More about Trump’s actions vs his aspirations. You’d think Trump were running to win a Nobel Prize not for peace, but for belligerence.
NY Times, David French, 7 Sept 2025: It Doesn’t Seem Wise to Let Trump Decide What War Is
(This echoes the topic yesterday about RFK Jr. finding a simple-minded explanation for autism.)
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As predicted, RFK Jr. has come up with a simple, simple-minded answer to the problem of autism.
CNN, 5 Sep 2025: Upcoming HHS report will link autism to common pain reliever, folate deficiency in pregnancy, Wall Street Journal reports
How clever of RFK to have found the solution after so many decades of actual autism researchers have failed to do so! (Has he checked whether this correlation exists in other countries? I doubt it.) That’s the conservative mindset for you: simple solutions to complex matters. And none of the actual medical experts are on board with this.
Subtitled: “The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life”
(Norton, hardcover, 2011, 252pp, including 47pp notes, additional reading, and index.)
(UK title The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life, also 2011)
I have a short shelf of eight or ten books that I’ve read over the past decade or more that I’ve never gotten around to writing up here, mostly because they’re very substantial books and I took *lots* of notes on them, so the chores of boiling them down to blog posts has been daunting. But these are some of the books that have most influenced my thinking, and so I’m making a new resolution to get these posted by the end of the year. Aside from the present book, they include two by Pinker, and others by Dawkins, Hitchens, Coyne, and Harris. (Then there are even older ones that I took notes on back in the ‘90s and 2000s, long before I began posting such notes on this blog. I’ll see what I can salvage from them too.)
This book by Bering I bought when it came out in early 2011. I think the author was unknown to me, and I may or may not have read reviews of the book. It followed books in the 2000s by the “new atheists,” including Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Dennett, that pointed out various things non-believers had noticed about religion that the religious apparently had not considered. Critics found the strident, and found reasons to dismiss them. (After all, they had *grown up* with their religions.) Bering, coming along a few years later, provided a new perspective, answering *why* people are subject to beliefs in souls and supernatural beings. Short answer: human nature, just as we had read about in Wilson’s ON HUMAN NATURE and later in Pinker’s HOW THE MIND WORKS and THE BLANK SLATE. And not just human nature, but human nature as evolved by natural selection to promote survival. That is, there’s survival value to believing things that are not true. Cool, huh?
Anyway, my approach to this book and the others will be to read through my notes and clean up their readability, without necessarily trying to condense them, and post them. But along the way I’ll extract some key points, and list those first, as a summary ahead of the full notes.
Again today the usual batch of items, a sort of “Goings On Around MAGA USA.” Of them, here’s one that digs deepest into fundamental principles.
Paul Krugman, 3 Sep 2025: Why Does the Right Reject Progress?, subtitled “The perverse push to make America miserable again”
He begins by discussing vaccines, and the resistance to them.
I just finished a post about Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel THE HANDMAID’S TALE, which is about a religious theocracy that responds to a dramatic change in human fertility. It’s about how human morality adjusts to changing circumstances. And how religions respond by reinforcing the most basic tribal morality: survival above all. That was then; this is now. Such thinking applied to our current environment goes haywire. Conservatives don’t think anything can be learned.
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NY Times, 3 Sep 2025: Florida Moves to End Vaccine Mandates for Schoolchildren, subtitled “The state would be the first to scrap requirements that children be vaccinated to attend school, among other rules.”
(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
