Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, February 6, 2026
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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).
Follow Steven on
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BlueSky.
Two forums today?
“Why/how they love him”
…
Every morning I have a regular morning reading list (Defense News Early Bird, Memeorandum, Texas Tribune, Politico, Houston Chronicle, among others). One of my newest is Heather Cox Richardson. Every evening she sends out commentary on a variety of topics. What is amusing, she always puts in a comment (based on an aggravation factor) on whether it is OK to read it before bed or advises to wait til morning. Anyway, today’s edition was to wait until morning. For your reading pleasure: Letters from an American. That reminds me. I have to go take my blood pressure medicine.
More Trump success: Losing business in Canada.
Saab floats Gripen production hub in Canada, if Ottawa were willing
The guy who killed 400,000 Americans w his incompetence during the pandemic, who is overseeing the first major measles outbreak in decades, and whose brown shirts are abducting and killing Americans wants to be recognized for his failures.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/05/politics/schumer-trump-ny-funding-rename
@Daryl:
I suggest naming a nuclear waste storage site for him.
An alert to the public that something is going on behind the scenes is always disturbing.
Democratic senator raises ‘deep concerns’ over classified CIA activities
A little history.
A brief history of the US military’s presence in Greenland
@Scott: And Greenland is so critical to our defense that since the ’50s we’ve increased our number of bases there from 50 to 1, and staffing at that one (Pituffik nee Thule) from 10,000 to 150.
I guess double Friday fizzled…
So, we’re told EVs are dreadful in low temperatures. Last month, Norway registered sales of over 2,000 EVs, plus 29 hybrids, 98 diesel cars, and 7 gasoline cars. Good thing Norway is such a warm country year round, especially in January.
To be sure, there are such things as carbon taxes and EV tax credits. But most crucially, as this piece notes, there’s no powerful lobby to oppose the transition to EVs.
Good thing Norway isn’t like a large oil producer.
To disprove the claims that immigrants don’t assimilate to their new country, I offer this:
See? That’s the All-American attitude. They still love their home country but hate the people living in it.
@charontwo: May I add another long, depressing piece. This one from Oren Cass at NYT (gift) this morning. Cass seems committed to some mythical center-right, moderate Republicanism. He writes about the financialization of our economy. Oddly, for someone who campaigned for Mitt Romney, Cass is agin’ it. He opens recounting a scene from Mary Poppins set in a bank, with the bankers singing about the wonders of savings and investment.
He goes on in considerable detail.
Mothra and Godzilla.
Crypto and ai are battling it out over the grids. There’s not enough energy to feed both beasts.
Neither has made a real case for all the hype, either.
Crypto is still mainly for criming and the roi on ai is way overblown. Rooting for injuries, myself.
Some analysis of the recent seat flip in TX:
“Lone Star Left”
@becca:
Some of the big AI boys are building their own gas-fired electric generation plants instead of buying from the local power company – because the power companies would need to build new plants, and the AI companies can build and get online faster.
@Kathy: A large majority of USians buy their car based on extreme usage cases. Eg, put two kids and a week’s worth of clothes in the back and drive 500 miles to Grandma’s house in a single day when the temperature is 10F (-12C). That trip may not be possible in an EV if the cold-weather battery performance is poor. It’s a dumb way to choose a vehicle, but here we are.
25% of Norway’s population lives in Greater Oslo. Norway has an excellent passenger rail system. Retail gasoline/diesel is considerably more expensive than in the US. Long distance driving in winter can be problematic. Even if Norwegians are choosing based on extreme usage cases, those cases are almost certainly much less extreme than in the US.
@Scott: That is a deeply alarming letter. It’s clearly a heads-up to the rest of Congress, and to the press & public. Unfortunately, all we can do is wait and play a useless guessing game. What shall it be? Attacking Iran? Invading Cuba? Storming Greenland?
@Michael Cain:
If I bought my car under those criteria, I’d own a large SUV with removable seats in case one day I need to deliver a lot of samples. That would be a nightmare the rest of the time.
@charontwo: is Bill Gates still trying to resurrect 3-Mile Island?
Serious fears are taking hold about the job loses due to ai, especially among techie types.
That’s a bigger job loss than when buggy whips and carriages fell to the wayside.
@Jen:
It could be all three.
Here is a very long (An hour 30 mins or so) video essay from YouTube. It was made by a guy named Adam Neely that I have been following for years. It’s about AI, particularly a platform called Suno, and its impact on the music scene and industry. It goes many places. I think it’s great. It reminds me a bit of Lindsay Ellis’ work. If you go “who?” then you can probably pass this. If you think “Cool!” I think you should watch this. Adam has his own voice, but there are some really great things here. It’s pretty music-centric for a good part of it, but we bring in Aristotle and Italian Futurism, too.
The place it went that was so alarming to me – the most alarming – is when he documented how several of the AI accellerationists found out that the Biden administration was going to regulate them and so they subsequently went all-in on Trump. The leader of this is Marc Andreesen. I consider Marc Andreesen to be not as smart as either Musk or Thiel, but quite probably controls more money. Maybe not more than Thiel, but maybe yes. Andreesen can do nothing other than talk his book. He’s smarter than Trump, I’ll give him that, but that’s a low, low bar.
Even more alarming are those people who have decided they want to get off the democracy boat entirely and go create “network states”. This is a kind of updated version of a libertarian paradise.
I mean, yeah, go to Singapore or something and do this. Find out what it will mean to run your country on cryptocurrency. Do that over there. Don’t try to overthrow my country to do it here.
I feel very let down by these people. I don’t recognize these attitudes at all in any of the places I worked or people I knew. For instance, the president and CEO of Silicon Graphics when I worked there was a guy named Ed McCracken. When Ed left the company, he ended up running a foundation dedicated to providing vaccinations to poor people in third-world countries.
Not to overthrowing the government because it was ‘decel’. Ed was an early supporter of Clinton, and Clinton and Gore came to our campus in order to sign the legislation and policy stuff that made the internet possible.
Seriously, I feel betrayed.
@Michael Cain:
Hence the huge number of pickups running around with no load in the bed and nothing in tow.
@Jay L. Gischer:
Have you seen the shape of his head? Not to get all phrenology on you, but how can he not be the smartest man in any room, or not be obsessed with eggs? With that head, his fate was ordained at birth. He’s a Batman villain. Originally portrayed by Vincent Price.
Then your time in the software industry has very little in common with mine. And I envy you.
There was always a hint of this in any every founder I ever met. Smart people who think they are way smarter than they are, who think that they can see the big picture when no one else can.
And the wannabes and hangers on, who aren’t quite as smart as them, and who hang on their every word. The ones who think Idiocracy is brilliant, rather than just eugenics as a comedy (the premise is that the stupid people are outbreeding the good people… it’s eugenics).
That big picture that they can see which everyone else ignores is always eugenics. Sometimes with a very patronizing element of helping the lower people who don’t know how to help themselves, and sometimes just straight up eugenics.
People who are so smart that they think you’re agreeing with them when you say “Well, as Stalin always said, ‘you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.’”
Morons. Stupid, fucking, eugenicist morons. Some of whom have now convinced themselves that the best humans aren’t human at all, but will be post-human generative AI chatbots that tell them that their ideas are great and who will never tell them no.
Bill Gates trying to kill malaria while hanging out with Epstein fucking children is probably the best of the bunch. The children never said no. Not in a way anyone had to listen to anyway.
And the efforts to end malaria, even if they fall short of that goal, have saved far more children than he has fucked. Like Stalin said, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, as a treat.”
@Jay L. Gischer:
Andreessen strikes me as being butt-hurt for the perceived unfairness inflicted upon him by the public institutions and the legal/financial regulatory systems that provided the foundation upon which his success was built.
Perhaps he’s just not adequately revered and compensated. After all, he did co-create the first widely-used commercial web browser more than 30 years ago, yet Netscape Navigator is a relic of history to today’s college students. And despite also being cofounder of an influential VC firm, Andreessen is now worth only about $2 billion, which is an order of magnitude less than Thiel, and two orders of magnitude less than the likes of Gates, Bezos, and Musk. So it’s almost understandable that he would direct his efforts at improving his position in the billionaire boys club and undermining the institutions and systems that serve the public good.
A day or two ago we were discussing the fate of WAPO and Jeff Bezos’ motivations. POLITICO offers, Amazon’s tax bill plunges after GOP tax cuts.
Let’s see, 1.2 billion over 90 billion, 1.33% tax rate. Or 9 billion – 1.2 billion = 7.8 billion. Per year. Bezos bought the Post for 0.25 billion. Pretty good ROI on letting the Post die.
@gVOR10: Just came here to post exactly this. It’s pretty clear what Bezos’ motivation is. He ingratiated himself for a huge tax cut.
@Gustopher: @Eusebio:
I think the thing that has really twisted my tail is this clip of Andreesen laughing as he responds to Rogan saying, “you go out and endorse Donald Trump”.
Laughing. Are you laughing still, Marc? You got what you wanted.
You own Renee Good’s death. You own Alex Pretti’s death. You own the saga of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. You own all of this. I would love to put a picture of Renee Good or Pretti on a big billboard on a car with a caption that says, “You did this, Marc” and drive it by his house every day. Not that I think it would change anything. He has his billions. He thinks AI will save millions of lives, and the faster it gets here, the better.
Human beings are terrible, it seems you thinks, and should not be in charge of their own fate. Do I have that right, Marc?
@Eusebio:
It strikes me Mark feels like a loser because he hasn’t reached the penis, sorry, wealth size that marks a really successful man.
@Gustopher: Growing up, particularly in middle school and high school, I often found myself to be the smartest, most knowledgeable person in the room. That sometimes included teachers.
This was a severe threat to me socially, which I think I recognized. I worked hard to focus my values on human things, not brain things. I had a very strong need to be social, to be with other people, and simply enjoy their company, and to have them enjoy mine. I think that it might have been fairly easy to nurture the resentment that many people who have been in my situation have. I managed not to do that. I hope.
I do not regret that work I put in. I can have good ideas, and put them out there. Often they aren’t understood, or waved off because of personal interests. I am not invested, though, in things going my way. I am invested in things going in a way that is good enough for me, and for the people I care about.
I once said to a friend who was a principle engineer in a very trying situation, “Things would be so much easier if everyone just did what you said”. I meant it as a joke, one that would make him laugh and relax a bit. But he just said, “Yeah!” in a very tense, excited way.
It’s what you are talking about on a personal level. It did not seem to be a political thing with him, though.
“Ron Wyden”
@gVOR10:
But the math doesn’t end there, does it? Increased profits aside, from tax cuts Lex has ten times more money in Amazon’s pocket than he did last year. So he must have created ten times as many jobs as last year, right? Tax cuts are meant to let “job creators” like Lex “create” more jobs.
So, did he?
Meanwhile in the UK:
Peter Mandelson’s Epstein links are leaving Starmer in a very dodgy political position.
Parliament is furious.
Might the US Congress and media consider not acting like a chorus of chirping crickets?
The UK interest is valid; but is overwhelmingly focused on Mandelson and “The Andrew who was formerly Prince.”
They are missing the bigger picture.
Does anyone here know what are the parameters on Congress appointing a Special Prosecutor?
Could they appoint one to follow up the Epstein Files?
And what authority would they have re subpoena power, and for international finacial transaction investigtions?
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Melania has a rating of 1.3 at IMDb. 😀
@charontwo:
Looks like he’s putting down a marker re Tulsi Gabbard?
It’s really quite hilarious but also sad.
No US adminstation ever has had such a collection of clowns in senior intlelligence (lol) and law enforcement posts: Gabbard, Noem, Patel, Bondi etc.
At least Rubio looks good by comparison.
Which ain’t saying much.
About the XpaceS lunar lander, I need to do some more reading about it.
In brief, space travel is about speed and trajectory, with the former largely determining the latter. The upper stage of Xtarship has enough fuel at launch to make it to orbit, to decelerate enough for re-entry, and to steer a bit and land.
The lander is an upper stage. It does not have fuel to get to the Moon. To do that, it requires refueling.
To do this, Adolf needs to launch some more upper stages to orbit to transfer fuel. The chosen method thus far is to orbit one upper stage to serve as a fuel depot, then loft several to fill up the depot. Then finally the lander can launch, rendezvous with the depot, refuel, and set off for the Moon.
How many? No one knows for sure. Estimates vary between ten and 20. And “everything takes longer and costs more.” In addition, neither Adolf nor anyone else has done any large scale refueling in orbit. The techniques need to be developed. Just as Apollo required Gemini to develop and test orbital rendezvous and docking procedures.
No matter how cheaply Adolf claims his Xtarship will be, based largely on reusability, launching ten of them, best case scenario, will be expensive. Add the $4.1 billion per SLS Orion launch.
There are some advantages. The nazi claims his lander can put down 100 tons of payload on the lunar surface. That would be, to quote Cleo Abram, “HUGE, if true.”
The lander can get to lunar orbit, land, and take off. Once. After delivering the crew back to Orion, it’s a useless hunk of metal until it gets more fuel. It would need less fuel to do another lunar landing and get back into orbit, but then you have to get the fuel all the way from Earth to lunar orbit. That should take more than 10 to 20 Xtarship launches.
Lex Bezos’ Blue Moon lander has issues of its own, but I’m far less clear on how it is planned to operate.