Thanksgiving

Posted on Friday 28 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Thanksgiving with an Asian family;
  • A Facebook graphic about hospitals and who gets the money;
  • Carl Sagan on Who Speaks for Earth?
  • Recalling quotes by E.O. Wilson and Robert A. Heinlein;
  • Don D’Ammassa on humanity’s death spiral;
  • NYT articles on Russia’s Nazi narrative about Ukraine, and how the UK public thinks immigration is up even as it’s down.
– – –

Another family get-together yesterday evening of course, after cooking and prepping until late afternoon. (Curious thing: the American style I grew up with would hold holiday dinners, on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, at mid-afternoon, 2pm or 3pm. The Chinese/Asian extended families of my partners sit down to dinner at 5pm.) And we bought a Christmas tree today.

This year I am thankful that Trump and MAGA have not *quite* destroyed everything that America has been aspiring to for two and half centuries. And I’m grateful that, after two and a half years of intermittent work, my essay for Gary Westfahl has finally been published.

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False Equivalences

Posted on Wednesday 26 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Frank Bruni on people who excuse Trump’s outrageous behavior for the relatively minor sins of the previous administration, unable to tell the difference in magnitude;
  • Briefly noted items about Mark Kelly and Benedict Arnold; NYT on Trump’s fatigue and Trump’s resultant outrage; Republicans getting rid of auto safety features; Trump wants money so he can get into heaven; Liberty Counsel’s boycott list and what it means; how Trump is what the founders were fighting against; and how new US rules subvert the idea of human rights.
– – –

This is about motivated thinking, whataboutism, projection, and insensitivity to scale (i.e. black-and-white-ism). About seeing the speck in your brother’s eye…

NY Times, opinion by Frank Bruni, 24 Nov 2025: The Outrageous False Equivalences That Prop Up President Trump (gift link)
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Principles vs. Loyalty

Posted on Tuesday 25 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • More about the ad that advised soldiers they don’t need to carry out illegal orders, with threats against Senator Mark Kelly;
  • The demise of DOGE, which accomplished nothing;
  • Tom Nichols suggests the Sen. Mark Kelly should be secretary of defense;
  • Or maybe, Robert Reich suggests, president;
  • Incompetence: Accidentally invading Mexico, reversing course about swastikas, Trump believing his poll numbers are his highest ever, and cutting pollution standards without considering long-term consequences;
  • Paul Krugman on the demise of DOGE, and how Democrats will have to repair the damage.
– – –

My current top-level thesis: while liberals/progressives are about principles, empathy, and reality, conservatives are about loyalty (at the expense of principles and competency), selfishness, and ideology. It’s easy to find examples every day that support these ideas.

Case in point:

The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait, 25 Nov 2025: Trump and Hegseth’s Hysterical Reaction to an Ad, subtitled “For the president and his minions, loyalty is more important than legality.”

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Be Careful What You Wish For

Posted on Monday 24 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • What a no-immigration economy looks like;
  • A profound psychological question: why is RFK Jr. so convinced he’s right?
  • A thought for the day about childhood religion;
  • Briefly noted items about an administration of liars; how MAGA is tearing apart following Charlie Kirk’s death; the Christian lies behind Alabama’s voucher program; more about the demise of DOGE; and about the incompetence of the Trump administration.
– – –

NY Times, guest essay by Wendy Edelberg, 23 Nov 2025: We’re Seeing What a No-Immigration Economy Looks Like [gift link]
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Getting the Joke

Posted on Sunday 23 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Family in town this weekend, a pre-Thanksgiving get-together to avoid busier plans next weekend. Michael and Honey and baby here; trips to Alameda and Foster City and Berkeley; I put 100 miles on my car in three days, driving back and forth across the bay. I am grateful for being part of an extended family, on my partner’s side.

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Mostly long-form pieces today. Saving fringe bits for tomorrow.

  • Peter Wehner on the intellectual and moral decline of the American right;
  • Joshua Rothman on whether MAGA has any ideas, and my two big problems with the book he discusses (about “Great Books” and the source of morality);
  • How Marjorie Taylor Greene didn’t get the “joke” — that all of DC’s “talk of ideas and principles was flimflam to conceal self-enrichment at the public’s expense”;
  • Contrasting Trump’s posts with what “treason” and “sedition” actually mean;
  • Why Trump got along so well with Mamdani;
  • Tom Nichols on Trump’s recent outbursts;
  • Short items about how “MAGA” is being replaced by “America First”; how Musk and DOGE have withdrawn and left only wreckage, and no documented savings in their wake; and how Trump eliminates bad news by deleting it.
  • And, listening again to Beck.
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The big picture: as I said last time, the political ideals of the Enlightenment, such as those in the US Constitution, may forever remain aspirational, always undermined by rank tribalism and greed.

*

The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, 22 Nov 2025: The Intellectual and Moral Decline of the American Right, subtitled “The conservative backlash against Nick Fuentes has yet to challenge the president who had him over for dinner.”

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The Retreat from the Enlightenment

Posted on Friday 21 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

The key theme of our age, at least in the US: the retreat from the aspirations of the Enlightenment, both political and scientific. Reverting to tribalism and intuitive superstitions.

Actually, these forces have probably never gone away. The difference now is they’re being driven by the current US administration.

(Edit next day: I changed “achievements” of the Enlightenment to “aspirations,” because there wasn’t any perfect past of such achievements.)

NY Times, Thomas L Friedman, 18 Nov 2025 (in today’s print paper): On Republican Neo-Nazism, Hamas and Israel: An Epidemic of Moral Cowardice (gift link)

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Now It’s Calls for Execution

Posted on Thursday 20 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Several Democrats advise the military that they don’t have to follow illegal orders; Trump orders their trials for sedition, punishable by death;
  • More about Trump and Piggy;
  • And more about Trump and the Crown Prince;
  • Items about the CDC reinstating an implication between vaccines and autism, despite RFK Jr.’s promise not to; weakening the Endangered Species Act; how the Coast Guard will no longer consider swastikas and nooses as hate symbols; and a MAGA rant blaming illegals for every imagined problem.
  • And an elegant bit of Zbigniew Preisner.
– – –

Yesterday it was Trump calling a female journalist “piggy.” Today it’s Trump calling for the execution of Democratic politicians who would follow the law.

Politico, 20 Nov 2025: Trump calls for Democratic lawmakers to face trial for ‘seditious behavior’, subtitled: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” he wrote on Truth Social. (via JMG)
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What Meaning Means, and if AI Gods Provide That

Posted on Wednesday 19 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • What the search for meaning actually means;
  • How AI apps fulfill religious needs;
  • Reasons why math scores are falling;
  • Short items about Nick Fuentes, people fired for criticizing Charlie Kirk, Trump and the Saudi crown prince, and RFK Jr.’s miasma theory.
  • Robert Reich on honor and shame.
– – –

Thought for the day. It’s been long established that primitive human nature involved searching for patterns in the environment, to detect causes and effects that could be relied on for survival. And this in fact led to the development of the human mind, but also the detection of a lot of false positives, i.e. apparent causes that did not actually exist. Thus superstitions. And, now is my thought, the idea that every effect, even human existence, must have a cause, is the origin of the persistent human pursuit of “meaning”. What is the “meaning” of life? Perhaps that notion is a just a projection of the propensity to search for causes of *everything,* and in this case, as in many others, simply doesn’t exist. Perhaps we just are.

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Greene and Pinker, and “Piggy”

Posted on Tuesday 18 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • A conversation between Brian Greene and Steven Pinker, two of the current greatest scientists/writers;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on how Trump “cares,” and his “piggy” comments;
  • Briefly noted items about how the GOP destroys, not builds; how the Trump administration uses bogus math; Christian nationalism and football games; and how conservatives discover new “rights” to take down Obergefell.
– – –

I have said before that in our modern age knowledge of the world is available to every person, in great detail, in books and in videos and on websites like Wikipedia, and how they comprise detailed understanding of the world far beyond anything captured in the ancient holy books. And there are podcasts, including those by many of the great nonfiction writers of our time. Here’s an example, which popped up on Fb today.

YouTube: What Happens When We All Know? | Brian Greene & Steven Pinker

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Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great

Posted on Tuesday 18 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “How Religion Poisons Everything”
(Twelve, May 2007, 307pp, including 24pp of acknowledgements, references, and index)

Here is the fourth, and last-published, of the four books by the so-called “new atheists” published in the mid-2000s. While Sam Harris was an academic, Daniel Dennett a philosopher, and Richard Dawkins an evolutionary biologist, Christopher Hitchens was a journalist and “public intellectual.” It’s worth glancing at the table of contents of his enormous essay collection Arguably to get an idea of his range of subjects. He had opinions about a great many things. He drank and smoked a lot and died at age 62. And he deliberately used lower-case “god” in the title of his book.

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