The Iran War, Pulp Fiction, and Quantum Mechanics

The Iran War, Pulp Fiction, and Quantum Mechanics

A lightly edited version of a letter emailed to a group of physicists, Catholic Church officials, government leaders, and other thought leaders
on May 7, 2026, Day 69 of the Iran War  

Greetings to all,

Today, I’d like to share some points that strike me as obviously true. Even if you wind up disagreeing, I hope you’ll find them useful, to inform your efforts to lead people, some of whom may have similar ideas.

1) In my last letter, I erroneously referred to the Breakthrough Prize as the “Millennium Prize,” which refers to a different award.

2) Famine is being manufactured, either deliberately or as an emergent feature of greed and bigotry, by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which blocks ships carrying a considerable portion of the world’s fertilizer. Some richies are always out to slaughter vast numbers of the poor, one way or another, because humans exist within the ecology, despite our tendency to think only of the portion of the ecology we call the economy. In order for richies to gorge themselves without collapsing the ecology, population is curtailed via war, famine, disease promoted by war and famine, and deaths of despair promoted by war and famine and disease and the knowledge on some level that one’s death is desired by the good people who populate the pews, who say they’re out to save everyone but know that there will be more for them to consume if the bad people get cut down and burned, as the sacred text seems on a myopic reading to be saying. Sheep aren’t nice, and do you notice that the flock’s mum on the mass death that’s being engineered for their benefit? I’m Irish, and around me, I see in large part the ideological descendants of the filthy British upper classes, who engineered famine more than once and against more than just my ancestors. Here’s a cartoon I created a few years ago for my Proud Father of None website, using emojis under Creative commons license CC BY-SA 4.0:

On the other hand, most of the rest of the people around me pretend ecological constraints don’t exist or believe they can be repealed via technology. Behavior arising from that attitude can collapse the ecology, ending civilization, and so is worse than mass murder in its effects if it prevails long enough.

The solution is the message of the Son: Consider the lilies, who don’t work for money, thereby minimizing their burden on the ecology and driving wages higher relative to the price of other resources. Share without making a big deal of it, so that all will feel secure. Don’t push people out of the flock, lest the Good Shepherd leave you, to retrieve the ones you induced to wander off. If you like, neuter yourself for the Kingdom of Heaven. Just chill, like good little Fonzies, for insecure folk seek allies by creating more children on average than secure folk. Above all, leave the McGuffin behind as you take what you got from the wallets and the register, for even in robberies, moderation promotes survival.

3) The diner scene in Pulp Fiction probably means different things to Pete Hegseth than it means to me, but it works very nicely as a model for the Iran War, or USISIR War. For example, no one’s eating while the guns are out, and drawn weapons promote risk-taking that can reverse fortunes.

4) Male supremacy, and the urge to dominate in general, distort our reasoning. Consider the fact that quantum mechanics, an extremely successful theory, as evidenced by the devices on which this message is being composed and will be transmitted, is considered weird by many physicists for various reasons, many or all of which come down to the fact that quantum mechanics permits the direction of causality to be ambiguous or multivalued. For example, in quantum mechanics, A can cause B in the same process for which B causes A. For reasons we needn’t bother with right now, Einstein’s phrase “spooky action at a distance” can be shown to refer to this feature of quantum mechanical causality. What does this have to do with gender politics?

Trained teachers, as well as many other teachers, have long been working to eliminate the gender and race bias in education toward casting members of the socially, and, in a more general sense, ecologically, dominant group as active, while other beings are cast as passive, when they’re represented at all. Patriarchy, racism, homophobia, transphobia, anthropocentrism, etc. emerge from a mindset of exclusion, which shows up throughout the culture, including in education and physics, because the mindset is a demon living inside members of the dominant group, who worship the demon to justify stealing the resources of those they dominate.

The attitudes that support domination impede understanding situations in which domination is absent or minimized, such as causal relationships more complex than that between actor and acted upon. It’s the difference between Pulp Fiction’s Jules in his conversation with Brad and Jules in his conversation with Ringo, though I sympathize with the urge to give Brad what-for. Who doesn’t? Wise folk simply realize that no matter how powerful a Jules they might play, someday they would wind up in a room where they’d be Brad or Ringo to someone else’s Jules. That is, after all, the character of Jules’s epiphany when the guy comes out of the bathroom with the hand cannon: Morality is good strategy, and if you live by the sword, you die by the sword.

I’ll proceed to the remaining points in the next letter. Until then, if the latest USISIR War peace initiative falls through, maybe the Vice President, Jared, and that third guy could watch Pulp Fiction together. Maybe they could invite the Iranian delegation to join them for a double feature, with one movie selected by the Iranians. As I’ve pointed out already, stories, both sacred and profane, give us means to communicate.

Right, Yolanda?

Yours in God(s), regardless of models of God(s),
James