Fractured Reality

Posted on Tuesday 3 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How an air campaign alone has never resulted in regime change;
  • Robert Reich: Trump doesn’t have a clue;
  • John Pavlovitz: He’s not worth this;
  • Heather Cox Richardson: Trump is workshopping reasons for his war with journalists;
  • JD Vance says the war can’t be dumb, because Trump is smart;
  • Troops are being told Trump has been anointed by Jesus to launch this war;
  • A megachurch pastor in Texas claims this is all God’s plan;
  • How some on the right are fracturing away from MAGA;
  • Dinesh D’Souza is still around.
– – –

Different takes on Trump’s new war.

The Critics:

Trump’s plan (to subdue Iran by strikes from the air, without any ‘boots on the ground’) has no apparent precedent.

PolitiFact, Louis Jacobson, 2 Mar 2026: Chris Murphy, stated on March 1, 2026 in an interview with CBS News’ “Face the Nation”: “There is no history … that shows an air campaign alone will result in positive regime change. In fact, there’s not a single example of it in the entirety of American history.”

Rating: Mostly true.

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Johan Norberg, PROGRESS

Posted on Tuesday 3 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
(UK: Oneworld, Oct 2016, 246pp, including 28pp notes, acknowledgements, and index)

Rather as I did with Rutger Bregman a few days, here’s an author who has a new book out recently, but before reading the new one I decided to back up and read two earlier books of his on my shelves. The author is Johan Norberg, a writer and filmmaker originally from Sweden and now stationed in DC working for the Cato Institute (which I did not realize until just now, the Cato Institute being a libertarian think tank and thus making him slightly suspect). His newest book, from 2025, is called Peak Human: What We Can Learn From History’s Greatest Civilizations (which sounds like it might align with Jared Diamond’s COLLAPSE), a big 500 page book; before that was Open: The Story of Human Progress, from 2020, a big 400 page book; and before that, the one I just read this past week, is Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, from 2016, a much slenderer book of only some 200 pages. He’s written lots of other books, mostly published only in Swedish, since 1994. And I’ll mention that the three books of his that I have, though ordered from Amazon.com, are British publications; the books apparently aren’t available from US publishers.

PROGRESS aligns neatly with books by Hans Rosling (et al) and Steven Pinker, documenting in great detail the ways progress has been made along various dimensions, mostly just in the past couple hundred years, despite common beliefs that the world is getting worse all the time. Continue reading →

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Our New War, and Perceptions of Change

Posted on Monday 2 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • BBC on how Trump has no plan;
  • Mark Joseph Stern on how Trump’s war is an impeachable offense;
  • Evangelicals see the return of Jesus everywhere, and now in the attack on Iran;
  • Cory Doctorow on how norms change, all keyed off when you were born.
– – –

I’ll post just a couple items about Trump’s new Iran war. This echoes many other commentaries I’ve seen. Why now? For what reason? Didn’t the US just obliterate those facilities last year?

BBC, via Doug Van Belle on FB:

OK, here’s the info from the intel community backchannel chatter that Americans need to know. Most of this can be confirmed by reading the details buried deep below the headlines in news coverage.

1. The US has no plan. No strategic plan. No exit plan. No medium term plan. No contingency planning at all. And they don’t seem to understand that there is such a thing as the long term. In fact they have nothing beyond about 48 hours worth of targets.

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The Demise of Mass Market Paperbacks

Posted on Sunday 1 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Trends in publishing can take place over decades, so they won’t be noticed by most people unless they’ve been buying (or borrowing) books for decades. Here’s a trend I’ve noticed for a while, which is now being noticed by the major media.

NY Times, Elizabeth A. Harris, 6 Feb 2026: So Long to Cheap Books You Could Fit in Your Pocket, subtitled “The mass market paperback, light in the hand and on the wallet, once filled airport bookstores and supermarket media aisles. You may never buy a new one again.”

When the first book in the Bridgerton series was published in 2000, it was immediately recognizable as a romance novel. The cover was pink and purple, with a looping font, and like most romances at the time, it was printed as a mass market paperback. Short, squat and printed on flimsy paper with narrow margins, it was the kind of book you’d find on wire racks in grocery stores or airports and buy for a few bucks.

Those racks have all but disappeared.

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Peace President Trump’s New War

Posted on Saturday 28 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Zack Beauchamp on how Trump’s Iran war makes no sense;
  • Wondering how election interference would actually be done;
  • How Trump repeatedly predicted Obama would attack Iran;
  • Why some say the dropping birthrate is a good thing;
  • An example from Dr. Noc about how the obvious interpretation of a graph of cancer data is wrong.
– – –

So now Trump, the would-be-Nobel-Peace-Prize-winner, has started a war with Iran. All by himself, without congressional overview or approval. As someone on Facebook said, this isn’t how democracies start wars; it’s how dictators do.

I’m going to try not to get too absorbed by this, and just let it play out. But I have a couple items to note today.

Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 28 Feb 2026: Trump’s case for the Iran war makes no sense, subtitled “The scary incoherence at the heart of Trump’s latest, biggest war.”

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Fearmongering and Gratuitous Cruelty

Posted on Friday 27 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • E.J. Dionne Jr. on Trump’s fearmongering;
  • Gratuitous cruelty in Kansas: canceling the driver’s licenses of transgender people, immediately and without notice;
  • Florida cuts off HIV meds access; White House edits video of US hockey star;
  • Thoughtful piece by Ryan Burge about the “God gap” in American politics, and the decline of mainline churches;
  • And a sample of Philip Glass’s opera Orphée.
– – –

Another take on the SOTU.

NY Times, opinion by E.J. Dionne Jr., 27 Feb 2026: Why Trump’s Fearmongering Is Falling Flat With Voters

President Trump did the nation a big favor in his State of the Union message: He brought home the dark secret behind his success. His one and true genius is hating on other people — Democrats always, immigrants and racial minorities (Mexicans one day, then Somalis), trans people, mythical election fraudsters, street criminals, drug dealers, foreign enemies and anyone else he finds it convenient to hurl a brick at.

The next paragraph makes an interesting point:

His speech was thus an unhappy marriage of bloody images designed to scare people and borrowed glory as he handed out medals to those who earned the honors by accomplishment and bravery, not flimflam. Mr. Trump demonstrated something too often overlooked: He can win when he’s not the incumbent and can go on the attack (2016, 2024), but he leads his party to defeat when he has to govern and fails to deliver (2018, 2020).

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The MAHA Veil, Cruelty, and What Trump Supporters are Teaching their Children

Posted on Thursday 26 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • MAHA isn’t about health, it’s about making money off quack cures;
  • Matthew Rozsa thinks Trump will lose in November because of one word: cruelty;
  • John Pavlovitz spells out what Trump supporters are teaching their children, about diversity, compassion, women, and much else;
  • Timothy Snyder fantasizes a Cabinet meeting in which members say honestly what they’re trying to do: destroy education, wreck the civil service, and so on;
  • How Trump’s problem is that voters don’t believe a word he says;
  • Short items about blaming Biden for closing rural hospitals, educating the Pope, and headphones;
  • About Fermi problems and Trump’s misconceptions about math;
  • Speculation about how American democracy repairs itself every 60 years or so;
– – –

The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last, 26 Feb 2026: Behind the MAHA Veil, subtitled “It’s not about transparency or choice. It’s not even about ‘natural health’ It’s about making everyone else take their quack cures.”

The other day I mentioned in passing that anyone who puts “anti-woke” at the center of their ideology is trying to camouflage their real beliefs.

I think that’s become pretty obvious in recent years with the journey of Bari Weiss, Elon Musk, and most of the famous anti-woke, “free-speech absolutists” who, it turns out, were just shy MAGAs who preferred not to cop to their real allegiances.

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SOTU last night

Posted on Wednesday 25 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Perspectives on last night’s State of the Union address;
  • Followed by personal thoughts about ICE and why conservatives are especially concerned about crimes committed by immigrants.
– – –

We saw only a bit of the SOTU address last night, mostly sections where Trump highlighted someone in the audience for this or that or the other and presented them with some award. Was there anything about the actual state of the union? Fortunately I check lots of sites every morning that provide their spins.

All posts are from today unless otherwise indicated. Start with this.

The Bulwark, William Kristol: Revealing Omissions

Here are a few terms that President Trump never uttered last night:

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Rutger Bregman: HUMANKIND

Posted on Wednesday 25 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “A Hopeful History”
(2019 Dutch; 2020 Little, Brown, xviii+461pp, including 64pp acknowledgements, notes, and index)

Still catching up posting about big books I’ve read in recent years. This book came out in 2020 (in the US) and I blogged about it briefly here. His first book, UTOPIA FOR REALISTS, came three years before this one, and I blogged about that one here. His third book, MORAL AMBITION, was released last year, and I picked it up last week to read next, before realizing I should catch up on the second book here, first.

Bregman is an historian and thinker and all-around optimist about things that many people are pessimistic about. This he aligned with Pinker and Rosling and Norberg and others. The title of this book is a play on words; Humankind doesn’t mean just humanity, it stands for the author’s conviction that people are more often kind rather than innately bad. In the big picture, he’s aligning himself with Rousseau rather than Hobbes, and so on that level he’s challenging the ideas of people like Pinker, who in THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE documented the decline of violence over human history in the context of Hobbes’ Leviathan and the ideas of the Enlightenment that reigned in earlier violent tendencies. Bregman is claiming those early violent tendencies didn’t exist, or have been misinterpreted through bad history or bad storytelling. And he makes a good case, even though he seems to rely on anecdotal evidenced a bit too often…

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Does ICE need to come and track you down?

Posted on Tuesday 24 February 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Why Trump fears “woke,” why he loves the poorly-educated, and how advances in American history were due to “woke”;
  • How he cares about discrimination only if it’s against Jews or whites;
  • How his creepy emails work on the MAGA faithful;
  • Short items about Kash Patel in the locker room; AI slop showing Trump winning the hockey game; Noem lied about a cannibal; how DHS lied about ICE training.
– – –

It’s all about whether humanity is stuck in tribalistic human nature, or whether, through principles, rules and laws, and agreed-upon values, we can transcend our base instincts. (And, perhaps, become a global civilization, and reach for the stars, as science fiction has always imagined.)

LA Times, LZ Granderson, 21 Feb 2026: The slur ‘woke’ highlights what Trump fears most

Summarizing all that’s happening with Trump lately: Board of Peace, $10 billion, Epstein files.

Which is why the president encourages his supporters to ban books and reject journalism. He doesn’t want voters to pay attention. He doesn’t want voters to understand his actions.

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