Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, July 25, 2025
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27 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
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BlueSky.
Today’s front page.
That South Park episode is brutal. And hilarious.
Mockery is the best rebellion
Continuing the decline and fall of the American Century.
Pentagon suspends participation in think tank events
It will take years, if not decades, to scrub out the corruption of Trump.
His Former Company Got Caught Employing Undocumented Workers. Now He’s Profiting Off an Immigrant Detention Camp.
As I started the Trek rewatch with the pilot ep. The Cage, I decided not to follow with the first aired ep., but rather go straight into the sequel ep., The Menagerie.
Big mistake.
It pretty much airs the entire pilot ep., with some setup and cut scenes about a present-day story of the crippled Captain pike and Spock. So about 4/5 of the time it’s the same stuff i just watched the day before….
BTW, poor Capt. Pike is reduced to communicate by only being able to express “yes” and “no”. Some really high tech help for disabled people in the future, right?
I know. Watching/reading old Sci-Fi runs into the Tom Paris Principle: how the past saw the future. Many time you don’t even notice. but sometimes you run into problems that were solved decades ago, which somehow still bedevil the very much more advanced people in the very high tech future.
More one Everand. Yesterday the app updated. This happens every few weeks and is never an issue. This time I put the current book on in my car and drove out. By the time I lost the building’s WiFi signal, the book stopped playing.
I had to park at the curb and look at the problem. The app insisted I need WiFi to play the book. I restarted the app, went to downloads and, behold, no audiobooks downloaded at all!
Never before did an update remove all downloads, and there were several…
I’m definitely cancelling, probably as soon as I finish the current book. Enshitification is one thing. Obsolescence is something else.
@Tony W:
Donald Trump’s a bitch
He’s a big fat bitch
He’s the biggest bitch in the whole wide world…
@Sleeping Dog:
Lock up your daughters.
@CSK:
Nice to see your avatar.
And…good to know that Trump has ordered flags to fly at half-mast to commemorate the passing of Hulk Hogan.
Such a tragic loss for our culture and history.
@Scott:
“the evil of globalism”
Which rather begs the question that should be put to the DoD:
What, precisely, is “globalism”, and why, exactly, is it “evil”?
The odd thing is, MAGA, the alt-Right, and the Campist left all use the term, but mean rather diffrent things by it.
Which is one reason why Russian social media operations love it so dearly.
All the various headbangers can pin thier own preconceptions upon it.
@CSK: first, happy you’re back!
Second, has Epstein caused a disturbance in the force of the magaverse? Even a blip is progress.
@becca: Well, ABC news reported last night that a subcommittee of the Oversight Committee (of the House of Representatives) had voted 8-2 to subpoena the Epstein files and that James Comer was going to sign it.
That seems like at least ripple, but I am not sure where this is gonna go.
Some of you may recall that I grew up in a town square on the Canadian border. As such, I knew people that worked for US Customs and Immigration (some of my teachers did during the summer).
The lore I received from that time is “you have no rights while entering the country”. That seemed questionable at the time. But I have seen this assertion made in current horror stories.
My own musings suggest that searches of US Citizens are not held unreasonable under the law when they are conducted when said citizen seeks to re-enter the US. No other cause is needed to conduct a search, and to ask questions. And detain you for some amount of time.
I don’t know that there is no limit to this enshrined in case law or statute, though. I have got the impression that neither courts nor Congress has had much taste for sifting through this, and has relied on *cough* normative behavior from Customs and Immigration (now CBP).
Does anyone have better information on this than me? I sure hope so. I definitely hope that, “you have no rights when entering the country” is hyperbole.
@becca:
Thank you. On July 11th, I had to get an emergency operation for an occlusion. Today I’m in rehab re-learning how to walk.
I have no idea why de stihl accused me of doxxing Beth, who’s always been open about her surname, profession, location, hildren, etc.
I’m going to ask my wife to print this up on 100 business cards (obviously will have to be front and back since he’s such a dirtball):
Consequences, of Trump’s Record:
– 64 mentions in the Epstein Report
– 97 times pleading the Fifth
– 34 felony convictions
– 91 criminal charges
– 26 sexual assault allegations
– 6 bankruptcies
– 5 draft deferments
– 4 indictments
– 2 impeachments
– 2 convicted companies
– 1 fake university shut down
– 1 fake charity shut down
Financial Penalties:
– $25 million fraud settlement
– $5 million sexual abuse verdict
– $2 million fake charity abuse judgment
– $93 million sexual abuse judgments
– $400+ million fraud judgment (Paul Leintz)
Personal Scandals:
– Cheated on all his wives
– Paid a hooker for silence but got exposed anyway
Inmate Number P01135809
The next time I have to listen to someone prattle on about Trump’s accomplishments, I plan to pull one out and tell them to skip the talk, these are Trumps’ real accomplishments. It will never a change a mind, but I will feel better.
@Kathy: Watching Breaking Bad and Hector Salamanca’s bell illustrated how dumb Starfleet was in that ep.
@Steven L. Taylor:
That probably would make sense if I had watched Breaking Bad, whatever that is.
Ok. I do know it was some kind of TV show, because the Mythbusters did an ep on it in the last season.
In Futurama’s Trek episode, they satirized the beepy chair as the witness stand. They got Shatner, Nimoy, Takei, Nicholls, and Koenig to voice their characters
This should make you feel old: 25 years ago today, the Concorde had its one fatal accident.
@Lucys Football:
“And a partridge in a pear tree.”
😉
@Steven L. Taylor:
The spinoff “Better call Saul” has a lot of backstory on Hector Slamanca and why he needs the bell.
(Clif notes version: the result of a failed attempt to kill Hector).
@Kathy:
Ever read Charles Stross’s paean to Concorde?
It really was the most amazing machine.
A civilian airliner that could say “goodnight and f@ck off “ to most military jets.
A low flying space-shuttle (I exaggerate, but barely) that actually was re-usable.
The concerted US effort to kill it still rankles in UK/France aerospace circles.
I still recall being in Windsor Great Park when when one went over (unusually for that area) on an ascent.
Big noise.
Though still nothing like a Vulcan, though, lol.
@JohnSF:
No, but I saw it overfly Mexico City a number of times, and heard it take off once* (it was rather loud).
As I recall, the US government pressured some airlines, notably Pan Am, not to take the Concorde, and to wait for Boeing’s SST built in partnership with the government. Of course, it never went past the mockup stage…
More like a lot. Aside the fact Concorde couldn’t put satellites in orbit, it was like a turtle compared to the shuttle. On reentry the latter reached Mach 25, about 12.25 faster than the former.
I’ll grant it had to deal with lower heat for a much longer period.
What killed Concorde was that no other airlines took it, despite there having been about 200 orders for it. And there were the oil shocks, the ban of flights over land, upper atmospheric pollution concerns, etc.
One measure on what an achievement it was is the proposed Overture SST by Boom Supersonic. We’re over 50 years past Concorde’s design period, and the best modern technology can do is a smaller, slower plane (~50 passengers, Mach 1.75**)
*The design of the airport at the time, 1981, included decorations over the windows that precluded much of an outside view. I saw Concorde line up and begin its takeoff roll, but that was it.
** If that much. The original announcement was a bigger plane at Mach 2.5. And if it ever gets built.
I have no doubt Trump’s DOJ will appeal.
@Kathy:
True, but so would have a brick dropped from orbit. 🙂
Concorde was in powered flight.
My teensy prdiction:
US company builds something: “Yay, yay, USA!”
Airbus builds it: “Oh noes! Oh woes! Oh horrid and rotten and wicked! Ban it now!”
@charontwo: I was talking about how he used the bell to communicate, which is pretty straightforward and Starfleet surely should have figured it out for Pike.
And BCS is awesome.
@JohnSF:
So was the shuttle, during the ascent to orbit. I don’t know how fast it got when it crossed the Karman line, but probably faster than Mach 5.
Look, it was a great engineering achievement, and the most beautiful passenger airliner of all time. But it was not rated for either space or hypersonic speeds.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Oh. Ok.
I was thinking that Stephen Hawking, with technology more primitive than should exist in Kirk’s time, was about as immobile as Pike, but could hold a conversation and write books.
Which brings me back to the Tom Paris Principle: How the past saw the future (he used this phrase in the ep where we see his Captain Proton holonovel).