Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, July 14, 2025
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52 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 will never sing as well as Bjork. I will never dance as well as Cindy Wilson.
That’s okay.
I’m very inadequate.
This sounds like a horrible way to die. https://www.yahoo.com/news/flesh-eating-maggots-inching-toward-142123379.html
The Guardian posted this story about the Trump DOJ dropping charges against a doctor who destroyed covid vaccines. I guess they thought it made a good headline. However, the real crime here was that he told parents he was giving their kids the covid vaccine but instead gave them a saline injection. As reported, he lied to the parents and the kids. He works in Utah and AFAICT he still has his license and faces no criminal charges. I guess if you work in a red state you can lie about giving kids any other vaccines or medicines of which you dont approve. As a parent and a physician I think this guy should not be practicing and should face some jail time.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/13/doj-utah-doctor-covid-vaccines
Steve
Bad will drive out good. Gresham’s Law on a governmental scale. That is Trump Administration in a nutshell.
Pentagon Withdraws U.S. 7th Fleet Commander Nomination
It’s a little late, no?
Senators Seek Guardrails Against JAG Firings in Must-Pass Defense Policy Bill
Interesting for defense heads:
The piece goes on to point out that DoD has not proposed any long-term financing and building plan which means shipbuilders are not going to invest big money in increased capacity. Why no long-term plan? Because that would require a SecDef who wasn’t an idiot weekend talk show host.
On Friday we took our younger dog Leia (age 11) to the vet after she spent a night just acting kind of under the weather. Lethargic, strange breathing patterns, etc. She was doing quite well by the time we got her to the vet, but we figured might as well get her checked out. Fluids analyses showed nothing wrong, but an ultrasound found a large growth on her spleen. 66% chance its cancerous, and if it is, 66% chance its aggressively malignant. The only way to do a biopsy is with a splendectomy, after which the survival rate is numbered in the weeks. So best to just make her comfortable, hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.
As we were figuring out how to tell our young children, our older dog Macey (age 15) just kind of shut down. Her body gave up the fight, pretty rapidly. It took 48 hours to go from a healthy dog who still liked to (slowly) go on walks, to having to put her down. Hell of a time, informing your kids that tomorrow one dog will no longer be with us, and also anytime now the other dog will go.
We got Macey from the local shelter back when my wife and I were just boyfriend and girlfriend. We went to the pound having already looked up a few dogs and we were sure which one we were going to get. Macey (or “Princess” as she was known then) wasn’t on the radar at all. The first time I laid eyes on her, she was a puppy laying in a pile of her own feces in her kennel, and again we already knew which dogs we really wanted so sorry ‘Princess’ you’ll have to find another family. But some of the dogs we had scoped out had already been adopted, and others were being played with by other families the whole time we were there. So we visited every single other dog and finally decided we’d at least say ‘hi’ to the shit dog.
We took her into the little visitation room. Cleaned her up a bit with wet wipes before sitting down on the floor to check her out. Macey immediately climbed into my lap, but her front paws on my shoulder, and licked my nose. We started filling out the paperwork a minute later. She was with me during an extended bout of unemployment, hiking hundreds of miles with me as I waited news from the latest round of job interviews. Through battles with depression and anxiety, through our breakup and our eventual reunion and marriage. She was the perfect nanny dog (half pit) to our new children, sleeping by their cribs, warning visitors with a slight growl–even those she knew well–that there would be consequences if you hurt these new babes. I don’t have the words to adequately describe how special she was. I’ve owned and loved a dozen dogs in my life, and known hundreds more, but Macey was something else. Her love, like her energy, was boundless, and I’m eternally grateful for the decade and a half I got to spend with her on this planet.
Our other dog is getting love-bombed now, and hopefully that’s helping with her grief. It’s certainly helping with mine. Here’s hoping she beats the odds (she has already beat cancer once), and we get another 4 or 5 years with her, but I understand if she’d rather go be with Macey.
@Scott: A follow on commentary:
What is Pete Hegseth so scared of?
@Neil Hudelson:
Beautifully written, Neil.
@Michael Reynolds: Add in the fact that NATO expenditures are for the most part regional (UK wanders afield a bit, and France meddles in Africa) and ours are worldwide, some questions can be asked. OTOH, add in the $400B VA budget (what is the VA but deferred defense spending?), the $100B Intel budget, and the $30B National Nuclear Security Administration (the nukes) and our budget rises pretty high also.
@Neil Hudelson:
Sorry to hear this. No matter how many times you experience the loss of a pet, it always hurts. I do find it comforting to know that there is another cold, wet nose looking to wrangle its way into my heart.
@Scott: Yesterday LGM had an interesting post wondering why traffic death rates are so much higher here than in England and Wales. (I have no idea why the statistics are for England and Wales and not the UK.) A commenter wondered if maybe street racing makes a difference. That led to a crack in reply that liberals are so inconsistent, want to ban drag racing but are OK with drag queen story hour.
@Neil Hudelson: Thanks, Neil for bringing the tears on so early in the day. Got to go hug my dogs now.
@Neil Hudelson: So sorry, Neal. Waiting to hear from the vet about my sick cat, as well.
@Scott:
I thought about crossing the Equator rituals when I read about “drag shows” on a USN ship. As I understand, the tradition goes back a long, long way.
@steve222:
100% to this. There is no reason this individual should still hold a license.
@Neil Hudelson:
Thanks for sharing all of that with us. It hits especially close to home for me as we just went through a serious health scare with our older dog. Willa Mae is somewhere between 8 and 10 years old. The shelter thought she was older, our vet thought she is younger. Either way she’s just at the cusp of being a senior dog.
Tuesday morning, we woke up to her violently throwing up and having diarrhea–more or less at the same time. She couldn’t keep anything inside her body. We took her to the vet and she was diagnosed with pancreatitis. They gave her fluids and IV anti-nausea meds and sent her home. By Wednesday morning, she still couldn’t keep anything down and was basically pooping blood. So back to the vet and then to the animal hospital.
Thursday she was still having issues at the hospital and we began to get ready to say goodbye to her. Thankfully, she stabilized, but wasn’t out of the woods. Basically, we went into a wait-and-see pattern. Which is always a special form of feeling helpless.
We adopted a new pup earlier this year who has some agoraphobia. Willa Mea was his helper dog. So Jasper started regressing and wondering where his friend was.
Our story appears to have a happy ending. Willa started a real recovery on Friday night and was able to come home yesterday morning. She’s continued to improve since coming home.
Needless to say, we spent a long time thinking about losing her and it was awful (we had to say goodbye to a beloved dog about a year ago). While it’s cliche, it remains true that the pain we feel at their passing is proportional to the amazing and rewarding bonds we formed with them. For people who have never had pets like these it’s hard to explain how much they become family.
I’m sending you and your family the best during this challenging time.
@Neil Hudelson: I am so, so sorry. That’s a rough couple of days, and Macey sounds like she was a lovely companion and friend. My condolences.
@Jax: You have my thoughts for your fun and funky wee kitty. She sounds like a champ, and I’m hoping you get more days with her.
Our pup will be 15 in November, with hopes that she makes it. They are never around as long as we’d like.
@gVOR10: RE: traffic death rates…my guesses are, in no particular order:
1) Americans drive more miles — more miles, more accidents (this is such a well established metric that it’s part of car insurance premium formulas)
2) The have narrower roads — narrow roads lead people to instinctively drive slower
3) Roundabouts vs. intersections — US is way behind on building traffic circles, which require drivers to slow down. Americans blow through lights, whether it’s impatience or inattention, it causes some bad accidents.
4) Much tougher penalties for inattentive driving in the UK. Using a phone while driving is largely prohibited, IIRC.
5) Driver education is much tougher there, and kids are older when they start.
6) They are, by and large, much better drivers than Americans, as we’ve observed when we’ve been over there vacationing.
ETA: 7) Better public transport means that nervous drivers and the elderly have other options to get from A to B, keeping them off the roads.
NYT headline: President Tells Russia It Has 50 Days to Make Peace With Ukraine.
Oooh, has he done 50 days before? 30 days and 90 days sure, but 50 would be a huge departure in that it is not evenly divisible by three. First comes the deadline, then the TACO truck pulls up.
@Scott: You are so right, what is Hegseth afraid of? I’ll never forget crossing the line in 1970 (USS Coral Sea bound for Sydney after a long Tonkin Gulf deployment). I still have my certificate framed and hanging on my wall. The antics included mermaids whacking us with short lengths of firehose as we (officers and enlisted) crawled through troughs of “clean garbage” and finally on our knees kissed the belly of Neptune’s “baby” a CPO with an ample gut. It was an initiation no worse than mild fraternity hazing and signaled something important. I’m a Shellback and proud of it.
Suppose instead of appeasement, the UK and France, perhaps with support from other countries, invade Germany when Adolf moved troops to the Rhineland in March 1936. Suppose further they are massively victorious (yes, extremely unlikely), and thus prevent WWII from ever happening. And Churchill can go back to fret over the Soviets.
That’s not really important. The point is the Allies would discover the nazi rocket program, and the UK and France could scoop up von Braun and the other rocket scientists. The US would be out of luck, as they wouldn’t have been involved in the short European war. Further, this happens 2 years before nuclear fission is discovered. It might make sense for the Allies to develop long range missiles to be used with conventional bombs, as an addition to their air forces, should war with the USSR eventually take place.
And this is still not important. The real point is France and the UK get a jump on rocket development, on a semi-war footing, and begin launching satellites from Kourou in French Guiana by the late forties. Say the Soviets and Americans eventually are aroused to catch up (spy satellites being very real), and it’s off to the races. So by 1957 or so, the first crews land on the Moon, and by 1975 there are permanent Lunar bases and mining operations.
Now, what kind of story can fit this background in 2,000 words or less.
@Neil Hudelson:
Geez, Neil…thanks for the water works!!!
@Jen: Campos at LGM touches on some of those theories, including miles driven as the most obvious. However we’re talking a 6:1 ratio in deaths per capita but only 2:1 in miles driven as he discusses below. (I don’t know his source for mileage driven, but 2:1 seems low to me.)
I suspect it’s an all of the above situation.
I am Chautauqua this week. First speakers were the directors for AEI and Brookings. Bother were well spoken and agreed on a lot fo stuff. It was actually a civil discussion. One topic on which they did disagree was that the AEI guy thought it was good that viewpoint diversity was being implemented at our universities. The Brookings lady, thought it was bad that it was a top down effort forcing people to change. Long time since I was at a university but not that long since I was a med school teacher. No one taught politics in med school. At the university level having listened to a lot fo professors and students talk I think there is an occasional professor who makes their bias obvious but most dont and for most classes its not an issue.
I end up thinking that a lot of this comes from the differences we now see in party affiliation by sex in young people. The young women are mostly Dems and the guys are more Repubs. When I listen it sounds like the guys are mad that when they spout right wing talking points they get bashed on social media and more importantly, most of the women wont go out and have sex with them. Am I reading this right?
Steve
Very very late because Luddite’s can’t finger out logging in.
Today’s really really important PSA.
Please join me in celebrating Cracker’s natal day.
https://youtu.be/3kyn9Es4HoY?feature=shared
@Neil Hudelson: I’m sorry for your loss.
@Kathy:
“UK and France … invade Germany when Adolf moved troops to the Rhineland in March 1936.
… massively victorious (yes, extremely unlikely)…”
Massive victory would have been overwhelmingly likely in 1936.
The main reason being, Germany only introduced conscription at the same time.
So they simply did not have a large number of trained reserves, whereas France had around 15 millions.
Nor an effective Luftwaffe, nor a navy that amounted to much.
Germany would have been stomped.
The problem was, the French were not willing to act alone, and the British were not willing to act at all.
British opinion was generally pacific, and also generally persuaded that Germany had been treated badly at Versailles.
So continued to place vain hopes in vague notions of “League sanctions” and “general disarmament” and “redress of legitimate grievances”.
@Flat Earth Luddite:..Happy Day!..
I don’t know what’s up with you tube. When I first clicked on the link you provided I got a
Video Unavailable message like I get a lot of from you tube lately. Then when I back out of the page and click on the same link again the video plays.
There are likely a catzillion birthday videos with cats real and animated out there. However it is just coincidence that I sent this same video to my sister who has a few cats of her own and fosters felines till they are adopted.
@Flat Earth Luddite: It’s cracker day! I guess I will have to eat some saltines or something.
@Kathy:
Also, by 1936 the route to atomic waepons was becoming clear.
Szilard had made the majot conceptual steps in theory about both chain reaction, including “rnaway” ie explosive, ones.
And on isotopic seaparation.
Given that, the discovery of the precise behaviour of U-235 was just a matter of time.
If Hahn and Meitner had not done so, Fermi was already pursuing si,ilar experiments.
As were the Joliot/Curie team in Paris.
And Chadwick in the UK.
Though its more doubtful, if absent the imperatives of WW2, anyone would have spent the massive sums on “brute force” isotopic separation of U-235.
Or the real joker in the pack: the discovery of plutonium and its properties, and the use of reactors for “breeding” plutonium from low-enriched uranium.
Incidentally, the basic design requirement for the RAF “V-type” jet bomber were in place by early 1945, and clearly anticipated use of atomic weapons.
I suspect even in an “alternative” timeline, at least initially, bombers would have been preferred to ballistic missiles.
Getting high levels of accuracy from BM’s required a lot of work.
@JohnSF:
Even better, then.
It’s alternate history. I’m not concerned with the point of departure, as with the consequences 40 years later. Which I think is typical of AH.
According to The Guardian our friends on the Supreme Court* have lifted a stay that prevented the Trump administration from gutting the Department of Education. The classic backdoor “we’re not saying it’s legal, but please, feel free to do irrevocable damage in the meantime, whereupon if we are feeling cheeky we will say that maybe you should be bound by congressional budgets.”
I would post a link to Pink Floyd’s “We Don’t Need No Education”, but since the album is actually about fascism it seems a bit on the nose. Might as well be Urinetown**.
Are there any rock operas or concept albums about rebuilding a country after fascism? I need something more optimistic and foreword thinking, in the form of a musical storytelling. I might accept a musical.
Pop culture really seems to be a lot more about fascism and tearing things down than building things, and that’s a shame.
Maybe Hamilton but it’s kind of his fault we’re all in this mess, and the story shies away from a lot of the hard questions.
——
*: they are not actually our friends.
**: it’s a perfectly acceptable Tony Award winning musical. Features the song “It’s a privilege to pee.”
@JohnSF:
I do see little need to develop long range missiles absent nuclear weapons. Still, shorter range missiles might be useful. And things like guided small missiles, like anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, are very useful in combat. Unguided small missiles, like the Soviet Katyushas, saw use in WWII.
Controversy and recriminations over the Air India crash have started.
India has ordered all its airlines to check the Boeing fuel switches. South Korea is about to require the same of all airlines that fly to the country.
Assuming it’s completely impossible for the fuel switches to move without human action, checking so many should produce some sort of definitive result. Either confirmation the switches are safe, or an indication on how they can fail.
This would leave deliberate action.
I cannot think of any means by which a pilot would shut fuel flow while intending to do something else. Not on two engines at once. But just because I can’t conceive of such a thing, doesn’t mean such a reason doesn’t exist.
I guarantee the team investigating the crash will try to get the fuel switches to move without human input. This is done sometimes in such investigations, when a very unlikely fault appears to be a cause of the accident.
And if I were Boeing, I’d be doing the same.
IMO, had it not been for the MAX crashes, and the spectacular plug door blowout, there’d be far less reason to think a Boeing jet failed in some kind of unanticipated manner.
So if something is wrong with their fuel switches, it would be to their benefit to find it first.
Re: higher traffic death rates in the U. S. than in Europe, from the standpoint of Germany.
I lived in Germany for nearly seven years, and have visited several times since. This is how I put it:
Americans learn how to operate a motor vehicle. Germans learn how to drive.
Today, Trump’s bought-and-paid-for SCOTUS overruled lower court injunctions against Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education. Shadow docket, of course, no explanation from the majority, of course.
The dissenters are 100% correct, of course, not that it matters.
From Steve Vladeck, Georgetown law professor:
https://bsky.app/profile/stevevladeck.bsky.social/post/3ltx5bf74hs2q
Assuming there is ever another Democratic President, their first order of business, and the thing they push for harder than anything else, must be expansion of SCOTUS and appointment of young, liberal Justices. Then, maybe we can reclaim the republic we couldn’t keep.
@JohnSF:
The outcome of WW2 was determined in 1933 when Einstein moved to Princeton and brought ‘Jewish physics’ with him. Or would have been had Pearl Harbor not determined the outcome in late 1941.
Good news! A round of IV fluids, two more high-powered antibiotics, a nasal steroid, and some serious booger removal from her nose later, Runty Sassy Pants has turned the corner! Whew, what a relief! I was not ready to lose her yet!
@Kathy:
A number of thoughts.
First, what’s the consequences re the Franch and British empires and economies?
India was already on the track for “dominion status” is effective independence as per Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
As were the Middle East mandates (Iraq had a government so independent that in 1941 it attempted to ally with Germany)
But Malaya perhaps not so much.
See also Dutch East Indies and French Indo-China.
Also, do the Afrikaaner’s in South Africa perhaps lack the stimulus of Nazi triumphs and perceived British weakness to form the 1940’s basis for the subsequent “apartheid state”?
The UK does not suffer the massive economic hammer blows of WW2 re having to sell off overseas assets for dollars and losing export and investment markets due absence of necessity of focus on war production and capital diversion.
France does not see the collpse of the “reactionary right” consequent on the disaster of Vichy.
The Soviet Union likely reamains pinned back in the 1939 borders.
What happens re Italy in Africa, on a timeline where the British have no immediate cause to stomp them in Ethiopia?
How do the victorious allies deal with Germany, and how do German politics play out in the aftermath of the Nazi regime being defeated?
Occupation, or what?
How do the Allies deal with Central Europe, given Italy would still be in play there?
How does Japan react, given that predation upon south-east Asia would be a far less viable option as an escape route from US sanctions over China, and the British are capable of deploying overwhelming forces to the region?
How fast does the US recover from Depression absent the stimulus of war production, and the opportunity to take over British trade and finance positions globally?
Does the absence of Bletchley Park, and other factors, delay the development of the Turing/VonNeumann type computing achitecture, and perhaps digital computing?
Maybe analog computing becomes predominant?
How fast does radar develop?
Are there possible knock-on effects for radio-astronomy?
Can a US that is not so economically predemonant still afford to buld the big optical telescopes at Palomar and Mt Wilson?
What about post-war physics, if there is no big driver for thermonuclear weapons, and perhaps for particle accelerators etc?
Maybe the big effort goes into biology instead?
Do we get a Franco-British Mars colony in the 1980’s, lol?
Also: no UN.
How might the League of Nations beeen adapted to this ordering?
Do American isolationists get persuaded to join?
Does the US still try to impose “hemispheric dominance” and the “Monroe Doctrine”?
US: “You can’t use Kourou as a launch site! It’s in the Americas, and we don’t like that!”
Allies: “Go sit on it, Yank.”
How might US politics play out absent the Cold War?
No “who lost China”, no “atom spies”, etc?
How would the US have interacted with continuing British/European imperial power?
What happens in Palestine if the British are able to tell the US to f@ck off and mind it’s own business, and there is no longer Nazi Germany to drive Jewish migration?
What are the cultural and intellectual impacts on the absence of the “great migration” of European scienitsts and intellectuals to the US? And the absence of the cultural catastrophe of the destruction of the civilsations of Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, and Prague?
If the US is not the global cultural capital, do we still get rock and roll?
And superhero comics? 😉
@Kathy:
There’s a big difference between short range area barrage weapons, like rocket batteries, and longer range ballistics like the V-2 and subsequent.
The V-2 was a nasty bastard, but miliarily ineffective due to inaccuracy.
The alternative to nuclear warheads might have been biotoxins, such as anthrax.
The UK put a fair amount of effort into weaponising those during WW2.
@Scott:
The “drag ceremony” alluded to in this decision has been around for a long, long time. IIRC, variations certainly predate the U.S. Navy.
But then again, Hegseth is an Army guy (of sorts) and I suspect he has no respect or understanding of any tradition or history outside of Big Green. And frankly, I’m not at all sure he has any respect or understanding of his branch’s traditions, history, or much of anything else in the adult world.
As always, I could be wrong, but I’m trying to attribute actions to ignorance rather than malice.
@JohnSF: I would think that a large enough nuclear payload would render accuracy problems mostly moot. Get vaguely near the target, blow up everything, probably including target.
I’m having trouble distinguishing whether things are real… Did Trump take the FIFA trophy for himself?
It’s very stupid, so I really can’t tell whether it’s so stupid it has to have happened or so stupid it couldn’t possibly have happened.
@Michael Reynolds:
Not so much, in my un-humble opinion.
Einstein was a brilliant physics theorist.
But he was not focused on atomic theory, still less on the required experimental physics.
The UK “Maud”/”Tube Alloys” efforts were way ahead of the US until the Manhattan Project started; which was in turn in large part because the Brits started kicking the doors in DC.
Of course, once “Manhattan” strated rolling down the tracks, the US had a massive physics community to call upon, both native and emigre.
They key factor was that the US also had the enormous industrial and engineering surplus capacity to realize “Manhattan”.
Whereas the British simply could not divert such productive capacity away from immediate war requiremnets.
And nor could the Germans, added to which many of the best scientist thay might have had, had fled to Britain or the US.
Arguably the key research was by Pierls, Fritsch, Oliphant, etc at Birmingham in 1940.
The irony being that, being German nationals, Fritsh and Pierls were “enemy aliens” and therefore excluded from key war projects on radar etc, and free to pursue less “relevant” work on nuclear physics.
Thence their report to the Tizard/Thompson committee; thence “Tube Alloys”; thence “Manhattan”
The Poynting Physics building is on the Brimingham University campus about a mile away from where I work.
Funny how few people realise its historical significance.
@JohnSF:
The idea is for a 2,000 word story for a historical fiction contest.
The questions you raise are intriguing and could be argued for days, and constitute over 1/4 of the length of the story I want to write 😉 I assume answering two of them uses up my word allowance.
And I still don’t have a story.
My backup is about an alien probe in a Maya village that doesn’t want her mother to die. I might have to resort to that.
What can I say? It’s hard to write only science fiction.
@Gustopher:
Applies to thermonuclear weapons; to nuclear aka atomic, not so much.
There’s two orders of magnitude difference between 10’s of kilotons and a megaton weapon.
Of course, atomic warheads make accuracy less of a key factor.
But for guranteed destruction of critical targets, as opposed to just killing people, you either need big warheads, or accurracy.
This is why in the 1950’s there was a focus on megaton weapons.
More recently, extermely accurate missiles have led to greater focus on smaller, more accurate warheads.
Current UK (and French) warheads are in the 0.3 to 100 kiloton range, and given their accuracy, do not need to be in the megaton range.
In the “war in 1936” alternative history supposition, do themonukes get developed so rapidly?
Arguably it took the Cold War to drive that effort on both sides.
@Kathy: This story sounds terribly familiar. Wasn’t there an earlier apparent murder/suicide airliner crash with the pilot turning off the fuel cutoff switches? I swear I’ve read all this speculation about moving cutoff switches before.
My Google skills aren’t up to getting through the hundreds of hits on this Air India crash. I tried Copilot, asking if there was such a crash before 2025. It replied “Air India Flight AI171 Crash – June 12, 2025”.
@Kathy:
“… alien probe in a Maya village …”
Interesting.
Then the questions become: is this village now-ish, or pre Conquistador?
What are the motivations and nature/assumptions of said aliens?
Are they just interested in research, or are they inclined to benevolence?
If the latter, what are their limitations, both practical and ethical?
@gVOR10:
There was an incident not too long ago in an Alaska Airlines flight, or Alaska’s wholly owned regional subsidiary Horizon, I forget which, where a pilot riding on the jump seat, wither commuting or hitching a ride, tried to pull the fire handles on both engines.
He was stopped by the flight crew and eventually taken into custody. he claimed diminished capacity due to drugs at some point in the recent past, I think psychedelics.
But there have been cases of active flight crew crashing the plane on purpose. There was the Germanwings case a few years back, with the captain locked out of the cockpit. And the Egypt Air crash off New York in 1999. There were surely others I can’t recall offhand.
@JohnSF:
I’m thinking around 1000-500 BCE, to make it fit with an earlier story that takes place in the present.
Those are interesting questions. They’re not malevolent, but not benevolent, either. They don’t appear in the story at all, just two of their self-replicating probes.
Thank you for the kind words everyone, truly.
@Jax and @Matt Bernius, my thoughts will be with both of your furry family members, and I hope you have much more happy time with them.