There Is Nothing Wrong with You

Posted on Tuesday 27 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Malcolm Gladwell on misunderstandings about gun violence;
  • Kevin Kelly’s proposal for a universal national service;
  • A video that explains why homosexuality has evolutionary advantages;
  • Jim Palmer on religion’s biggest lie: sin;
  • A bunch of brief links about Hegseth’s faith advisor, RFK Jr., how the Supreme Court approves every religious privilege, how Trump seems immune from jail, how Trump has failed, how Trump is sowing doubt about the upcoming elections, how the stamp of MAGA is being cruel, how Robert Reich says Trump wants to imprison him, how a MAGA activist thinks Noah’s flood was due to gay sex orgies (!), how a pastor with two wives thinks God approves of him, how Tony Perkins advises voters to vote according to Biblical values, how red states are restricting education to traditional American themes; and how there’s no evidence that voting machines flip votes.
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A lot of things to note today. Let’s focus on the non-fringy ones first.

LA Times, Shelby Hartman, today: Malcolm Gladwell thinks everything you know about gun violence is probably wrong

Gladwell, I think, has a reputation for being a bit superficial, but also for challenging native notions. Let’s see what this piece says. I’m always attracted to counter-intuitive themes.

OK, here’s bullet points at the top:

• In his latest book, Malcolm Gladwell argues that public debate focuses on the wrong measures of gun violence, from mass shootings to assault rifles, while overlooking everyday shootings and handguns.

• He traces how violence is shaped by factors beyond the gun itself, including policing, school practices and gaps in how shootings are counted.

Then,

In his recently released ninth book, “The American Way of Killing,” Gladwell does what he does well. He digs into a topic, in this case gun violence in America, illuminating unexpected causes and prodding at assumptions that perpetuate what he refers to as a gun violence “epidemic.” The premise is that this epidemic can, in large part, be tied to what he calls a “dishonest conversation.”

And here’s the gist:

The majority of middle-class Americans, he says, believe the most consequential threat to their safety is mass shootings when the data shows it’s actually everyday violence on the streets and in homes. Another misunderstanding at the heart of conversations on gun reform is the belief that assault rifles cause a disproportionate number of homicides, when more deaths are attributable to handguns.

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This is probably a good idea, despite issues of coercion.

Kevin Kelly, today: A Proposal for Universal National Service

And it’s an idea that’s been floating around for years. Kelly’s piece opens:

Every young person between the ages of 18 and 21 should provide 2 years of mandatory national service. Accepted service goes beyond military service and includes civilian service like teaching, or construction, or emergency response. Everyone serves. There are no exemptions for wealth or connections, or even handicaps; service would be matched to ability, not waived. This would be good for them, good for their country, and good for the world.

There are several main benefits:

  • This duty partially offsets some of the rights citizens enjoy.
  • Useful societal work is gained that may not be as well served in the marketplace.
  • There is a meaningful mixing of people from diverse backgrounds, helping political unity.
  • Kids get a gap year, in the work space, that makes them better students in higher ed.
  • They may get training, but surely get a sense of service and accomplishment.

I am an American, so I will make this argument primarily in American terms, but examples of this exist in part in other countries of the world.

Part of my attraction to this is personal: the part of my life I regret, though I had no real control of, is that I did not move away from home to go to college. I graduated from high school in the San Fernando Valley and after a summer passed I commuted to UCLA, still living at home. For four years. I never made any friends at UCLA. Going there was essentially an extension of going to high school. I wish I had been able to get out into the world. And that I didn’t, seriously inhibited me in a way that has lasted my entire life.

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Why does homosexuality exist?, ask the naive evolutionists.

Because, essentially, homosexuality is linked with empathy and nonaggression, and so facilitate community survival in which males are otherwise aggressive. (It’s an idea. I have other ideas.)

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Checking in on the loquacious Jim Palmer. This piece goes to one of the earliest realizations many of us have about the functionality and irrationality of religion.

Deconstructionality, Jim Palmer, 23 Oct 2026: You Are Not A Sinner, subtitled “Exposing Religion’s Biggest Lie”

This recalls my comparison of priests to snake-oil salesmen, recalling that Stephen Prothero book: each religion identifies a problem, which it presumes to be able to fix. The problems and fixes are all different; religions are not “all the same.”

Palmer:

There’s nothing wrong with you.

Yes, I realize no one is perfect, we have our good days and bad days, and we’re all a little neurotic here and there. Lemony Snicket said it well:

“People aren’t either wicked or noble. They’re like chef’s salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.”

When I say “there’s nothing wrong with you” what I mean is that at the most fundamental level of what you are, you’re not depraved. Despite the pointing finger of religious condemnation, you are not a sinner. You were not born bad.

One of the greatest lies propagated by religion upon humankind is that being human is a condition to overcome, disease to be cured, blight to be forgiven, and the reason for estrangement from God. Contrary to the pop-Christian “gospel”, you don’t need saved from yourself.

This begins a new series by Palmer: “The Top Most Abused Bible Verses.”

Another very long Palmer post, with issues of translations and interpretations, and much else.

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And then the fringy ones. I’ll try to condense these as much as I can.

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Music this evening:

The three Beck albums. Those three.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Politics, Religion, The Gays | Leave a comment

The Disclosure Cult

Posted on Monday 26 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • David Brin on the UFO cult, which he now calls the Disclosure cult;
  • A forthcoming book about the nature of human intelligence;
  • Brief items about the term DARVO, Tina Peters’ defense as a “person of faith”, Trump and Republican priorities, and Laura Ingraham’s claim of a leftist plot to overtake the government.
– – –

Let’s lead with this today: the latest David Brin post about the ongoing UFO mania, in which the evidence has never gotten any better than it was 70 years ago. Brin is now calling it the Disclosure cult, suggesting it’s just as crazy as the MAGA cult.

Contrary Brin, David Brin, yesterday 25 Oct: “Disclosure’ UFO cults get worse, even as we try to restore sane politics.

Brin often sounds like a prototypical crazy uncle, except that I think most of his points are valid.

So. Why do I classify UFO nuttery with MAGA? First there’s the blatant overall goal: using X-Files to distract from Eps-Files….

     …and also because the two share cult-like traits that start with asserting their members are smarter, braver and more honest than anyone in the smartypants science and fact professions! In this case, the tens of millions of fact professionals in every field of endeavor or expertise that would be involved in some purported “Undisclosed Alien Contact.”

 

What an arrogant stance! One that bears a substantial burden of proof. 

 

(Remember Brin’s two running themes: the Republican war against all the fact-based professions, and America’s ongoing civil war, which is about pro- vs. anti-modernity.)

Here he revisits all the obvious objections to the Disclosure Cult. No serious scientists are involved. No one who works at Area 51 ever talks. No evidence of alien technologies has ever been produced. And most crucially to my thinking: in an era with 10 million times as many cameras as there were in the 1950s, the images are still fuzzy, and no better. And so on. How the Disclosure cult is… a cult, or a faith-based religion.

All of this, I think, is evidence of a need to believe. It’s about psychology, not reality. That unexplained phenomena can be understood by familiar ways of thinking. This is an example of how human thinking “flattens” multiplex reality.

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I have an online subscription to Publishers Weekly partly to include its bestseller lists into my weekly compilation for Locus Online, but also, for decades reading print issues in college libraries, I like to see its reviews of books, typically covered two to three months ahead of publication, to know what to look forward to.

Today is a review of this book: The Thinking Animal, by Nichola Raihani, due in January.

I’ll wait until nearer publication to see if there are more reviews. But its subject seems right up my alley. Science fiction has a long history of imagining whether aliens might be more intelligent than humans, and in what way. And lately, we’re thinking about this question in new ways, with the emergence of AI. (My provisional take: we’re already aware of different kinds of intelligence, among humans, and among other species. The aliens are already here.)

A couple lines struck me. This is from the review (not the book).

The “hallmark” of intelligence, she says, is the ability to adjust to ever-changing situations.

My thought, of course, is what does this say about conservatives, who by definition resist change? And:

Human intelligence, too, has been shaped by evolution, she notes, explaining that human creativity and ingenuity might stem from the demands of complex social life and ecological challenges.

Well, of course. Many many books are published, and they are not all about different things; they about different perspectives on the same consensus reality that has emerged in recent centuries. And this is a familiar theme.

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Briefly noted.

There are many more. Just one more:

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Human Nature, Lunacy, Psychology, Religion | Leave a comment

Failure to Learn

Posted on Sunday 25 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Steven Strogatz on the AI crisis in mathematics; is it OK to be given the answers, without figuring them out for ourselves?
  • How religious zealots mock scientific understanding, since scientific conclusions can change;
  • Briefly: another comment about Rubio’s defense of Western civilization; how David French thinks there is no bottom to MAGA; Heather Cox Richardson recounts how the Republican victories in 1920 led to the 1929 Crash; and Nicholas Kristoff on the pillars of our nation — education, immigration, and legal and social norms — that are on the current ballot.
– – –

Humanity only advances by learning from the lessons of the past. No one person can learn everything about modern civilization by themselves, from scratch. But are we now stuck in a cycle of repeated failures, unable to learn? (Or refusal to learn?) (Or failure to launch?)

Is it about the journey, or the destination?

The Atlantic, Steven Strogatz, today: A Mathematician Reads the AI Future, subtitled “My field is as much an expression of the human spirit as music and literature. Is it for the machines now?”

Strogatz is a mathematician and author. I have his book about calculus.

I am a math professor, and my field is in crisis. Nobody in math is ever going to forget the year 2026. Unless this is really the end of the subject, and then nobody will remember anything about math anyway. Well, the machines will remember. But for them, this is something like day one.

He cuts to the core question.

I’ve been trying not to talk like this. It’s really discouraging for the graduate students and undergraduates, who have been dreaming of a life as a mathematician, or maybe a math professor—a life of solving puzzles, asking questions, working with friends who love math too, thinking about our sublime, transcendently beautiful subject that is so misunderstood. Meanwhile, the wider public is confused. Don’t mathematicians want their problems to be solved?

Yes and no.

Yes, for “applied” math; not so much for “pure” math: AI’s truths come “at the cost of robbing us of the struggle and joy of discovering them ourselves.”

Pure math is the study of ideal patterns and structures: numbers and shapes, waves and vibrations, order and chaos, symmetry and infinity. There are no perfect circles in nature, only in our minds. Except—and this is eerie—the truths of mathematics also seem to exist outside of human minds. They inhabit a mysterious Platonic realm, casting shadows on our reality.

Our species has been playing this game for at least 4,000 years. It’s as much an expression of the human spirit as music and literature. If AI continues to bulldoze pure math, it’s going to crush the hopes of the young people who were dreaming of joining this tradition.

(At the same time, some human-discovered mathematical truths are so long and complex it’s difficult to see how they ever provided the kind of deep insights we associate with great discoveries. Another aspect of the limits of human cognition.)

And he goes on with three stories that illustrate how people have reacted to the October 6 report that AI solved some 400 landmark open problems in mathematics.

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From this Facebook post, by Danny Ellis Jr., from a group called “Christians & Atheists: Exploring The Big Question,” who is mocking the idea of scientific conclusions, since they keep changing.

“If they were wrong, couldn’t you be wrong?” He thinks this is an issue.

Of course. All scientific conclusions are provisional. All personal knowledge is provisional. No one knows everything. This is what the religious folk, who are ever trying to defend their simplistic faith-based answers, don’t understand, or refuse to understand. Some of us can learn, based on new experience and evidence; religious people are happy with their certainty in the truth in ancient holy books, and don’t understand learning.

Comments to his post try to explain this to him. Also, I have no idea where this chart came from, or if it’s accurate. But the gist is certainly true: science keeps updating conclusions based on new evidence.

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More briefly.

  • Via Steven Pinker on Facebook.
  • The UnPopulist, Cathy Young, 21 Oct 2026: Rubio’s Grotesque Defense of Western Civ
  • Subtitled “In his pseudo-history, Caesar and other European conquerors are the models for the US”
  • NY Times, opinion by David French, today: Despicable Doesn’t Begin to Cover It
  • About the Vivek Ramaswamy political ad in Ohio.
  • “Long ago we learned that there is no bottom for MAGA…”
  • Which involves elements of tribalism, and failure to learn.
  • Some useful history from Heather Cox Richardson, today: October 24, 2026
  • How the election in 1920 gave control of the nation to Republicans, who rejected the Progress that followed World War I and turned the government over to businessmen, whose policies worked at first, until they didn’t, resulting in the 1929 Crash.
  • There’s a theme here about being unable to learn. That is, repeating mistakes of the past.
  • NY Times, opinion by Nicholas Kristoff, yesterday: None of This Is Normal
  • “The principles and strategies that over multiple generations have made the United States the world’s leading nation in effect are on the ballot, and these midterms mark a potential turning point.”
  • Three pillars that explain our nation: education; immigration; and the norms that govern our politics, economics, and society.
  • I’ve commented on this many times: the institutions that established the US, aligned with the Enlightenment, were designed to overcome the tribal instincts that still drive the majority of people. But MAGA is about returning to tribal instincts: replace education with religious indoctrination; resist immigration to keep the tribe pure, and prioritize tribal victory over pesky rules and regulations. The gap between the ideals and the reality is education. Learning.
  • Are we doomed? Again… we’re making progress, slowly and steadily. The religious zealots are falling away, as they will need to if humanity is to survive.
Posted in conservatives, History, Mathematics, Science, Social Progress | Leave a comment

Passing Through World Fantasy Con 2026

Posted on Saturday 24 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

I didn’t attend the World Science Fiction Convention a few months ago, in Anaheim, but I had thought to attend its fantasy counterpart this month since it’s being held in downtown Oakland, just a few miles from me. I wouldn’t need to rent a hotel room; I could drive back and forth each day (even though many of the events at such gatherings occur in the evening, often until late hours, not to mention ordinary gatherings at the bar). But then I waited too long to buy a membership, and found them no longer for sale as of earlier this week, and found daily passes (which Worldcons used to offer) unavailable. Still, inquiries led me to acquire a “Locus staff” badge, and I used it to attend the convention yesterday, Friday, from 10am to 4pm or so. (Not that there were any careful observers keeping non-members out of event rooms.)

It struck me as a low-key convention, rather small (only some 800 attendees, one of the Locus folk told me), and spread out across the sizeable Oakland Convention Center to such an extent that it had no central focus. The only eating place was closed by noon (no lunch at the Convention Center!) and not due to open until late afternoon as the bar. (I found lunch at Chipotle, up the street.)

I’m glad I attended on Friday (rather than today, Saturday) because, first of all, guest-of-honor Ted Chiang’s interview was Friday at 11am, conducted by Cliff Winnig. Anyone who’s seen Ted in person knows his speaking style, which is … hesitant. A persistent pausing to find just the right word, the right phrase. He’ll never be a politician; he’s a perfectionist. The interview focused initially on his involvement in the adaptation of his story “Story of Your Life” into the film Arrival. The key was that the screenwriter, Eric Heisserer, insisted on holding true to the story, resisting studio suggestions, for example, to make the protagonist male. While acknowledging a key difference between the story and film, about the nature of the Amy Adams’ character’s death. Winnig and Chiang then discussed other of his stories, including “Tower of Babylon” (reifying ancient mythology, in a Klein-bottle way), “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” (time travel and why the story works in an Arabian culture), and “Hell Is the Absence of God” (about angels=messengers, and the true nature of God).

The second reason I’m glad I attended Friday is because, at the Locus table, I met Elan Samuel, the tech guy at Locus who has fixed the hacker problems over the past few weeks, and with whom I’ve been emailing back and forth. We chatted about tech issues, and books. Friday at 3pm or so he took off to take care of family business (I gather), so I would not have met him on Saturday or Sunday. Very nice guy, who’s been associated with Locus longer than I’d realized, and who’s much more savvy about tech than I have been over the past 15 years, when I’ve only learned enough about html and css and php in order to build the sites I imagined (e.g. sfadb.com), without understanding how to fix the problems that he was able to fix.

Chatted with Gary K. Wolfe and Dale W Hanes, and Karen Haber. Sighted in passing, many others: Joe H and Ellen D and Daryl G and Ellen K and Darrell K S and Rich H and Greg K and even Palo B and Betsy W and John P.

But not Robert S or Annalee N or Nancy K or the many other luminaries who reportedly attended.

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I got a couple insights to move forward. First, reports than when the Locus sites were down, Locus got a number of inquiries about sfadb.com. Apparently it’s quite useful to many people, more than I’d realized, and I should focus my attentions on refining and expanding that. (I never see any site traffic stats.) Secondarily, some thoughts how to develop my own site, and potential book.

Posted in Conventions, Personal history, The Book | Leave a comment

Evolutionary Tradeoffs, and Nonintelligent Design

Posted on Thursday 22 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Today’s thought piece.

Keep in mind that evolution doesn’t “care” about anything; organisms that survive natural selection (or environmental filtering, another term someone used) do so by reproducing, and once they’ve done that, it doesn’t matter what happens in their “old age.”

The Atlantic, Adina Wise, 18 Oct 2026: The Evolution of the Human Brain Set It Up for Failure, subtitled “The genetic changes that made the human brain may have made us uniquely vulnerable to Alzheimer’s.”

Apes don’t develop Alzheimer’s—at least, not like we do. Although we share a hefty amount of our DNA with our closest primate relatives, humans are uniquely at risk of developing the disease that can erode our sense of who we are.

When I make the diagnosis in my neurology clinic, I tell patients and family members that in most cases, doctors can’t point to a single, definitive cause of the illness. Age, genetics, health, lifestyle factors, and environmental triggers all play a role. But a growing body of research offers another dimension: We can lose our sense of self precisely because our species evolved to have one. In recent years, scientists have been comparing the brains of humans with those of other, closely related species, and teasing out how the genetics, structure, and molecular mechanisms differ. What they’re finding is that the same characteristics that support our unparalleled cognitive abilities make us susceptible to Alzheimer’s disease.

The essay goes on, rather technically. The gist, which I think is rather mind-blowing, is the middle sentence in the second paragraph above. “We can lose our sense of self precisely because our species evolved to have one.” Also, a key theme, for those who don’t “believe” in evolution, is the close genetic relationships humans have with related species of apes. Here’s a later paragraph:

Our bodies are no strangers to evolutionary trade-offs. Homo sapiens’ vertical spine leaves us vulnerable to herniated discs; our pelvis, narrowed by bipedalism, makes childbirth difficult. We manage these compromises as best we can. But if an evolutionary give-and-take implicates our organ of thought and reason, accepting the compromise is harder.

Whole books have been written, and I’m guessing university courses have been designed, about such items. Which undermine the notion of “intelligent design,” of course. Evolution works by building upon what it already exists, not designing from scratch.

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And then the kibble.

This is the funniest, most ironic. I don’t need to spell this out.

  • JMG, via Religion News Service, today: Survey: Majority Of Evangelicals Don’t Value Empathy
  • “New survey: 83% of nonreligious Americans see empathy as a core moral value, compared to just 42% of white evangelicals.”
  • Because, as I’ve been saying, evangelicals are basically tribalists.
  • Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 21 Oct 2026: Rob McCoy Keeps Spreading False Christian Nationalist History
  • I’m beginning to wonder if this is particular to fundamentalists religions. Doesn’t everyone, every group or tribe or nation, filter history to put themselves in their own best light? But serious historians generally provide correctives. Not yet, for the modern Christian nationalists.
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Evolution | Leave a comment

What Would Be the Cure for Being Human?

Posted on Wednesday 21 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Jim Palmer’s six existential realities that humans try to escape…;
  • Short items: Fox News provides the conservative need for the panic of the day, or month; even National Review calls out Trump as shameless; Pete Buttigieg on how Republicans take credit for Democratic projects; and how Christian Nationalists are plain about their intentions to “seize power.”
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I briefly noted this piece back on 9/24. Let’s spend a little more time with it today. What does he mean by “trying to escape”? This goes to the core of his metaphysics, which I still haven’t exactly figured out.

Jim Palmer, Deconstructionology, 23 Sep 2026: There Is No Cure for Being Human, subtitled “The Six Existential Realities We Spend Our Lives Trying to Escape”

It’s 37 screens long, on my big laptop. Just write a book and be done with it! Let’s see if we can find his six.

Here’s part of his preface:

As Existential Health becomes established as a field of health, there is necessary work to be done defining its concepts, developing its theoretical foundations, examining its applications, and subjecting its claims to serious scrutiny. I have published an academic paper Continue reading →

Posted in Human Nature, Philosophy | Leave a comment

The Biggest Inflection Points

Posted on Tuesday 20 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Big picture: What we know about how life arose: a good summary by NYT’s science writers;
  • Relatively trivial items: Vance lies about gas prices; men in groups; Edsall on Trump’s real agenda; Krugman on how Trump actually hates America and what it stands for; Reich criticizing the NYT for its false equivalencies; and Heather Cox Richardson on charges from a decade ago that Trump is Putin’s puppet.
  • Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.
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Decent summary. Not sure of the occasion.

NY Times, William J. Broad, Kenneth Chang and Carl Zimmer, yesterday 19 Oct: How Did Life Arise? [gift link]

Subtitled: “Where did it start? How did it grow complex? Why did it get big? Three moments in Earth’s early history when evolution suddenly, inexplicably turned up the dial.”

Apparently this is part of a NYT series called “Unknowns” — “A special project exploring unanswered scientific questions — the big mysteries about ourselves, our origins, our world and our universe.” — that also included that item about whether babies are conscious a couple weeks ago.

I’ll quote the intro:
Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Evolution, Music, Politics | Leave a comment

Speculations on a New World Order

Posted on Monday 19 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Speculation on a new world order;
  • Tom Nichols on how Trump has abandoned the Western order;
  • Reconsidering what business schools promote;
  • Fareed Zakaria’s essay;
  • How Fox News peddles “fear porn”;
  • How the Trump administration is discouraging even legal immigration.
– – –

What might this new order be?

NY Times, opinion by Serge Schmemann, yesterday 18 Oct 2026: The Old World Order Is Over. This Is What Could Come Next.

Opening:

By now it is clear to most of America and much of the world that America and what it stands for have changed. The dominant face of that change is President Trump and his determined and deliberate efforts to accumulate greater powers than the Constitution apportioned to the president, to create a cult of personality based on grievance and vengeance and to challenge every aspect of the postwar global order, demeaning allies and courting autocrats.

Continue reading →

Posted in conservatives, History, progress, Social Progress | Comments Off on Speculations on a New World Order

Placeholder

Posted on Sunday 18 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

This post from Oct 18 was a placeholder containing content originally compiled from Oct 4 to Oct 6. To represent them fairly, I’ve created separate posts for those three days, and set the publish dates accordingly.

 

Posted in Politics, Psychology, Religion | Comments Off on Placeholder

If Humanity Doesn’t Have a Grasp on Reality, Does It Matter?

Posted on Saturday 17 October 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Wondering if it matters that humanity doesn’t have a grasp on reality, via recent politics about James Talarico.
  • And today: posted page Notes on Meaning, (and Wisdom and Purpose and Progress), part of my grand plan to identify broad philosophical themes and how they relate to science fiction;
– – –

A thought piece for today.

Slate, Molly Olmstead, 16 Oct 2026: A Hoax About James Talarico Went Viral and Then Fell Apart. What Happens Next Will Tell Us a Lot About Politics in 2026., subtitled “Texas just set up a natural experiment on the power of conspiracy theories—and whether it matters if they’re debunked.”

Title on homepage: “Texas Just Accidentally Set Up a Great Experiment About Whether Facts Matter at All in 2026”

If humans cannot engage in reality, what hope is there for our race?

Continue reading →

Posted in Human Nature, Philosophy, Politics | Comments Off on If Humanity Doesn’t Have a Grasp on Reality, Does It Matter?