Mark R. Kelly
» Founder in 1997 and site-runner for 20 years of Locus Online (Hugo Award winner in 2002). Founder in 2012 and still site-runner of sfadb.com (Science Fiction Awards Database). Retired in 2012 after 30 years as a software engineer for a certain rocket engine factory.
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» Previous Views from Medina Road (2010-2013)
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Recent Posts
- Party of Hypocrites
- A New Cycle of Doom: Trump’s Second Inauguration
- For Certain Values of Great
- Immigration, Economic Growth, and the Limits of the Planet
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- Cynics, Conspiracies, and the Oligarchy
- Jonathan Haidt, THE ANXIOUS GENERATION
- Competence Is Beside the Point
- MAGA Delusions About Health
- Zack Beauchamp, THE REACTIONARY SPIRIT
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Meta
Category Archives: Narrative
Politics as Fantasy, as Competing Stories
Three topics for today. The Hunter Biden verdict this morning, and how conservatives explain it to fit their conspiracy theories; Religious dimwittery about installing the Ten Commandments into schools; and Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito’s presumptuous allegiance to Christian godliness … Continue reading
Visiting the Profound
Brian Greene on understanding reality as a collection of nested stories; Recalling analogous thoughts by Sean Carroll and others; Big Think’s Ethan Siegel on the success of modern fundamental science. Perhaps today we can step back from the paranoid, delusional … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Cosmology, Narrative, Physics, Science
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Third Birthday
Third ‘birthday’; Why American Christians support Israel; More polarities and correlations for my chart; Examples, just from recent days, about Republican ambitions to turn back history; More examples of Christian indoctrination. This week is the third anniversary of my heart … Continue reading
Posted in conservatives, Narrative, Personal history, Religion
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Floating
After three days summarizing recently read nonfiction books, today let’s capture recent items from the news. A conservative blames the unpopularity of an ice cream flavor on Biden; Conservatives are eager to impose Christian indoctrination in Florida and Texas; Paul … Continue reading
Jonathan Gottschall, THE STORY PARADOX
Here’s a nonfiction book from 2021 that I read just a couple weeks ago. It’s similar in heft to the two books just discussed, in terms of length and conceptual depth, perhaps somewhere in the middle below Wilson and above … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Narrative, Psychology, Religion
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Living By Stories, Not Reality, Part 2
A New Yorker review of a new book about human origins; Robert Reich on how Americans don’t understand the reality of Trump and Biden; Short items about the Pope, and fundamentalists beliefs in the evil nature of human beings; how … Continue reading
Posted in History, Narrative, Psychology, Religion
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Most Humans Live by Stories, Not Reality
Books by Gottschall and Rosenberg, and how history is just a bunch of stories; A couple notes from the fringe; Beck’s “We Live Again”. I’ve mentioned more than once the truism that “history is written by the winners.” I just … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Music, Narrative
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Rules for Storytelling
Vatican updates rules for identifying miracles; Some conservative Christians, dealing with gender wars and their own kids identifying as gay, are bowing to reality. If storytelling, more than we realize, drives the human experience — if people understand only through … Continue reading
Posted in Narrative, Psychology, Religion
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Conspiracy Theories: Solar Eclipse Edition
Salon on how solar eclipses are a breeding ground for conspiracy theories; Rolling Stone on how the far right is subject to conspiracy theories; Free Inquiry on why solar eclipses are nowhere close to being evidence of a creator. While … Continue reading
Necessary Stories, and Most of the Others
About this morning’s Baltimore bridge collapse, and the right-wing conspiracy-theory accusations about it; Paul Krugman on how Republicans want to bring down Obamacare to support their notion that the government can never do good things; And a Doonesbury cartoon about … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Economics, Lunacy, Narrative
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