Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, September 20, 2025
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34 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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BlueSky.
The Florida headline of the day- Florida attorney told client he slept naked and asked what she wore to bed
The headline of the day- Cyberattack disrupts European airports including Heathrow, Brussels
Music for the weekend. Something rather unusual: a cover of Bohemian Rhapsody
This is both hilarious and ridiculous. There is no limit to the stroking of this awful man’s ego, even in court filings.
https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics/trump-nyt-lawsuit-too-annoying-to-read
Kind of cool. With pictures!
This unusual hybrid found in Texas is the first of its kind in the wild
@Kathy: that was so wonderful! Thanks!
Maybe we shouldn’t blame AI bots for hallucinating. They are as we made them.
When Socrates was proclaimed by an oracle as the wisest man in Athens, he said words along the line of “If it be so, it’s because I alone know that I know nothing.”
But artificial wisdom was never promised.
That AP poll showing a sharp increase in pessimism and a significant drop in support of the administration among GOP voters rocked some worlds.
It’s a comfort to see a good majority of Americans can smell a rat. It can be an empowering motivation to keep up the good fight.
@Bill Jempty: I got one for you:
Cops: Dog pees, owner pulls a gun
Woman faces multiple charges due to dog that was off its leash
VENICE — A woman who brandished a gun after being confronted about where her dog urinated was arrested by two different agencies.
What I’m not doing today: Watching College Gameday or any games on ESPN channels, watching anything on ABC, signing up for Disney+ or Hulu, or planning any trips to certain theme parks. I just can’t.
What I’m doing today: Some of the thousand other things that need doing or can be done.
Tell me I’m wrong, cuz I’d like to believe, but I think the climate change battle is over. It was always going to be a very heavy lift, but without US leadership there is zero chance of hitting the targets. Not that I’m blaming just the malignant idiot in the White House, because China and India are still building coal-fired plants and producing lots of concrete.
Climate change will also spell the end of the anti-GMO movement – we’re going to need to grow food by any means necessary.
I’d say that our only hope is through engineering but all those proposals are as expensive AF and the whole world is going broke. Every major economy is on the edge and the president of the United States is working night and day to push the whole world off the economic cliff.
ETA: Have a nice day!
@Bill Jempty: I hope it doesn’t disrupt your upcoming Europe trip!
Trump’s tariffs, deportations and climate change are making groceries more expensive (CNN Business)
Winter heating bills are about to rise (CNN Business)
Lower prices on day one, he said.
Trump Invokes ‘Golden Share’ to Block U.S. Steel Plans for Illinois Plant
Darth Vader: Good, it would be unfortunate if I had to leave a garrison here. Lando: [to himself] This deal is getting worse all the time!
Also: “I’m altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”
Interesting. Europe has grown a pair of big, brass ones. The EU has cut off all purchases of Russian LNG. That will hurt a lot. Lithuania has literally cut the power lines that keep the lights on in Kaliningrad. That will also hurt.
Putin – you remember him, the macho, shirtless equestrian – really is a master at causing unintended consequences. He has single-handedly expanded NATO, given the EU a new, unifying purpose, killed his own arms export market while shooting the European arms industry full of adrenalin, and of course made Ukraine into a genuinely badass enemy on Russia’s border – an enemy which is systemattically destroying the Russian oil bidness. Additional consequences include losing Syria and much of the Russian efforts in Africa. And he’s made it crystal clear, for all the world to see, that Russia is just the tail on a Chinese dog.
This is the incompetent fool Trump idolizes. Russia – a country of vodka-pickled incompetents – is the country MAGA wants to mimic, because they may suck by every objective measure, but at least they hate trans people.
A couple of weeks ago I found a book in my collection I’d no memory of reading, or even having bought it. It’s a Star Wars novel by Timothy Zahn called Choices of One, and has Mara Jade in the cover.
I’ve read it since then, and realized two things: 1) I had read it over a dozen years ago (the book is from 2012*), and 2) it’s so unmemorable I recalled very little of it; like I didn’t even recall Thrawn was in it.
Next on the queue is a TNG novel featuring the Mirror Universe, “Dark Mirror” by Dianne Duane. That one I remember very well, though it’s over 30 years old (where does the time go?). It’s different from the depictions of the Mirror Universe on DS) (the Empire still rules). It is quite good.
*The year makes it near certain I bought it on a day trip to Houston in 2012. But I still don’t recall buying it. Unlike 99% of my other paperbacks, it still looks as good as new.
@Michael Reynolds: Yeah, testing the Polish and Estonian airspace boundaries is a FAFO move. Putin is banking on NATO not being worth much if the US is sitting on its hands. I wouldn’t take that bet.
Responding to claims about other gods in the Bible
@Eusebio:
I believe that perhaps the best thing that could’ve happened is calling the bluff, if is a bluff, of yanking FCC licenses from existing stations. IMO only about half the US public pays more than the slightest attention to events and seeing stations disappear would wake at least some of them up.
Not holding my breath, the stations are run by shareholders of one sort or another. Highly unlikely they are willing to take the certain hit to the wallet, easily avoided by compliance.
@Michael Reynolds: I’m hoping you might be able to help me out a bit with some information involving Las Vegas. I have family members who are planning to go to Vegas in a few months and they have no plans to gamble. Their plan is to find some reasonably priced local places to eat at while going to some shows (Penn and teller, horse tour etc). I am hoping you could give me some perspectives as a local. Do you have any suggestions for good “cheap” places to eat and experience Las Vegas? They are staying in a hotel off the strip. They have a car rental ready to go on arrival. I was just hoping a local would have the low down on the good places to eat and experience.
Anyone else with suggestions are more than welcome.
Thanks y’all for your time.
@Matt:
Not that you asked, but I highly recommend visiting the Atomic Testing Museum, and the Mob Museum (formally the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement).
@Matt:
I’m afraid I am going to disappoint. I live in Las Vegas but I am not a local. I live just a few hundred yards from The Strip, a place where no self-respecting local would be caught dead. In fact we often cannot get services like dog-walking, for example, because we are in the tourist zone, far from where most people live.
We deliberately avoided the Las Vegas where actual people live because we just wanted walkability to casino bars and restaurants. We figure we’ll own property here for maybe a total of four years (2 down) because we’re trying to save enough to leave our not-exactly-big-earning kids sufficient resources to continue living in two of the most expensive counties in the US. Our place here costs a third of what we were spending in LA, and there’s no state income tax. (13% in CA.)
In a couple years our income will drop dramatically which, paradoxically means we can move back to CA. But the plan right now is to GTFO of this country for more than half the year.
Vegas is being hurt now by the over-the-top greed of the casinos with their $27 cocktails, their overpriced but still second rate restaurants and the utterly dishonest game rigging of triple zero roulette, etc…. Sometimes the prices just seem like deliberate provocations, and people are catching on. That said, if I were a price-sensitive visitor who still wanted a bit of the Vegas experience, I might look at the Station casinos, especially Red Rock and Durango, both beautiful new properties (and not cheap) with restaurants that are overpriced but not insultingly overpriced. Make sure your friends look at ‘resort fees’ not just the listed room rates on Expedia. Bullshit fees can almost double the quoted price.
There is free stuff. The Bellagio fountains and seasonal displays, for example, or the Fremont Street Experience, and some fun stuff that isn’t entirely extortionate, like the neon museum. But make no mistake, when Vegas sees how much money-vampires like Disney parks get away with charging, Vegas says hold my beer. (My $10 beer.)
Honestly, if you want an affordable meal in Vegas think In-N-Out or Cane’s. Sorry to be no help.
ETA: Also what @Kathy said.
When scientists disagree.
@Matt:
@Michael Reynolds:
My go to cheap dining option was the buffet at the Main Street Station casino. It’s not great food, but there’s a lot of it. I’ve no idea whether it still exists. I heard many buffets never reopened after COVID.
@Kathy:
As I’ve said before, given the main training base of the LLM’s is the internet, it’s a minor miracle that the response to all queries is not “CATS!”
Followed by: “… and would you like some p@rn with that, sir?”
When the statisical basis of such opinion is un-mediated, which given the sheer volume it often cannot be, LLM “AI” just defualts to an opinion poll of idiots.
Garbage in = garbage out.
And the LLM “black boxes” seem to have little capacity, thus far, for rules generation, truth testing, or data validation
Teaching students that “AI” is highly unreliable on certain topics is becoming a rather tedious chore.
otoh, it is fairly useful where the base data has NOT been polluted: eg on coding, or music theory, or law, or most areas of basic science.
@Michael Reynolds:
Putin seems detemined to follow the old Soviet (and indeed, Imperial Russian) methodology of push and poke and test.
And is convinced that the inclination of Europe to be pacific and resolve disputes reasonably equates to fundamental weakness.
This is a similar mistake to that Hitler made re the UK: Baldwin, Chamberlain etc were prepared to appease.
But when that road ran out, they were willing to fight.
One example: European output of 155mm shells is now at about 2 million per annum, four times current US production, and capacity is still ramping.
Rheinmettal alone now produces more artillery ammunition than the entire US.
As I’ve said before: the Europen defence effort is often underestimated.
Current spending is on the order of $500 bn pa
And “Euro-NATO” (excluding Turkey) has a military manpower of over 1.5m.
These are non-trivial numbers.
Europe actually fields more MBT, howitzers, jet fighters, submarines, and frigates, than the US.
Its major problem is co-ordination,
Multiple national defence ministries spending in ways that suit national politics, and a reliance on “NATO assets” = US in key areas such as satellite intel, AEW, etc
And a default to reliance on NATO SHAPE/SACEUR operational command, which again means integration with US military, given all SACEUR since the start of NATO have been American.
A lot of Europeans are now inclining to the view: “De Gaulle was right. We cannot hand over key security tasks to the US, and just pray they don’t renege on the deal.”
@Kathy:
On the subject of atomic testing, just in case you haven’t encountered this before: Orion, Mars in 10 days.
A hoot, definitely, but it does seems they got pretty far along with the technology before giving it up.
@Kathy: Thank you for your suggestions I’ll pass those along.
@Michael Reynolds: Thanks for your help. The neon museum was something they mentioned they were going to visit. Glad to know you agree with them on that.
I’ve been making sure to tell them about resort fees and the nickel and dimming Vegas has become. That’s a big reason why they don’t plan any gambling at all.
Thanks again y’all.
My family wanted me to specify that they appreciate the help and some of what you suggested they had been looking into but were not sure.
@dazedandconfused:
Old “bang bang” remains an interesting option, in certain cases.
If we had a a couple of years warning on an comet or asteroid impact, and no other infrastructure in place, Orion plus a SUNDIAL type “backyard bomb” might be applicable.
@Kathy: Regarding the AI training, I find it quite interesting that the main reason that AI’s hallucinate is that they were never penalized for it during training.
Kind of like the internet and humans. Consider pundits that are regularly wrong, but never seem to lose their jobs.
@dazedandconfused:
It showed up my Youtub feed. I haven’t seen it.
As I recall, Orion involved serial low-yield nuclear detonations to propel the ship. This tends to upset those who think nukes is nukes and even one will vaporize everything in a million kilometer radius 😉
@JohnSF:
Teller was one sick puppy.
I think the most powerful nuke the US ever tested was 15 megatons, and wasn’t supposed to be that big. The soviets tried one of 50 megatons, which is far too much even for the ultra paranoid Soviets.
@Kathy:
Teller was an odd duck, to put it mildly.
See his determination to get Oppenheimer excluded from atomic policy.
And that his thermonuclear project got priority over the arguments of others that “advanced boosted fission” warheads were a better option, and entirely adequate to the strategic requirements.
Wow, this is good: John Stewart and Maria Ressa
@Kathy:
Read somewhere that Russian mega-bomb went off with the expected force but they were surprised the area of the ground surface wherein everything should’ve been obliterated was significantly smaller than had been calculated.
The reason? At a certain level “bangs” start venting energy into space instead of spreading laterally through the atmosphere.