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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David Brin, THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY

Posted on Saturday 28 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
(Addison Wesley, April 1998, 378pp, including 42pp of notes, follow-up, acknowledgements, index, and about the author.)

Here is a book that has sat my shelves for over a quarter century, unread. At the same time, I see enough of Brin’s commentaries on Facebook, and in his weekly blog posts, to know where he’s coming from. So for this book, I’ve given a sort of ‘inspectional’ or ‘summary’ reading, not a close reading of every chapter. This means I’m trying to spot the subjects he discusses, and focus in only on those I find especially pertinent to my own interests. And there were a couple of those. The most interesting core of the book is Chapter 5, about human nature and the maturity thesis. “We must choose it because it’s our only hope.”

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Again, No Kings

Posted on Saturday 28 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Noting the rallies held today, bigger than those last time;
  • Pieces today about how MAGA is entering the ‘acceptance’ stage of death, and how there’s no way to redeem Trump’s dismal second presidency;
  • Who are the 100 million people Bovino and Bo French want to deport?
  • How the “great man” theory of history might actually apply to Trump, since ‘great men’ aren’t necessarily good, and how progress in the world doesn’t necessarily include moral progress;
  • Philip Glass’s and Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing.
– – –

No, I didn’t attend any of the No Kings rallies today, but that’s because I’ve never attended any kind of protest or rally (I’m just not that kind of person), and now I’m old enough that I wouldn’t be able to be on my feet comfortably, especially in the hot sun, for hours and hours. But I’m following the news. From Fb:

Two pieces today.
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