What It Means to Think That God Is On Your Side

Posted on Saturday 21 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Concerning Hegseth, Trump, and Rubio;
  • Also, how do religious sects decide when to reinterpret their scriptures?
  • Items about 100% approval, teleportation, church/state separation, and uncounted COVID deaths;
  • FBers compare reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death to Trump’s reaction to Robert Mueller’s death;
  • And David Brin notes a similar comparison between Cesar Chavez and the people the right defends.
– – –

Everyone thinks God is on their side. Don’t they realize this?

NY Times, 20 Mar 2026: Hegseth Invokes Divine Purpose to Justify Military Might, subtitled “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has imbued U.S. military actions with a Christian moral underpinning that suggests they are divinely sanctioned.”
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Ziya Tong; THE REALITY BUBBLE

Posted on Saturday 21 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths, and the Dangerous Illusions that Shape Our World
(Penguin Canada: Allen Lane, 2019, 366pp, including 15pp of acknowledgements and index.)

This is a pleasant enough book by a Canadian journalist. Her broad point is that there are many things about the world that most of us are unaware of, living as we do in a “reality bubble.” One way this is true is that many things are the way they are by convention, not because we live by some unalterable rules. Example: time zones. (This aligns with a key theme of science fiction: things might well be different in ways that wouldn’t occur to most people.) Another way this is true is that some things that we’re unaware of are just about the complexity of life. No one can, or necessarily needs to, understand all the details of where our food comes from. And a third way is more fundamental, that reality really does constrain what we perceive and what we don’t. Example of the electromagnetic spectrum and how humans perceive only a small fraction of it. There are lots of examples along all three of these themes… But they strike me as separate themes, analogous only in the broadest sense. So this is sort of a three-books-in-one. This is understandable, perhaps, in that the author is a journalist, for TV and radio, and presumably has been open to topics of all sorts that would be suitable science-oriented programming. (Also, very broadly, it aligns with similar works by Gladwell, Freakonomics, etc etc. But not in a hard science way.)
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Misconceptions about Science and Predictions

Posted on Friday 20 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Jeffrey Epstein, obsessed with eugenics, was wrong;
  • How Paul Ehrlich was not a villain, even though his predictions failed;
  • John Pavlovitz wonders why anyone still supports Trump; I have another idea;
  • Tom Nichols on no Plan B; the disappearing Charlie Kirk banner;
  • Rufus Wainwright’s “Go Or Go Ahead”.
– – –

Evolution is the scientific topic about which even people who don’t reject it utterly still have more misconceptions about than any other branch of science. (Going back to Lamarckism, or the inheritance of acquired characteristics, that people like Lysenko and Stalin so much wanted to be true it became Soviet doctrine for decades.) I think it must reflect the teleological mode of most human thinking.

Slate, Susanne Paola Antonetta, 19 Mar 2026: Jeffrey Epstein, Eugenics Supremacist, subtitled “The files reveal his obsession with genetics. But genes don’t work the way he thought.”
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Donald Hoffman: THE CASE AGAINST REALITY

Posted on Friday 20 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitle: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes
(Norton, 2019, 250pp, plus color plates, including 45pp acknowledgements, notes, and index.)

This is the first of three books I read in January, all with ostensibly similar themes, but actually quite different from one another in their perspectives and ultimate intents.

This one, for example, isn’t about evolution per se, as the subtitle suggests; it’s about how humans don’t perceive “true” reality, but only perceive reality in the sense of what is necessary for humans to survive and reproduce. OK, fine. I’ve made the same general point before. But he goes farther: he suggests that when we’re not looking at the moon, for example, the moon doesn’t exist. This goes back to certain philosophers, and sounds fatuous, and can only be true in the sense that humanity’s *conception* of what the moon is – filtered through our senses and our priorities for survival – ceases to exist when we’re not looking at it. It can’t mean that the physical object, the moon, that triggered our perceptions in the first place, ceases to exist. Yet he doesn’t want to spell this out; he leaves us with the impression that the actual moon ceases to exist when we’re not looking at it. Which I think is fatuous, and solipsistic.

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Latter Day Skiffy Flix: STTNG: Encounter at Farpoint

Posted on Thursday 19 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

A couple evenings ago I rewatched the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, called “Encounter at Farpoint,” for the first time since I watched it as the series premiere back in 1987.

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Increasing Willful Ignorance and Intolerance

Posted on Thursday 19 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How energy independence, which even Fox News once thought could avoid the quandary we now face in the Strait or Hormuz, is now regarded as a scam by the likes of JD Vance;
  • How Trump and MAGA are all for religious freedom… for Christians, but definitely not for Muslims;
  • While MAGA Christians want to repeal the 19th amendment and be much more intolerant toward ‘Satanic’ nonbelievers;
  • The White House Cage Match, and a Newsmax Host’s eagerness to punch people: are conservatives prone to settling disputes with violence? (Also yesterday’s item about guns);
  • The kids are all right, say new studies, better than previous generations, and the various psychological reasons many people believe otherwise.
– – –

We have only conservatives to blame.

Media Matters, Allison Fisher, 18 Mar 2026: Fox personalities used to claim that energy independence would shield the US from potential retaliatory action by Iran — such as closing the Strait of Hormuz, subtitled “As gas prices rise, the network has scarcely invoked the concept of ‘energy independence,’ mentioning it a fraction as often as it did during the start of the Russia-Ukraine war”

Hmm, why would that be? Perhaps because the current administration thinks energy independence is a scam.
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The War, the Economy, and Religion

Posted on Wednesday 18 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Yet more commentators on the stupidity of this war with Iran, from Adam Lee, Suzanne Maloney, and Susan B. Glasser;
  • How the economies under Biden and Trump aren’t that much different;
  • Brief items about why conservatives need guns, Christian Nationalists who admit they mean to impose their morality on everyone, how the transgender plague is driven by demons, hurricanes, tricks, and Christian theology;
  • And two examples of the first lesson of comparative religion, for conservatives.
– – –

Adam Lee on the war.

OnlySky, Adam Lee, 18 Mar 2026: The colossal stupidity of war with Iran, subtitled “An unwinnable war without a goal and with consequences for the world.”

If anyone still doubted that Donald Trump will be remembered as the worst president of all time, he’s doing his best to eliminate that doubt.

Last month, America and Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior Iranian military officials. (We also accidentally bombed a school, killing over a hundred children.)

This is all the more hypocritical because isolationism used to be one of Trump’s defining policy stances. As a candidate, he railed against politicians whom he said would get us bogged down in wars:

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Is Trump Insane, Delusional, or Merely an Inveterate Liar?

Posted on Tuesday 17 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump claims a former president supports his actions in Iran; the four living former presidents all deny it;
  • Many on the extreme right sound insane to the rest of us, with examples;
  • Trump is pressuring the media to support his war, as authoritarians do;
  • Yet another example of how Trump is only transactional, without principles;
  • John Pavlovitz on how MAGA Americans will feign ignorance of the Trump administration, jut as Germans did about the NAZIs.
  • A report on the health of Democracies around the world is unsurprising concerning the US;
  • Anne Applebaum on how everyone but Trump understands what he’s done;
  • Philip Glass’s Monsters of Grace.
– – –

Today’s story about crazy Trump.

NY Times, 16 Mar 2026: Trump Claims an Ex-President Confided His Regrets on Iran. But Who?, subtitled “The New York Times reached out to people close to President Trump’s predecessors. They disputed Mr. Trump’s claims.”

President Trump claimed on Monday that a former president told him privately that “I wish I did what you did” in attacking Iran and killing its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Mr. Trump would not identify which of the four living predecessors he was referring to.

“He said, ‘I wish I did what you did,’” Mr. Trump said. “I don’t want to get into ‘who,’ I don’t want to get him into trouble.”

All of the four living ex-presidents have denied any such conversation. Is Trump delusional? Insane? Lying by rote as he always does?

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Clueless, Stupid, and Cruel

Posted on Monday 16 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The status of Trump’s war in Iran;
  • Paul Krugman explains that America is not respected around the world;
  • And how George Orwell foresaw this;
  • Robert Reich on Trump’s stupidest cabinet member: Pete Hegseth;
  • How Hegseth doesn’t understand “no quarter” any more than he understands “rules of engagement”;
  • Brief items about Peter Thiel’s antichrist fixation; grandparents who remember what vaccines were for; the pointless voter fraud bill; how conservative Christians aren’t helping their cause; how the Trump administration is now forced to hire migrant workers (to replace those who were deported); and about the DOGE dolts who mindlessly slashed DEI programs and didn’t actually save any money.
– – –

Recently in the Iran war: Trump has declared the mission complete, or nearly complete, or maybe complete in a few more weeks, but even if it’s complete now, he’s thinking of bombing them some more just for fun. Also, he’s asking all the American “allies” he has insulted with tariffs this past year for help clearing the Strait of Hormuz, and they have declined or not responded, while dolts like Newt Gingrich suggest using nuclear bombs to clear a new pathway that avoids the Strait. These people are clueless.

Thus.

Paul Krugman, 16 Mar 2026: No, America is Not Respected, subtitled “Thanks to Trump, we’re held in contempt even by our closest allies”

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Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan: SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS

Posted on Monday 16 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: A Search for Who We Are
(Random House, Oct 1992, xvi + 505pp, including 85pp of notes, permissions acknowledgements, and index.)


This is perhaps Carl Sagan’s most substantial book, on the grounds that it’s through-written as a single composition; it’s not a compilation or fix-up of previously written magazine pieces, as THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD was, or an edited series of lectures, as THE VARIETIES OF SCIENTIFIC EXPERIENCE WAS, or aligned by chapter to episodes of a TV show, like COSMOS was, or a book aligned to an earlier book, like THE PALE BLUE DOT was.

And on the grounds that it takes a wide perspective, a sort of 10,000 foot view of a period of history not examined by most books about evolution, or the cosmos, or human history. It’s about the history of life up until humanity’s ancestors came on the stage, and so it outlines how and why life on Earth came to be, and how things like competition and violence necessarily came to characterize life on Earth.

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