindsay, 28 Aug 2025: The Resurrection of Jesus and the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election
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[Note: three of the images from JMG are not displaying properly. Click through to the articles to see the images.]
Were there any Good Germans? Are there now any Good Republicans?
We’ve been thinking for a while that there were, maybe a few, but as time passes and the Congress keeps rubber-stamping Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic demands/orders, maybe not. This is how politics works. It’s as much about keeping your job, as about supporting governing principles.
LGBTQNation, commentary by John Gallagher, 2 Sep 2025: It’s long past time to acknowledge there are no good Republican politicians
Subtitle: “Trump has set the stakes so high that politicians who stay in the party are complicit in his attack on democracy.”
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We drove from Oakland to LA (Santa Monica area) Friday, and returned home today, avoiding all the predicted holiday weekend traffic by leaving early each time, around 9am. We celebrated my birthday and my partner saw his new granddaughter for the first time. We stayed at the Luskin Conference Center Hotel on the UCLA campus (as we did at Christmas), and I had a chance to wander around the campus a bit more. This time, unlike last year, the Powell Library and UCLA bookstore were both open.
I remember both fondly. On my first visit to the campus, in August 1973 before I began my freshman year that Fall, I visited the bookstore and found books in the science fiction section I’d never seen before, not in the local paperback shops, or the Pickwick or Walden bookstores in the malls. They were Ballard’s THE VOICES OF TIME, Moorcock’s BEHOLD THE MAN, Disch’s CAMP CONCENTRATION, and Lafferty’s THE DEVIL IS DEAD. (I confess I never have gotten around to reading that last one.)
Another quick batch. Which to begin with?
Here’s a writer and radio host I’ve been aware of for a while but not followed closely. Addressing that question about what really motivates Republicans (and those who vote for them).
The Hartmann Report, Thom Hartmann, 28 Aug 2025: The Long Con: Why Every Republican Policy—From Guns to Healthcare to Taxes—Harms the Public & Enriches the Few
Distracted the past couple days by the disappearance of Linus. I mentioned this on Facebook last night. Maybe he’ll come back.
Click for much larger image. I posted this on Facebook, yesterday the 26th.
Our beloved Linus, who appeared exactly one year ago yesterday with his mother on our back patio, has disappeared. Mother and later kittens were given up to East Bay SPCA, and quickly adopted. Linus grew up outdoors, and while we have tried to make him happy as an indoor cat, we’ve indulged his pining for outdoors — he looks outside the dining room sliding glass doors, and yowls — to let him go outside. He rolls around on his back on the patio pavement, and he has always come back in 2 or 3 hours. But I let him out yesterday at 3pm, and he has not come back, in over 24 hours.
Yes, I’ve read articles about how outdoor cats can be gone for days or weeks, and eventually return. I hope so.
I look over to the window where he would reappear every 10 minutes. Well, 5.
My discussions the past two or three days about what really motivates conservatives, especially the MAGA folks, not being principles like the Constitution or even everyday law and order, made me recall a nonfiction book I read several years ago, Matthew Hutson’s THE 7 LAWS OF MAGICAL THINKING (review here). As I’ve noted before, many of these books about psychology and human nature overlap in topics even if they use different terminology. Thus the protocols of tribal thinking are analogous to the naive ways of perceiving the world (Bering) and to the intuitive ways of perceiving the world that Hutson calls “magical thinking.” Recalling his seven:
The conservatives mindset essentially incorporates these elements of “magical thinking,” in that these elements are prioritized over secular principles. Examples from today:
AP News, 25 Aug 2025: Trump moves to ban flag burning despite Supreme Court ruling that Constitution allows it
At some point you have to stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt, because of their presumed high-minded holiness, since in this country at least we’re supposed to be deferential to religious faith; and call them out for what they are — cultists, driven by ignorance, tribal loyalty, and a quest for power. Certainly not law and order. Or principles.
NY Times, 24 Aug 2025: Reframing Jan. 6: After the Pardons, the Purge, subtitled “In its campaign of ‘uprooting the foot soldiers, the Trump Justice Department has fired or demoted more than two dozen Jan. 6 prosecutors, even as those they sent to prison walk free.”
In the spirit of MAGA, let’s suggest a few more simplistic definitions to characterize the political/cultural divide.
We already have, from yesterday’s post:
Evil is that which would kill us, or disturb the capacity for the tribe’s survival.
So then, Sin is the committing of any act which might be construed as evil, even very indirectly.
(Like all morality, it’s relative to circumstances and viewpoint. There’s no fixed list of things that are good or evil, moral or not.)
Anything that doesn’t support or conform to the (simplistic) worldview of the conservative tribe is dismissed as ‘woke’ or ‘fake news.’ Or ‘evil.’
Just glance through the news and see how well this thumbnail definitions works. The matching to these examples is left as an exercise for the reader.
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The Oregonian, 22 Aug 2025: Donald Trump Jr. calls Portland, Seattle ‘craphole cities,’ hints at federal takeover of police forces (via)
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Two thematic follow-ups to yesterday’s post.
OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, 20 Aug 2025: Can people thrive in a secular society?, subtitled “Are secular values the cause of our malaise?”
Yesterday’s post extended a theme on this blog concerning a range or divergence in human nature that I’ve previously characterized (following Lakoff) as conservative vs. progressive. Red vs. blue, tradition vs. change, and so on. Even, emotion vs. logic. That’s the simplex take. The complex take is every single person is a mix of various positions along multiple dimensions of human nature, and it requires such mixes and blends for optimal survival, given that circumstances change. Iron everyone down to a single traditional way of thinking, as the current administration and MAGA are trying to do, and society will suffer in the long run. Attacking diversity is self-defeating, if only because other societies that value diversity will then prevail.
Yet there are many who think traditional values are essential and secular values are actively harmful. This piece at OnlySky responds to a recent piece by David Brooks on that idea.
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