Gullicism and Literacy

Posted on Monday 9 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Adam Serwer on our “gullible, cynical” America, a condition he dubs “gullicism”;
  • And how this is an absence of “literacy” about how the world actually works;
  • Why everyone thinking “God is on our side” is a problem;
  • John Pavlovitz answers overseas friends worried about America: Yes, it’s worse than you think.
  • And my position living in a cosmopolitan city, and fortunately rarely experiencing what John Pavlovitz has observed.
– – –

As I’ve realized recently, ‘literacy’ isn’t just about being able to read and write, it’s about understanding how the world works, which understandings about it are true and which are just stories and are not true, and how the human mind works and is biased to believe certain things and reject others in the name of tribal survival and solidarity.

The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 9 Mar 2026: Gullible, Cynical America, subtitled “The trouble with believing anything and nothing at the same time”
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Leaving the US, Shalom, Worrying the Mind-Body Problem, the Latest Drake Equation analysis

Posted on Sunday 8 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • About Trump’s misguided “Christian” war, as more and more people are literally leaving the US;
  • Peter Wehner on a word for our trouble times: shalom;
  • Alan Lightman wonders, rhetorically, if our minds transcend the corporeal form (an issue long-since settled);
  • About Iranian scientists and their take on the Drake Equation: 5000 years.
– – –

Salon, Kirk Swearingen, 8 Mar 2026: Trump’s misguided “Christian” war is anything but, subtitled “Some commanders claim the Iran war is serving Christ. Haven’t they noticed the fake Christian in the White House?”

What struck me here is the reference to a news item I saw elsewhere, just a day or two ago. Third para.
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Morality, War, Science, Persecution

Posted on Saturday 7 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Robert Reich on the moral basis of civilization, and how Trump is destroying it;
  • And Reich on how Trump is paying for the war, and giving the rich a huge tax cut;
  • More about the undermining of America’s scientific expertise;
  • Hemant Mehta on the myth of evangelical persecution, at WaPo;
  • How Florida is erasing mentions of racism from a sociology textbook.
– – –

From a couple days ago.

Robert Reich, 5 Mar 2026: The Moral Basis of Civilization, subtitled “Trump is actively destroying it”

About Trump’s Iran war, of course. What is Reich’s moral basis of civilization?

As I have noted before, the moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful could survive.

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Everything Will Be Better in Two Weeks

Posted on Friday 6 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Ten rationales for Trump’s war on Iran;
  • While some insist it’s not a “war”;
  • Promoting the war with movie clips and video games;
  • Cuba is next, they’re now saying, as predicted;
  • Who is Hegseth to declare the US as a Christian nation?;
  • A creepy Oval Office photo of “laying hands”;
  • John Pavlovitz on how God did not ordain Trump, alleged Christians did;
  • How some conservatives influencers want to return to the days of McCarthysim;
  • The obvious point that renewable energy sources would avoid problems in the Strait of Hormuz;
  • And Trump’s obvious tell he has no idea what he’s doing: everything is two weeks away.
– – –

Back to our regularly scheduled programming. No one in Washington knows what they’re doing. And conservatives are regressive.

The Atlantic, Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl: Six Days of War, 10 Rationales, subtitled “The administration has laid out a buffet of reasons for Operation Epic Fury—take your pick.”

On the third day of the war in Iran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called Operation Epic Fury the “most-precise aerial operation in history.” A difficult claim to fact-check. More difficult still has been parsing statements from the White House and the Pentagon to figure out, with any exactitude, why we are at war in the first place. So far, the Trump administration has offered at least 10 separate rationales in just six days.

Imminent threat. To prevent their nukes. To halt the militias. Regime change. Election interference (they did it to us). World peace. For the grandkids. Preemptive hit. Fulfill God’s purpose (a useful go-to for anything). And, the Israelis made us do it.

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Heated Rivalry, Autism, and Conceptual Breakthrough

Posted on Thursday 5 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ve only alluded to this show before — note the photo at the top of my January 10th post — but perhaps I have some things to say about the TV series “Heated Rivalry.” On the occasion of this longish essay in today’s NYT. About the show, its portrayal of autism, and how sexual awakening is a type of conceptual breakthrough.

NY Times, critic’s notebook by Wesley Morris, 27 Feb 2026, I’m So Used to Gay Tragedies That I Almost Missed Romance, subtitled “After a lifetime of settling for shame, secrecy and death onscreen, I had my doubts about ‘Heated Rivalry.’ Then it seduced me, too.

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You Can Fool Some of the People All of the Time

Posted on Wednesday 4 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump can’t stop telling on himself;
  • Christian media sees the Iran war as signalling the second coming, or the End Times;
  • And some of them want mass deportation of American Muslims;
  • How ICE ‘loses’ property yet finds it when challenged;
  • The Interior Dept has plans to rewrite the history of black and LGBTQ rights;
  • How the Bible is too woke for some Christians.
– – –

Promise not to dwell on this war news. There are always wars, apparently, even in Trump’s administration in which he promised to end them. But here are a couple items.

Slate, Fred Kaplan, 4 Mar 2026: As He Tries to Rationalize His War in Iran, Trump Cannot Stop Telling On Himself, subtitled “His explanations for why he went to war keep getting worse. His plans for the future aren’t looking any better.”

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Fractured Reality

Posted on Tuesday 3 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How an air campaign alone has never resulted in regime change;
  • Robert Reich: Trump doesn’t have a clue;
  • John Pavlovitz: He’s not worth this;
  • Heather Cox Richardson: Trump is workshopping reasons for his war with journalists;
  • JD Vance says the war can’t be dumb, because Trump is smart;
  • Troops are being told Trump has been anointed by Jesus to launch this war;
  • A megachurch pastor in Texas claims this is all God’s plan;
  • How some on the right are fracturing away from MAGA;
  • Dinesh D’Souza is still around.
– – –

Different takes on Trump’s new war.

The Critics:

Trump’s plan (to subdue Iran by strikes from the air, without any ‘boots on the ground’) has no apparent precedent.

PolitiFact, Louis Jacobson, 2 Mar 2026: Chris Murphy, stated on March 1, 2026 in an interview with CBS News’ “Face the Nation”: “There is no history … that shows an air campaign alone will result in positive regime change. In fact, there’s not a single example of it in the entirety of American history.”

Rating: Mostly true.

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Johan Norberg, PROGRESS

Posted on Tuesday 3 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
(UK: Oneworld, Oct 2016, 246pp, including 28pp notes, acknowledgements, and index)

Rather as I did with Rutger Bregman a few days, here’s an author who has a new book out recently, but before reading the new one I decided to back up and read two earlier books of his on my shelves. The author is Johan Norberg, a writer and filmmaker originally from Sweden and now stationed in DC working for the Cato Institute (which I did not realize until just now, the Cato Institute being a libertarian think tank and thus making him slightly suspect). His newest book, from 2025, is called Peak Human: What We Can Learn From History’s Greatest Civilizations (which sounds like it might align with Jared Diamond’s COLLAPSE), a big 500 page book; before that was Open: The Story of Human Progress, from 2020, a big 400 page book; and before that, the one I just read this past week, is Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, from 2016, a much slenderer book of only some 200 pages. He’s written lots of other books, mostly published only in Swedish, since 1994. And I’ll mention that the three books of his that I have, though ordered from Amazon.com, are British publications; the books apparently aren’t available from US publishers.

PROGRESS aligns neatly with books by Hans Rosling (et al) and Steven Pinker, documenting in great detail the ways progress has been made along various dimensions, mostly just in the past couple hundred years, despite common beliefs that the world is getting worse all the time. Continue reading →

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Our New War, and Perceptions of Change

Posted on Monday 2 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • BBC on how Trump has no plan;
  • Mark Joseph Stern on how Trump’s war is an impeachable offense;
  • Evangelicals see the return of Jesus everywhere, and now in the attack on Iran;
  • Cory Doctorow on how norms change, all keyed off when you were born.
– – –

I’ll post just a couple items about Trump’s new Iran war. This echoes many other commentaries I’ve seen. Why now? For what reason? Didn’t the US just obliterate those facilities last year?

BBC, via Doug Van Belle on FB:

OK, here’s the info from the intel community backchannel chatter that Americans need to know. Most of this can be confirmed by reading the details buried deep below the headlines in news coverage.

1. The US has no plan. No strategic plan. No exit plan. No medium term plan. No contingency planning at all. And they don’t seem to understand that there is such a thing as the long term. In fact they have nothing beyond about 48 hours worth of targets.

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The Demise of Mass Market Paperbacks

Posted on Sunday 1 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Trends in publishing can take place over decades, so they won’t be noticed by most people unless they’ve been buying (or borrowing) books for decades. Here’s a trend I’ve noticed for a while, which is now being noticed by the major media.

NY Times, Elizabeth A. Harris, 6 Feb 2026: So Long to Cheap Books You Could Fit in Your Pocket, subtitled “The mass market paperback, light in the hand and on the wallet, once filled airport bookstores and supermarket media aisles. You may never buy a new one again.”

When the first book in the Bridgerton series was published in 2000, it was immediately recognizable as a romance novel. The cover was pink and purple, with a looping font, and like most romances at the time, it was printed as a mass market paperback. Short, squat and printed on flimsy paper with narrow margins, it was the kind of book you’d find on wire racks in grocery stores or airports and buy for a few bucks.

Those racks have all but disappeared.

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