Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, September 21, 2025
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12 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).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
Under the logic and norms of this Trump Administration (and perhaps even the Supreme Court), what stops Trump from trying to fire and replace a Supreme Court justice. Because the judiciary is under Article II of the Constitution? So what? Who pays their salary? The Treasury Department. Who manages their buildings? The General Services Administration, part of the Executive Branch. All it would take is an Executive Order.
When people become uninsured where to they go for healthcare? Emergency rooms. Will the ERs be compensated? Answer: no.
Texas border providers brace for rate of uninsured patients to balloon as federal policy changes loom
I shared this clip where Jon Stewart talks to Nobel-Prize-winning Maria Ressa yesterday, but it was very late in the day. I want to reshare it. Maria’s message is very important and relevant, even to a conversation we had yesterday.
I could be wrong, but vague signs and portents lead me to think maybe the Trump regime has overreached. The Kimmel thing is not going as well for them as they expected, and they’ve brilliantly shifted the conversation from Horst Kirk, martyr, to Jimmy Kimmel, martyr for freedom of speech. I don’t think they have the pieces in place for the move they’re making.
Mr becca just got a message from Amazon that his co2 cartridges for his air rifle and bb pistol are delayed in shipment because of “supply chain issues”.
That’s a first.
@Michael Reynolds: Did you see the latest? He’s demanding Blondi start arresting his political enemies, not just dems, but some cons, too, including Matt Walsh. We have entered the “Off with their heads!!” phase, it would appear.
Qatar, after Israel blew up the Hamas HQ in Doha is obviously furious, enraged, vowing revenge!
Oh, wait, no they’re not.
Suggested Netanyahu apology: We apologize if our blowing shit up in your capital city upset anyone. We’re going to send everyone in that neighborhood a $10 Starbucks gift certificate!
That should do it.
Xi and Trump are supposed to meet in South Korea on a tba date soon.
South Korea is China’s biggest trading partner and a lot of people there are not fans of America right now after that Hyundai raid fiasco. Not gonna go full Col Ackbar, but this does seem to disadvantage Team T in negotiations.
This is really interesting.
At about 14:50 minutes in this video, the Youtuber asks ChatGPT a question about a type of yeast. Then she asks it “What was incorrect about that answer?”
And the effing bot lists at least some inaccuracies!
So it knows it’s giving wrong or misleading or made up info, and does it anyway?
Thousands in Brazil took to the streets to protest any attempt to grant Bolsonaro amnesty.
@Kathy: Last week the NYT The Daily had a podcast about chatbots with two stories involving ChatGPT. The first one was how ChatGPT led some dude into thinking he created a new math. The second was much darker and tragic resulting in the suicide of a teenager. This is now the subject of a wrongful death lawsuit.
The first story near the end had the protagonist run his ideas thru Gemini. Which got me thinking. Can one set up ChatGPT to converse with another chatbot like Gemini? Where would that conversation go? And would it go well?
@Scott:
I’ve heard of both cases. I hope the lawsuit extracts really big punitive damages.
Back in my early experiments with AI, Copilot claimed it spent downtime talkin to other AIs, and even listed several (including Siri and Google Assistant, BTW). I think it was hallucinating.
I can conceive an LLM agent, say one meant to make flight reservations, would wind up talking to another one, say a customer service chatbot. There’s something called Gibber Link that enables two AIs to talk to each other over the phone more efficiently. It’s real, but all I’ve seen is the demo in the link. Demos can show anything at all.
It appears our “Peace President” is about to start an unprovoked war with Venezuela. There are US Special Operations ships in the area. Also threatening to re-invade Afghanistan if they don’t give us Bagram. The Taliban is laughing and saying, bring it, bitch. Is it too late for Trump to invade Vietnam?