Eve of Destruction?

Posted on Sunday 5 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump’s profane threats to Iran;
  • US politicians respond;
  • Seeing resurrection everywhere, in cycles of life and death;
  • Trump killed easy tax filing software to appease big business;
  • Review of a book about how capitalism conquered the world and may destroy it;
  • Brief items about pollution, budget cuts to science, how Trump’s story changes every day, disputes between the right and the Pope, tht teleportation guy, Trump and Sunday School, how data dispute wishful thinking about a Christian religious revival;
  • Radiohead’s “Reckoner.”

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.”

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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.)

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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.

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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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Education Conservative Style: Robots

Posted on Monday 30 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Conservative ideas of education: replace teachers with robots;
  • Takes on Stephen Miller, white supremacists, Trump voters, college Republicans, taking away the car keys, and Pete Hegseth by Tom Nichols and Paul Krugman;
  • Radiohead: “I Might Be Wrong”
– – –

This is a pretty easy one.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, today: Why MAGA fears human teachers, subtitled “Melania Trump’s robot stunt opens a new front in the GOP’s war on education”

Describing Melania Trump’s appearance with a humanoid robot, as in the photo above.
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Skiffy Flix: Red Planet Mars

Posted on Sunday 29 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Now we come to one of the strangest SF movies of the early 1950s, and ultimately the most risible.

This is a 1952 movie about an American astronomer — played by Peter Graves, later of Mission: Impossible and Airplane fame — who sees telescopic photos of Mars and concludes that an intelligent civilization lives there. So he manages to send a signal (via Morse Code) and gets replies that indicate an advanced civilization there that has developed all sort of high technology dwarfing anything on Earth. This news crashes the world economy. Meanwhile, a Russian agent living in the Andes, of all places, intercepts his signals and… maybe is faking the Martian replies. But the movie wants to have it another way, to salve religious sensibilities.

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Cognitive Health and Reading

Posted on Sunday 29 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Cultural norms changed about exercise, and maybe they can change to address the harms of social media — by reading more;
  • How the faithful grasp at straws to find societal reassurance;
  • More about JD Vance and demons;
  • How the government is purging information about gender identity;
  • Rufus Wainwright’s “Greek Song”.
– – –

Here’s another item that’s about, in part, reading.

NY Times, guest essay by Cal Newport, 27 Mar 2026: There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate [gift link]

The essay begins with a reminder that cultural norms change.

Today we take for granted that diet and exercise are vitally important for our health and well-being. But we didn’t always think this way. Much of this awareness emerged in a remarkably short time during the middle of the last century.

In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack after playing golf in Denver. This event shocked the nation. The president was just 64 years old and projected American strength and vitality. The surgeon general at the time said that hearing the news about the heart attack was like learning about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

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