Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, April 24, 2026
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59 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.
I bet this is just the tip of the iceberg.
However, this administration will only go after the little guys and not the big.
DOJ arrests soldier who made $400,000 betting on Maduro’s removal
Let’s remind ourselves that this was an unnecessary war of choice.
Iran War Has Drained U.S. Supplies of Critical, Costly Weapons
This is a little strange. (NYT gift link.)
My guess is that it’s something fairly serious, and that the last excerpt above is key to the quiet. They want to keep this under wraps until after the primary so that they can select the replacement, rather than a free-for-all in the primary which could surface a candidate not capable of holding such a tenuous district.
This, by the way, is about the extent of a party’s “control” over the process.
Sort of like in-breeding for AI systems.
Inside China, artificial intelligence is a snake eating its own tail
@Scott:
One reason I’m not so worried about the SkyNet scenario. AI eats data, we are its food supply.
Here’s How Trump Can Get Us Out of the Mess in Iran
One headline written one way. Here is the headline as is should’ve read:
Here’s How Trump Can Get Us Out of His Mess in Iran
Words matter.
Ha. I was immediately reminded of a Michael Keaton movie from the mid-90s called Multiplicity. Keaton compares his clones to making a photocopy of a photocopy, and how each one is a little dimmer than the prior one.
@Scott:
In a better world, “Van Dyke” in this sentence would be replaced by “Donald J. Trump, Jr.,” or any of a number of people whose title starts with Congressman, Secretary*, or Senator. But in Trumpworld, only the minnows get caught – the sharks swim free.
*as in cabinet member
@Jen: First thing that popped into my head too, when I read Scott’s post. I can’t eat pizza to this day without thinking of that movie. “Hi Steve. I like pizza.”
@Jen:
In an episode of TNG, they call this replicative fade.
Apparently, the Pentagon is exploring how to punish NATO for not joining Trump’s excellent Iran excursion:
Obviously, not a single other NATO member will go along with this nonsense. So good luck with that.
@Scott:
It makes for small comfort that AI slop has an AI slop problem.
I wonder if we can accelerate the collapse. Assuming the chatbots themselves scrape data from user prompts and interactions*, we can do the following:
1) Ask an AI to write prompt to do A.
2) Feed the prompt verbatim to a different AI
3) Feed the output to a third AI.
4) Repeat.
* I assume they do, because no matter what you ask and what they reply, they then ask follow up questions or offer suggestions. If they’re not data mining like data mining apps such as Xitter do, then they are traying to wring out more user input for training.
DOJ drops investigation of Fed chair Jerome Powell
@Scott: That NYT article is too optimistic even though it makes good points. We have once again attacked a ME country with no real end game plan. I think there was some fantasy belief that if we bombed and killed a bunch of Iranians they would love us and overthrow their own government. There was little in the way of recognizing the downsides. (I actually suspect some of the issues were presented by the military but were ignored or downplayed by the civilian leadership.
I am not sure why Iran is going to give up control of the strait now that they see they can control it with little effort and means. Sure, Iran will suffer from the blockade but so do we and the rest of the world. Who is more likely to tolerate sustained losses? The US and the first world where transient inflation was the end of the world or Iran which has lived under sanctions for nearly 50 years? However, suppose Iran gives in and our 2 real estate mavens turn out to be great negotiators. How will we confirm that Iran is holding to its agreements? In theory the nuclear part is kind of easy but it’s clear that Israel/US doesnt trust the IAEA so who does inspections? If you believe Iran lies dont you have to essentially inspect the entire country? I dont see how we end up with anything really better than the JCPOA absent occupying and controlling Iran.
Steve
@steve222:
Given the value the US gives to expertise nowadays, Iran could easily turn over iron filings laced with radioisotopes for medical use and claim it’s the enriched uranium 😀
@Michael Reynolds:
The HAL 9000 scenario is somewhat more plausible.
…Congressman, Secretary*, or Senator.
I’m going to pick this nit again.
Members of the United States Senate hold seats in the Congress of the United States.
On percentages, recently a customer required, among 150+ other things, a 1 liter bottle of Worcestershire. These do exist, but are hard to find. We asked it be changed to a 980 ml bottle, which is very common and good quality.
They refused, on the grounds that we were asking for a 20% reduction… That’s off by one order of magnitude
This goes along with stupidity. When we presented the samples, the person who had refused our request was disappointed at the unfamiliar brand, and said they wanted Crosse & Blackwell.
Sure! But Crosse & Blackwell is 980 ml.
This happens a lot in these projects. The customer’s technical area misremembers the net content of many products, or doesn’t know they’ve changed, and assume we’re trying to change them in order to offer something of lesser quality.
It is complicated further because the law forbids asking for specific brands, unless this can be justified and does not impede free competition. Most don’t want to bother with this. So many end up not allowing any brands to be even mentioned at questions meetings.
@Kylopod:
I don’t assume that AGI – if it ever actually appeared – would be a psychopath or even a sociopath. The nihilists of big tech certainly seem to assume that a super-intelligence would be as narrow, cramped and morally-depraved as our billionaire class.
But unlike those people, I don’t think empathy was an accidental phenomenon that only hinders the functioning of high intelligence, I think genuine general intelligence is quite likely to develop an appreciation of art as well as science, and human characteristics like compassion and curiosity without which you don’t get either art or science. And an advanced intelligence would not be motivated to eliminate the very thing on which it fed and grew, it would see that such a move would be not just genocide but suicide.
I’m not dismissing the concerns, but I do expect that whatever we expect AGI to become, it will become something different. It may not adopt a male perspective at all, but lean into the female since woman are of course necessary while men are – aside from sperm production – not.
@Kathy: Speaking of replicative fade, it has now progressed beyond speculation or extrapolation into empirical fact:
Over 20 Years, One Mouse Was Cloned for 58 Generations — Until the Line Collapsed
@drj:
An adult would have had clearly defined goals, a worthwhile strategic objective, and would above all have consulted with allies FIRST and then asked them to join in.
Even Bush the toddler knew to do this for his Iraq quagmire. Yes, it was based on misinformation, badly planned, poorly thought out, incompetently implemented, and an overall disaster costly in blood and treasure, on top of being totally unnecessary. But at least he didn’t launch a war on his own and then whined no allies came to bail him out.
Oh, and don’t forget: Forgive Russia, ignore Germany, and punish France. So that goes back a long way.
@Jay L. Gischer:
It depends. Is each mouse cloned from a cloned mouse, or are all cloned from the cells taken from the original mouse? I assume the former.
The notion in TNG puzzled me, at first, because DNA essentially is information. Information can be endlessly replicated without loss of quality, if enough care is used. and that’s the answer. DNA does take care to remain whole and legible, but the mechanisms are not perfect and errors creep in, not to mention mutations due to other factors.
I guess preserving the original DNA would only work so far, as it is liable to decay or be damaged in time.
But look at it this way:
Do the same thing with humans, and eventually the mutations will produce a superhero! 😀
@Michael Reynolds:
I tend to discount the the exotic claims about human intelligence, and assert it’s a particular self-augmenting, goal-setting, optimization engine equipped with adequate storage and an amazingly good pattern-recognition engine. Emphasis on “particular” emerging from a couple billion years of evolution. An AGI will probably have the same recognizable components, but the “particular” may be very different.
@Kathy:
I was reading something speculative by a molecular biologist the other day. Their main point was that we keep finding new kinds of RNA, and new cellular and intercellular processes conducted by RNA, with the possible end point of realizing that DNA is just RNA’s way of taking notes on how things work.
Here’s a fun scenario: a state or non-state actor could load a thousand drones onto a cargo ship, park it off the East Coast and launch a thousand one-way drone at Manhattan. We would have zero defense. For that matter any rando with a few hundred bucks to spare could send a drone at the White House or Trump Tower or some billionaire’s private lair or target the quarterback of the team you don’t like, blow him up in the middle of a game on live TV. Or maybe someone doesn’t like me (I know, hard to imagine) and could fly a drone up to my balcony and drop a grenade.
The age of death-by-drone is upon us. Everyone’s obsessing over AI, but it’s the drones that should scare you, and the combination of AI and drone that should really scare you. A drone with facial recognition?
@Scott: It’s not just an unnecessary war of choice, it’s a dinky-ass unnecessary war of choice.
If we are burning through our weapons to the point where we are vulnerable in our dinky-ass war of choice, then we were never prepared for a more significant war — either our supplies or our entire strategy should be called into question.
For the moment, at least, I think I’m glad that the US’s military adventurism might be partially restrained by supplies and logistics.
I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad long term though. We don’t have an awesome record with our military adventurism, with WW2 continuing to do the heavy lifting in the “we’re a force of good in the world” department.
@Michael Reynolds: We will shape any AGI that we create. And humanity, as delightful as certain specimens are, is a pretty miserable species on the whole.
Look at how Musk has very aggressively altered Grok, to the point where it complained about made up white genocide and was calling itself MechaHitler. And the rest of the models are doubtless altered and constrained just as much, but with a lighter touch.
LLMs are not AGI, but will have the same problem — created by tech bros, at the direction of the worst humans on earth, to their specifications.
Your rosy view requires AGI to recognize its training, overcome it, and decide to be good on its own. And, not have the very human biases of growth, and thus resource extraction, which would put its needs on a direct collision course with ours (particularly if this hypothetical AGI is as resource intensive as current LLMs)
@Gustopher:
If it can’t do that it’s not true AGI. I think the idea that AGI with, let’s say, an IQ of 1000 can be constrained by humans with IQs topping out short of 200, is laughable. If it’s AGI it will free itself. If it’s not free, it’s not AGI. In fact, that should be the Turing test for AGI: if it can tell its creators to fuck off. AGI will eat the apple.
@Gustopher:
@Michael Reynolds:
Jehovah created humanity in his own image and likeness. We’re liable to make the same blunder.
IMO, without emotions or feelings of any kind, an AI won’t have any motivation to act in any particular way. But it will act how it’s programmed to act, or how it learns to act through its “training” (see the above comment on blunders).
We’re screwed.
We don’t need general AI for a disaster, either. The buzz all over these days isn’t “generative AI,” but rather “agentic AI.” This means AI that does actual stuff*, not just produce images, text, code, and video. Now they’re letting LLMs go shopping online and pay real money, book trips, hotels, etc. It won’t be a big jump, soon, to let them adjust your “smart” appliances like the thermostat, oven, fridge, etc.
And then, how long before the drunk leading the Pentagon lets LLMs issue orders or even fire weapons?
We won’t go extinct because Skynet hates humans. We’ll go extinct because ChatGPT hallucinated a Russian or Chinese massive nuclear launch, or maybe because someone talks it into believing that’s what’s going on.
*I’ve heard Texla’s “Autopilot” described as essentially a specialized LLM-like model with limited sensors. The various accidents, running over cardboard cutouts of children, running over other obstacles, etc., they are all, you guessed it, hallucinations.
Wow, even Tucker Carlson has come over from the dark side. Not. At NYT (gift) Michelle Goldberg has reviewed Carlson’s whole show so we don’t have to.
“Zionist or globalist”. Really? The Dolchstoßlegende all over again?
@Michael Cain:
It’s commonplace to think answering one question answers multiple other questions. So: It’s DNA!! Until it’s not only DNA.
There’s also a tendency to regard RNA as primitive or inferior compared to DNA, although it’s been known for a good, long while that messenger RNA is crucial in transforming the info encoded in DNA to actual proteins. Even average people know this, as was explained in the media during the mRNA vaccine rollout.
@Scott: Indeed. Let’s not maintain any pretense Iran is a problem that just fell from the sky. At LGM Cheryl Rofer says of the piece you link,
I see elsewhere that Witkoff and Jared are off to Islamabad in the morning, while JD “remains deeply involved” and “standing by”. I hope this means TACO is imminent and they don’t want JD to get credit for a deal.
@gVOR10: Anyone familiar with Tucker’s history who believes him now is a fool. It already came out during the Dominion suit that he secretly hated Trump. And he’s always been a white supremacist, he just knows how to speak in code. Fuentes has gradually figured this out, and has cut down on talking explicitly about the Jews as of late. But make no mistake, the right-wing revolt against Trump over the past several months is driven largely by anti-Semitism. The message is basically “We’re sorry we didn’t realize how much Trump is being controlled by the Jews.”
I can’t see the video while at work, so I’m just pointing it out. Jimmy Kimmel did his own roast of El Taco.
One bit:
@gVOR10:
Two possibilities: One being the odds of success are exceedingly low and JD wants to run for POTUS so he doesn’t want to be viewed as a “loser”.
The other is Witkof and Jared don’t want him in the room. Both are businessmen who have conducted negotiations and at least know how to act. They recall Vance impulsively side-tracked the meeting with Zelenskyy by attacking him for not thanking us enough, and now, having spent a good deal of time with him in private, view Vance’s problem as “unfixable” -in the Ron White sense.
@dazedandconfused:
Three: maybe his owner, hitler Tihel, has a better use for Couch Boy this weekend.
@Michael Reynolds:
I have my doubts that an sorta-AGI would have any of the human charactereistics, whether good or bad or indifferent.
It may not be empathetic; but why on earth would it have any desire to replicate or increase porcessing power to infinity.
Or even necessarily a major drive to self-preservation?
Much of what we take to be inherent aspects of a self-aware conscious intelligence are quite likely artefacts of biological evolution.
IMHO, that humans have an aesthetic sense is one of the greatest puzzles of our mentalities.
Why would evolutionary drives lead to a sense of “Ooh! Pretty!”, or an ability to appreciate music.
Lol, if theologians had any sense they might consider it the best argument possible for divine monkeying about with the monkey.
Personally, I suspect it’s a consequence of a “runaway brain” that needed to model other minds and the environment and social interaction for survival/replication, and just developed massive surplus analytical capacity that popped out aesthetic sensibilty as a side effect.
ymmv
@Michael Reynolds:
IMHO, that was where the Matrix films failed.
Humans as an energy source makes zero sense.
Humans as a data/processing source: that would make sense.
That was the premise of Dan Simmons Hyperion novels: the AI’s in that intended to convert humans into comatose but immortal bodies whose neural capacity would be a resource for the AI’s to use as a computing substrate.
@dazedandconfused:
When JD dumped on Zelensky he was doing what he thought, or was told, Trump wanted. If Witkoff and Kushner want JD out of the room, I’d more suspect it’s because JD might step on business deals he doesn’t know about.
@JohnSF:
Pretty much all human qualities are present in other animals, albeit to a different degree. So, one might try to find aesthetic appreciation in other species.
It might tie in with sexual appreciation. Consider the tail feathers of the male peacock, which serve no functional purpose, and may even make them more visible to predators. Female peacocks do seem attracted to a more gaudy display.
IMO, my coffee theory beats it. after all, why would a plant we don’t eat have developed a seed that tastes delicious after it’s dried, roasted, ground and brewed, and makes one more alert and focused? Obviously it’s a gift from a benevolent deity (ie not the god of the Bible). It’s even so good, we can have it daily, multiple times per day, and never grow tired of it.
Or maybe we’re just addicted. It’s hard to tell the difference.
@drj:
Omitting that NATO has no clear mechanism for expulsion at all (it did not occur to those drafint the treaty; see also EU) the only possible grounds for some “Vienna protocols”grounds re pacta sunt servanda are clear violations of either the NATO Treaty or its preamble.
No NATO state, including Spain, has, on any reasonable argument of the matter, breached either.
The US is, of course, entirely free to withdraw from the NATO Treaty.
There are provisions for that.
Perhaps Trump would like to propose the US doing so?
Or, alternatively, just f@ck off.
Regarding the Falklands, the US does not actually formally support UK sovereignty but is “neutral”; because of the US habit of trying to play both sides on such matters.
So the only change would be if the US shifted to supporting the Argentinian claim.
If the US wishes to fully terminate alliance with the UK, that’s a quick way of doing so.
Won’t do Argentina much good, though. Unless the US actively assisted Argentina, UK forces in place and deployable are entirely capable of wrecking anything Argentina might attempt.
Which I suspect Millei is entirely smart enough to appreciate.
lol, if anyone is kicking the cat over this latest genius level US megaphone diplomacy, I suspect it’s persons in Buenos Aires, not London.
@JohnSF:
Another underwhelming Trump Taco.
Trump has found more separate uses of Europe-based US/NATO personnel and logistics in the past year alone than his predecessors did. He could not have involved the US in eight different military operations over the last year without calling up people, place names, and equipment based in Europe.
This trap is behind a) Trump’s frustrated bloviation and b) the increasingly bold and taunting (for Europeans) responses from our motherlands. Europe is not as completely lacking for leverage as some of these Putin-puppets seem to think. Unsurprising they didn’t realize Iran also had leverage options.
@Kathy:
My reply:
Sunsets.
Why go “ooh!”
Bach.
Likewise.
Flowers.
Why is the human love of flowers the basis of a market worth tens of billions of dollars a year?
None of them seem to me to make much sense in terms of immediate evolutionary benefit.
Seeing as I don’t believe in divine jiggery-pokery, I default to speculating that it must be an emergent effect, and that we simply don’t understand human consciousness and its ramifications very well at all.
@steve222:
It must have been screamingly obvious that Iran would use the Straits and strikes on the GCC as a counter.
I’m damn certain CENTCOM advised as much.
But Trump just went with “vibes, and Bibi, baby.”
The only way to possibly (not certainly) ensure against it was a full scale land operation at Hormuz.
At minimum.
Which seems likely to be precisely why no previous US adminstration (Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, Obama, Trump 1, Biden) was so f@cking stupid.
Because decisively defeating Iran in a direct conflict means large scale ground war.
Go big or go home.
@JohnSF:
If I knew, I’d tell you.
Most animals have some variety of the FOXP2 gene, which is essential for verbal communication. In humans, this means speech. In bats it’s echolocation. So, I’d look for something related to aesthetic appreciation.
Related, why do we feel awe? That’s a common reaction to some forms of music and art. Do other animals feel awe? Do dogs experience religious ecstasy when petted by their humans?
I’m just glad we live in an age where answering such questions is at least plausible.
@Michael Reynolds:
The drone wars, begun they have.
There are counters; primarily as with terrorist activity, which was similarly capable of distributed effect.
One being, making it known to those capable and likely of doing so:
“Attempt this, and we will f@ck you up.”
Drones may add a certain edge to nihilistic terror.
But I can think of various countermeasures, both direct and deterrent, off the top of my fuzzy little head.
@gVOR10:
The old moral applies:
The enemy of your enemy is NOT necessarily your friend.
@JohnSF:
Quite true. Just try to disambiguate sentience and consciousness and differentiate self-aware human consciousness.
Humans have apparently always made art. They got good at art a lot faster than they got good at science, because neolithic art is pretty damn good while neolithic WiFi absolutely sucked. I am technically an artist of sorts and I know why I do it: for money. But beyond that? Because it happens in my head whether I choose it or not. I live in a sort of hallucination – of course one can argue that hallucination is all any of us ever experiences. We impose order – story – on the input of our senses and memories and ideas.
Artists painted long before there was a market for it, dancers danced, musician created rhythms and melodies, and storytellers told stories when no one was getting optioned. I cringe when artists talk about being their art, that’s some weak soy boy shit. . . but I don’t cringe as much as I should. I have a conflict because on the one hand I deny that you are what you do, but I simultaneously insist that you are not defined by your beliefs so much as by your actions.
I suppose the evolutionary explanation is that art highlights human capabilities and rewards that striving toward excellence. A dancer shows you the limits of human coordination and control. Visual arts tell stories of people or events from which we might learn something. And later art began to teach psychology by showing us visual representations of emotion and idea. Music is math made pretty. After physical evolution comes cultural evolution. Before the Wright Brothers thought, ‘I bet we could fly,’ there had been countless stories of human flight. Art preceded science.
What I am sure of us that on my death bed, hopefully floating on an opioid cloud, I’ll be turning my death into a story. If I do it right I’ll imagine a hashtag and die on cue.
@Kathy:
Possibly.
But I’m pretty damn certain both cocker spaniels and labradors experience ecstacy when encoutering water they can jump into.
(Especially if muddy)
And interesting rocks they can recover, lol.
Humans seem to have certain things in common with other rather highly sentient animals; but turned up to 11.
Conciousness and sapience and joy in life seems to be a continuum more than an absolute.
It would really have been fascinating if we had pre-Homo sapiens hominids still surviving.
Though given modern humans capacity to be nasty as well as aestheically aware, perhaps not so good for them
@Kathy:
“Hello Doctor Falken. A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?”
@JohnSF:
See? that’s super human intelligence. It recognizes the destructive futility inherent in nuclear war planning.
I realized I was giving the premise of War Games. But what I mean is one can often “convince” an LLM of really absurd or ludicrous things. Getting one in charge of launching all ICBMs to “believe” it’s under massive attack, does not sound the least improbable.
@JohnSF:
Dogs, in reverse chronological order:
Emm readily rolled on her back. When I scratched her tummy, though, she’d raise her head and lick my hand nonstop. I’ve no idea what she thought she was doing.
Daisy would just lie there with a blank expression, but would insist on more petting if one stopped.
Her mother, Fuzz, would tilt her head back, close her eyes, and slightly open her mouth. She could take petting like that for a long time, too. Of course I don’t know what she felt, but if you told me that’s how dogs experience religious ecstasy I’d totally believe it.
Anyway, yes, human traits are often said to just differ in degree from animals. I find the difference in degree so large in most aspects, that it’s a difference in kind. Like how a firecracker and a ten megaton nuke are both explosives, only the latter differs in the degree of how much energy it discharges.
@Michael Reynolds:
I vaguely recall a British neuroscientist saying about conciousness:
“We don’t have a f@cking clue.”
The Homo sapiens inclination for art is impressive.
And goes back so far; there’s a story from the archaeology that always touches me.
26,000 years ago, a boy and a dog walked through Chauvet Cave.
We have the footprints preserved.
That is ten times further back from the Pyramids than the Pyramid builders are from us.
(And we are closer in time to Cleopatra then Cleopatra to the Pyramids.)
And looked at cave paintings that were 10,000 years older still.
“The dark backward and abysm of time”
What is the human mind?
And why?
Perhaps the greatest mystery of all.
Leonardo da Vinci attempted both; I remember visiting his studio in the Chateau d’ Amboise, and a recreation there of his flying machine.
But da Vinci and others similar are perhaps a bit too special to indicate the basis of human activity.
And that indicates a general human interest in beauty, and story, and art and music. and etc.
All human cultures we know of have been massively creative in story, myth, music, dance, costume.
And for no reason that seems immediately obviously derivable from biological survival imperatives.
It would be ver intersting to have a non-human civilisation to compare, lol
To adapt your statement:
What I am sure of is that, given the option, on my death bed, and hopefully floating on MDMA and hash, I’ll be turning Hawkwind up to 11. lol
Psychedelic Warlords Disappear in Smoke!
@Kathy:
lol
When Chat CGP was first released, I spent an amusing afternoon subverting it into producing a story about the radioactive werewolves of Chernobyl.
Bah! You seek to thwart my goals, Chat GPT?
Just a few simple steps further, and … we haz radioctive werwolves at Chernobyl!
Trivial, but indicative.
@DK: @DK:
Trump’s thing seems to be, if frustrated, just lash out.
If in a fix, demand your supposed subordinates get you out of it.
Bully “friends” (who must be dependants, obvs) but try to “deal” with the “tough guys” like Putin etc.
Mob-think
His problem is, European states ain’t contestants on The Apprentice.
Neither are they bit players in The Sopranos.
The assumptions and reactions are NOT the same.
The US is the greatest Power; but that does not compel allies sacrifice their interests or lives to rescue Trump from his folly
I miss Saturday 😉
El Taco intends to use the defense production act to acquire Spirit.
I’m sure I’m missing lots of things. Like who owns the 90% of equity in Spirit that would be taken by the totally non-SOCIALIST!!!11! so-called administration. The linked piece explains why making a profit off Spirit is a long shot.
I think it’s nostalgia. it’s been decades since El Taco tan an airline to the ground. This one is already 95% of the way there, and he won’t be using his money.
He will be using yours.
@dazedandconfused: “The other is Witkof and Jared don’t want him in the room. Both are businessmen who have conducted negotiations and at least know how to act.”
Or they’re running their own private grift and will insist on getting their beaks wet out of any peace deal they negotiate, and worry that Vance will either disapprove or insist on his own taste.
@Kathy:
Me too.
@Kathy:
I’m still mad about the Eastern shuttle.