Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, November 14, 2025
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56 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.
@Kathy:
Kathy,
I figured out how to display all icons like I wished. It required me to buy Start 11. A $20 investment that is all. My task bar is now how I like it.
Thank you again for the help.
The Florida headline of the day- Four men who plotted to cash $27 million U.S. Treasury check arrested in Broward, feds say
The headline of the day- Turkish prosecutor seeks 2,000 years for jailed opposition mayor of Istanbul
The most corrupt people in the most corrupt administration in Warren G. Harding. Yes, the Gatsby party was appropriate.
Party like its 1929.
Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts
@Bill Jempty:
You’re welcome
Another DHS Noem action:
Kristi Noem awards Houston TSA officers $10K checks for working through government shutdown
I don’t know enough about civilian personnel rules to say whether this is legal or not but it is clear that Noem and this entire administration are free and easy with taxpayer’s dollars.
Action/Reaction
Saudi Nuclear Posture After the 12-Day War
Israel’s short but destructive summer war against Iran and its brazen military strikes on Doha in September have reignited a debate across the Middle East over the value of nuclear deterrence. Gulf states also now worry that Israel’s aggression could push the Iranian leadership to finally make the leap to a bomb in order to prevent regime change.
Saudi Arabia has long desired to match the military and nuclear capabilities of its regional rivals — Iran and Israel. In the aftermath of the 12-Day War it now seems to be doubling down on a policy of nuclear ambiguity.
Trump finally [after over a decade!] dropped his health care plan.
“Everyone should just go buy health insurance. But don’t call it Obamacare!”
No subsidies, naturally. Good luck with those elections, Republicans.
Time the infinity: Go fash, lose cash.
Kind of enjoyed this article from Politico.
Inside 10 Downing Street, the creaky old house that runs Britain
Laughed out loud at this:
If not for Karoline “Tokyo Rose Garden” Leavitt, Trish McLaughlin would be the most promiscuous liar* in the administration. When an ICE or CBP goon gets a scratch on his hand while wrestling someone who LOOKS like an immigrant to the ground, McLaughlin will first deny that force was used, and then when video surfaces, she will talk about the force being necessary because the agent was being assaulted.
*I do not view Trump as a liar as much as I view him as a guy whose senility, dementia, and delusion seem to be piloting his brain.
Odd things I’ve come across:
1) I bought a brand of milk called Lac Del. It’s ok, and cheaper than other brands. In the front it states 100% cow’s milk (whew!). On the ingredients it lists something like “reconstituted 100% cow’s milk.”
My guess is it means it’s made from powdered (dehydrated) milk. But why? It costs money to dehydrate milk. And then you’d take it and just reconstitute it with water?
It could be they get some very cheap milk from very far away, which would require dehydration in order for it not to spoil on the way. Or they take surplus powdered milk a bit short of expiration and repackage it this way.
I need to get some answers on that…
2) Yesterday’s launch was meant to send two probes to Mars. It did so successfully, but the probes didn’t head to Mars right away. instead they went to the Earth-Sun L2 point, where they will wait until next year for the proper Earth Mars alignment in order to start their trajectory towards Mars.
I understand planetary alignments and minimum energy transfer orbits. What I don’t get is why do it this way, instead of just launching them next year when the alignment for the transfer orbit is in place.
Both these things strike me as examples of overcomplication.
@Kathy:
These are (relatively) inexpensive satellites, so NASA wasn’t required to use a vehicle rated for high-cost missions. Blue Origin gave them a very low price for this launch, like $50-60M off the post-certification price they will be charging for a New Glenn launch this time next year.
@Kathy: Just speculation on my part, but many governments support the dairy industry by buying milk for a strategic reserve, and dehydrating it for storage. It does have an expiration date, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they sell some of it off before then. In the US, most of it was given away as food aid, but Republicans have eliminated that, so our reserve is probably bursting at this point.
On the Halligan / Comey hearing.
When a prosecutor is addressing the grand jury is there ANY reason to fail to have a court reporter present?
Brazen hypocrisy compounded by pathological lying and moral bankruptcy.
Justice Department sues to block California US House map in clash that could tip control of Congress
—- there, I fixed it.
In fact, Governor Newsom offered a remedy, but the GOP decided to plunge ahead:
The obvious explanation: this is war.
@MarkedMan: welcome back, mm!
@Kathy: Milk is 87% water. Mssr. Wiki says Lacdel is a French product produced in Europe and Australia. It would seem that transportation costs would figure into the dehydration business plan — not limited to just the cost of physical transport but also refrigeration costs as well as risk of spoilage. A lot more powdered milk can fit into each cubic foot than that which has not been dehydrated. Not to mention the weight.
@becca: Thanks, but not really back. I check in every Friday for Steven’s picture, and happened to see Kathy’s comment on the milk, and so shared my limited insight. I’m still in low news mode. Participating in the occasional Vote Forward campaign is about my limit right now for political stimulation.
It does seem that I don’t see as many trolls as before? Or do they just not participate in the open thread?
@Bill Jempty:
Guy: “So yeah, a carton of Marlboros and 2 Powerball Tickets.
And can we cash a paycheck here?”
Clerk: “The check? Nope, but try the Mar-a-Lago Grift Shop just up the road.”
At least Florida gives us these headlines.
@MarkedMan: registration reduced the troll issue. Miss your insights, but totally get the pause.
@Michael Cain:
Sure, but the mission was designed years earlier. Interplanetary missions have years of lead time. so NASA approved this mission with the wait time at L2 (probably). I suppose it fits if Lex offered a discount years ago, rather than more recently.
@MarkedMan:
Mexico’s government operates an agency that distributes cheap milk and some other staples, but my understanding is they never have enough. I doubt they have any surplus. If they do, it would qualify as a cheap source of dehydrated milk.
@Rob1:
The one I got is made in Mexico by a company called Alpura (short for something like dairy cattle ranchers and producers of pure milk). It’s their cheap brand.
Yesterday was a tough day, we needed to put our Pug, Tucker down. He suffered from a collapsing trachea and was essentially choking to death. It came on a few weeks ago and we knew it would be when, not if, the moment would come. For a couple of weeks he responded well to medication, though that began to effect him as well. This week he took a turn for the worse and after a bad night Wednesday, we knew it was time.
RIP Tucker
I served on a Grand Jury in 1989*. Jackson County, Illinois. Not Federal. I can remember the room in the courthouse and very little about the several cases presented by the County Prosecutor. There may well have been a court reporter in the room but I can’t remember for sure.
*I remember the year because after the last grand jury session I went to the Ford dealer and picked up a new 1989 F-150.
@Sleeping Dog: what a cutie. I’m so sorry for your loss. Been there and done that so many times over the years. Every creature companion loss makes me think “why put yourself through that pain ever again”. But they are so worth it.
@Kathy: When I was stationed in northern Japan in a fairly rural location in the mid-eighties, the commissary carried what was called filled milk. Basically, the milk fat was replaced by vegetable oil. More shelf life, more shelf stable. It was disgusting.
@becca: @Sleeping Dog:
Yes, they are. And a good reminder to go and hug my dogs again.
These people are a danger to the country.
FBI Director Kash Patel Waived Polygraph Security Screening for Dan Bongino, Two Other Senior Staff
@Scott:
That kind of product is sold here. I t can’t be marketed as milk, though. In Spanish it’s called “formula lactea.” The literal translation would be dairy formula. More accurate it might be rendered as dairy-based formula.
I’ve never tried it.
These days to conserve milk longer there’s UHT (ultra high temperature) pasteurization, often called also ultra pasteurization. Once treated this way, the milk lasts 6 months or so without refrigeration as long as the container is not opened.
@Kathy:
Basically, that’s what happened. ESCAPADE’s budget didn’t include launch service because it was supposed to be a ride-along on the Psyche asteroid flight. When that couldn’t happen, NASA went looking for an inexpensive ride and the New Glenn test flights were the only ones cheap enough. So the choices were (a) figure out some way to match Blue Origin’s schedule or (b) cancel the mission.
@Sleeping Dog:
Sorry for your loss.
It’s never easy to let got of a pet. It sometimes feel unfair they live such short lives compared to ours.
@Sleeping Dog: Hugs. I had to put my cat King Richard of Spot down last week. He was 12. He had developed eye cancer, and it was spreading at a high rate of speed. Any longer and the tumors in his nose and throat would’ve suffocated him. He got all the loves and one last night of sleeping in the girl’s bed. 🙁
@Sleeping Dog:
My condolences.
It’s always hard.
I can still both smile and mourn at the memories of two beloved dogs.
It would have been a poorer life without their merry souls.
@Jax: what a great name. Condolences all around.
@Sleeping Dog: I’m so sorry for your loss. It is never easy to say goodbye to a furry family member.
Our shepherd mix is now 15–quite old for a larger dog. We know our time with her is drawing short, and we’re both dreading the time when we’ll need to make that call. Thinking of you both.
@Jen: years ago Mr becca brought home a 100 pound puppy he almost hit darting in and out of traffic on the Nashville Loop. Grew to be 250 pounds. We loved Big Joe to pieces. The Green Hills Veterinary Clinic nicknamed him Tiny. He didn’t sniff crotches, he sniffed armpits. He lived almost 10 years and the vet said that was truly remarkable for his size.
Long way to say you did right by your fur baby.
@Bill Jempty:
Thinking of you Bill. Hope yopu’re doing well.
Now I understand how and why Carl Hiaasen can write so many great stories – he has so much (maybe too much) material to work with.
I spend more time than I care to acknowledge wondering if the people in this administration are acting stupid, or are actually stupid. Today’s entry is…this.
@becca: Ohhh, thank you. The mind-blowing thing is that we almost lost her in 2020, she took a tumble and started acting funny an hour later. We rushed her to the emergency vet, where an x-ray showed a massive tumor in her abdomen. They operated the next day, and she recovered well. It’s now been FIVE years since that operation–another third of her life. Vet says she’s “quite spry” for her age.
She’s a trooper!
@Jen:
I don’t say this often: OMG!
One can most easily act stupid by being stupid, something all humans have ample experience of. I’d say a good marker of acting vs natural stupidity would be gilding the lily*, because no one could be that stupid.
Except we tend to give people more credit and the benefit of the doubt.
I mean, an economist has to know what deflation is and what causes it.
It’s also possible the need to act stupid habituates one into stupidity, so there’s no tangible difference any longer.
“No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” George Orwell.
*No, Shakespeare wrote “to gild refined gold, to paint the lily.” But the popular expression is the one I used.
@becca:
@Scott:
@Kathy:
@Jax:
@JohnSF:
@Jen:
Thank you all.
Given that he was frequently underfoot, I’ve spent the day still stepping around him. We’ve had at least a dozen dogs over the years, often two or three at a time and it never gets any easier.
@Sleeping Dog:
Add my name to that list.
I’m mulling over an idea. I’ve said a few billion times that space travel won’t become commonplace until and unless there’s profit to be made on Mars, the Moon, the asteroids, etc. I maintain that’s so.
Not obviously related, human population growth has slowed down a great deal, even in places where it’s still growing. Forecasts are for the population to stabilize at around 10.5 billion in the last quarter of this century, or maybe as low as 9 billion by the middle of the century (under 30 years from now).
If the population stops growing, or even declines and then stabilizes, where will economic growth come from?
This assumes that population growth drives economic growth. At the least, they are related. If more people are alive this year than there were last year, the consumption of everything, from food to cars, will go up, so more of it needs to be grown, mined, or made.
Society would work fine if both population and economy stopped growing, I think. but the rich would no longer grow richer, unless they took more wealth from the rest of us. Also, savings won’t yield squat. Investment turns to expenses, merely to maintain production levels rather than increase them.
Of course, some new developments could launch new industries that would grow. How many cell phones were made in 1950 vs last year? How many computers? How many web based streaming services in the 1990s?
So, how about instead we develop space in order to keep the economy growing?
I don’t mean off Earth settlements would grow their populations, though that seems inevitable, but that money could be spent to produce more materials, more machines, more software, more entertainment, etc. that will be required to first explore the solar system and then to settle such parts of it that prove amenable to it.
Maybe Adolf Muxk, Lex Bezos, at. al. were simply born 50 or 60 years too early.
Or maybe I seriously do not understand economics.
Thank you all for all your your good wishes. Sadly, I had to have my right lower leg amputated. The fasciotomy healed, my heel rotted
I hope none of you are dining
@Kathy:
It’s really quite obvious that material production growth has limits.
No growth can be exponential indefinitely.
But there are not just hard supply contraints of physics and available matter.
There are also demand limits.
Few sensible household actually want 100 cars and a dozen washing machines and refrigerators.
As for services, there are also limits.
Healthcare can only deal with one body per person.
You can’t eat more than a certain amount per day.
You can only read/view one website at a time.
etc etc etc
There are limits to time and related attention.
There remains a considerable amount of growth potential to bring the poor in the rich countries, and the majority in poorer countries up to whatever the satiation point is.
But there is, inevitably, a satiation point.
The experience of colonial expansion on this planet, I’d argue, is that generally they are created by those already prosperous, and add only marginally to the metropolitan properity.
The loss of empires by Europe seems to have had little real impact; and the role of colonies in the wealth revolution in Europe post 1800 is much debated.
Germany for example only acquired colonies after it industrialised, not before.
The US, like other “sub-continental expansive” countries (also Russia, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Argentina) had a slightly diffrent trajectory, because the new regions were more tightly integrated.
There seems no prospect in the medium term (say 100 years) of any “space expansion” generating a self-sustaining economic exponentiation S-curve.
IMHO, space will remain a “luxury good”, on which a stabilised, but very wealthy, Earth can spend a marginal amount of resources just for the heck of it.
Space settlement on large scale is going to require an industrial/technical base a long way ahead of current levels to be considered a reasonable project.
Consider: nobody is seriously projecting massive settlement (given current climates, which may alter) of the high Arctic, or the central Sahara, or the Australian “dead centre”.
All of which are orders of magnitude easier to do, and more likley to have at least some returns on investment than settling Mars, or the Moon, or wherever.
Any such activities, imho, are going to be more like the Antarctic bases, or Arctic oil or mining camps/towns, or offshore oil-rigs, than genuinely self-sustaining settlement.
That is, exploration/science bases, or mining operations, or combinations of both.
@CSK:
I’m so sorry to hear that.
If I had a god who might listen, I’d pray.
As it is, I can but wish you well.
@JohnSF:
Thank you, John.
I’ve never said “fuck”so much in my life.
@JohnSF:.. If I had a god who might listen, I’d pray.
When anyone tells me to pray. I tell them that I do not presume to tell god what to do.
@CSK: I am so sorry to hear that. Thinking of you.
@Kathy: How about growing the economy via making better stuff rather than more stuff? Whole milk from pasture fed cows rather than reconstituted dried stuff, Microsoft software that doesn’t need work around add-ons, etc. I want butter like the stuff in Normandy. Real crispy apples not the varieties in our supermarkets. Thick socks of Icelandic wool. Better/not more!
@CSK:
You’re entitled to.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
If I believed in gods, I’d certainly presume.
Because they arguably seem to need a hint, from time to time.
@CSK: I am so sorry.
@JohnSF:..deities…
Adonai and his Asherah
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
Personally I’d opt for Minerva, Apollo, Pan, Bacchus, and Flora.
😉
@JohnSF: Really good comment.