Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, February 9, 2026
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36 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.
World’s premier show critic delivers his verdict:
“Link”
Also, the NFL sucks too.
To say that the Bad Bunny Super Bowl appearance was a hit among the greater Latino community would be an understatement. I had cousins with zero interest in football texting me during and after halftime to tell me how much they felt represented by the show. A good chunk of my Dominincan cousins have married Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Chilenos, Nicaraguans, Salvaforeans, and Panamanians. The halftime show was a glorious celebration of all those cultures, and it was well done.
F**k ICE.
F**k MAGA,
@charontwo:
Thanks for the laugh.
How did stinky know the half time show was bad?
Thot he was watching Kid Rock.
I wonder if Kid performed his big hit Balls In My Mouth?
Him being so family friendly and all.
It’s been a week of setbacks.
The reasons have to do with bureaucratic incompetence and my impatience, but Portugal is rejecting our Visa bid. As a practical matter this has about a one month cost – we’ll get five months instead of six months minus a day. At six months plus a day we’d be tax residents so that was never in the cards. Which leaves us dealing with Schengen rules. You need an app to keep track of Schengen – 90 days within any rolling 180 days – so the plan is to spend most of April, then all of June and July in Estoril.
We developed a lot of affection for Estoril, but not enough to defy Schengen or pay a top rate of 48%.
And the TV series? Once again we were presented with a pre-cooked deal on the assumption that we’d cheerfully endorse it. And it was looking pretty good til we managed to get them to discuss the production budget, which wasn’t even close to adequate. We are not on-board with an underfunded, half-assed adaptation, so we’ve bailed. Again. Our position has always been: better no show than a bad show. This is evidently not the prevailing opinion in Hollywood. Not sure what they’ll do now.
One more Hollywood time suck. And another experience of the casual arrogance with which creatives are treated, in this case not by the streamer (the one with the Mouse) but by the publisher’s Hollywood extension. Some executive who had nothing to do with the work just assumes the right to adapt something we created? Without even talking to us beforehand? Legal right is not the same as moral right.
@becca:
Bad Bunny half time show = 142.3 million viewers
Kid Rock half time show = 6.1 million viewers
@Michael Reynolds: Sorry to hear about all of this. On Portugal, I’m not terribly surprised. I haven’t gotten into details here, but we considered Portugal, even though the UK is the more logical option for us. Portugal had a bunch of positive factors: more reasonable prices, more sun, EU member, etc. (Negatives for us…neither of us speaks Portuguese, no culinary tradition of chocolate.) But, right as we started investigating our options, Portugal cracked down hard on visas, largely because the influx of foreigners was making the housing market unaffordable for locals. We also heard from friends that it took them YEARS to get their property purchase finalized, and they live in Europe.
Also sorry about the TV series, I was looking forward to that!
This is not surprising…
Brand America Is Dead: The Hundred-Billion-Dollar Cost of MAGA
According to the 2026 Global Soft Power Index, the United States has experienced the steepest fall in cultural influence of any nation in recorded history. Not the steepest fall among Western nations. Not the steepest fall among democracies. The steepest fall, period. Beating out every dictatorship, every failed state, every pariah regime.
In surveys across Canada, France, Germany, and Australia, 30-50% of consumers now say they are actively less willing to purchase a product simply because it is American. Think about that. Being American—once the ultimate selling point—is now a liability.
Darn it. Meant to post link. It’s an X post by Gandalv@Microinteracti1
@CSK:
So, there are over a 140 million illegal immigrants in America! 😛
I had the show on background while browsing the web, and paid little attention to it. Not my kind of music. Mostly I don’t turn off the TV during the big game at halftime, because later I tend to forget to turn it back on and I miss parts of the 3rd quarter.
As to cooking, I made an unusual combo: meatballs with kasha, pepper pasta (not proper cacio e pepe), and chilaquiles with onion and bell pepper mixed into the sauce. I serve the meatballs over the pasta, with the chilaquiles on the same plate. I then take a bite of meatball, kasha, pasta, and chilaquiles, and for some reason it works rather well.
@Kathy:
And only 6.1 million real Americans!!!!
@EddieInCA: That’s wonderful. I’m glad to hear it. One of my very small graduating class (whom I still talk to) is a guy who has roots in PR. Interestingly, he says that his family did the 23 and Me thing and the strongest component of their genome is in fact Native American. I’m not super sure he’s a BB fan though. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him about it.
Benito did a show on NPR’s Tiny Desk (a YouTube thing). It was quite interesting. Not just for the music, but for what other musicians he brought, and how they related to the songs and the lyrics. I did get the sense that they felt he was representing them and their part of the world.
With so much attention on Bad Bunny (rightfully so), I haven’t heard anything about the Green Day performance during the 30-minute pre-kickoff show. They did a brief set consisting of a chorus of Good Riddance and shortened versions of three other songs on a stage in Levi’s Stadium.
It seemed that Green Day and NBC/the NFL had agreed to let Green Day be Green Day only to a certain extent. They led with the protest song Holiday–not the full version, so some of the spicier lyrics were left out, but it was still Holiday. And they finished with American Idiot, skipping the second verse that has “fa–ot” and “redneck agenda” (lately performed as “maga agenda”). The first verse of American Idiot, which they did sing, goes like this uncensored…
They bleeped only the second syllable of the second-to-last word, which was barely noticeable. Somewhat oddly, they had a group of former super bowl greats (Montana, Manning brothers, Brady, etc.) walk along side the Green Day stage during American Idiot, but whatever.
English language music is popular all over the world.
I don’t know the situation in the rest of the world. In Mexico, several radio stations play it. Some play recent releases and artists, some play oldies going back to the 60s. The majority of Mexicans don’t speak English*, yet many listen to such music, without any meaningful understanding of the lyrics.
So why is an American artist who sings in Spanish so controversial? I mean, if there’s a reason aside from bigotry.
*I’m an outlier.
@Jen:
I can’t blame the Portuguese or anyone else for closing the door on Americans. They were already kind of sick of Brits, but now we are the pitied and despised. We’re not mad at the Portuguese: their country, their rules.
As for the show it may still happen. We don’t control the rights. It’s being budgeted at a fraction of what they spent on Percy Jackson and there is just no way with that kind of budget. Animorphs is child actors, animals, challenging cinematography and a ton of expensive effects and that is not a formula for a low-cost show, that’s a 15 million per episode minimum. Not mad at the Mouse, it’s not their fault that the economics of streaming have changed. Quite annoyed that suits tried to sell our Porsche to someone with a Prius budget.
@Kathy:
There are a number of songs that are probably better if you have no understanding of the lyrics. I can see that being a plus.
The Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” for instance. Lovely song if you don’t listen to the words. And the blues standard “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.”
(And then there’s Kid Rock, whose music is best if you don’t understand the lyrics, hear the lyrics, or hear the music itself)
@Gustopher:
In the 80s, the song Neunundneunzig Luftballons by a German band named Nena, was a hit in the US. It was popular here in Mexico, too. People liked to dance to it.
The song is about a devastating war.
Curiously, the English version, Ninety Nine Red Balloons, wasn’t a hit in America. Maybe because people could understand those lyrics.
It still gets some play here in the oldies stations I mentioned before.
@Kathy: Many years ago I was watching a halftime when the performer–I think it was Beyonce, but I can’t quite remember–suddenly broke into Spanish, and the live closed caption paused for several seconds, before it finally said (I’m not making this up), “Sorry, I don’t speak Spanish.”
@Gustopher: @Kathy: I vaguely remember there was an English-language version of “99 Luftballoons,” but Wikipedia says it did not chart.
Truth be told, Americans don’t pay much attention to lyrics even when they’re in English and perfectly easy to understand, Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” being a prime example.
@Kathy: I was living in Germany when that song by Nena came out. (I think I might still have the LP, come to think of it.) It was a testy part of the Cold War and there was a very strong anti-nuke movement in Germany.
My friends and I all spoke German at least well enough to understand the song…and the English language version kinda sucked. Words that rhyme in Deutsch do not necessarily rhyme in English.
@Kathy: My local radio station played the 99 lead balloons version all the time. If it wasn’t a hit, they were definitely trying to make it one. Maybe Rochester just hated the Germans? Maybe I just hate the Germans and blocked it out?
There was also 99 Dead Baboons. I assume that was not as popular as either of the original artist’s versions.
@Gustopher:
@Kathy:
@Jen:
Dua Lipa performed the song recently in Hamburg in the original German. Kudos to her. She crushed it.
Dua Lipa Live in Hamburg 9/25
@Michael Reynolds: Is it bad that I hope they move forward with the series, cutting the budget further and further until it becomes an unrecognizable show about a bunch of teenaged furries saving the world through madcap capers, and maybe the occasional heist?
It feels wrong.
But if we can get the English Crown (containing alien artifact) being stolen by people dressed like cartoon badgers, foxes and sheep, I think it (all of western civilization) would all be worth it. Maybe add a message about British colonialism.
@Kylopod:
I’ve heard of that. I rarely see the halftime show, so I wouldn’t have seen it.
@Kylopod:
@Jen:
I read at the time the band was dissatisfied with the English version, which someone else wrote for them. They still performed it, but I understand their frustration. Poetry doesn’t translate well.
It occurs to me every time I try to understand a song in a language I have studied that I often can’t understand English language lyrics either. It depends mostly on the singer, but also the arrangement.
@Kathy:
I listen to a lot of different music, and most of the time it doesn’t matter to me
what the language of the lyrics is.
What I mean is, you don’t have to be from Brazil and know Portuguese to appreciate, Milton Nascimento’s ‘Travessia,’ ‘San Vicente’ and ‘Milagre dos Peixes,’ or Caetano Veloso’s ‘Sampa.’
Nor do you need to know Spanish to understand the feeling behind the Chilean poet Violeta Parra’s ‘Volver a Los 17.’
… and on and on and on
@EddieInCA: That was amazing and fun. Thanks for sharing.
@Joe:
We need to keep in mind also that rock music first emerged in a very censorious era where many singers deliberately tried to be incomprehensible so they could get crap past the radar, or make people think they were. It led to “Louie Louie” getting investigated by the FBI, and singers like Dylan and Jagger made incomprehensibility part of their brand. It never totally went away. I grew up with bands like Def Leppard and Pearl Jam, where it took me to the Internet age before I figured out what some of their songs were even titled, let alone what the lyrics were.
I know the tendency isn’t limited to rock, but rock seems to revel in it, maybe in part because there’s so much emphasis on shrieking electric guitars that drown out the vocals; indeed, sometimes the lead guitarist is considered just as important as the lead singer (the group was called Van Halen, not Roth or Hagar; Santana’s Supernatural and later albums don’t include his voice at all). The vocals are treated as just another instrument, where even when they’re allegedly singing in our own language, whatever they’re singing about is sort of irrelevant. In fact more of them would be doing us a favor if they just dropped the act and sung in pure gibberish.
@Kathy:
I rarely watch football or any sport. I saw this from spending just a few minutes in my dad’s room while he was watching the halftime, but it was a memorable moment so it stuck in my memory.
@Joe:
In high school, I heard an argument on whether Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” contained a phrase saying “Just a drop of water in an endless sea,” or “Just a drop of water in an embassy.” And another on whether it was “Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky,” or “nothing lasts forever but the urban sky.” Also whether the Go-Gos had a song called “Island of Seals.”
Rush’s lead singer, Geddy Lee was almost impossible to understand in about 90% of the band’s songs. If I could read the lyrics, though, I kind of found the words in the song.
@Kathy:
I find this to be true for me in Spanish language songs. It’s like solving a word puzzle. As soon as you see the words, you can’t believe you didn’t see (understand) them all along.
I caught a few videos with Neil deGrasse Tyson over the weekend. In two he mentions a trip to Mars would take several years (with a minimum energy orbit) and cost $1 trillion.
But that price tag was first floated when he served in Bush the toddler’s Moon, Mars and Beyond Commission (aka the Aldrige Commission) in 2004. There’s been some inflation since then. So, adjusted for inflation, such a mission today would cost $1.7 trillion.
This was also before reusable boosters came to be, so maybe that lowers the price some. But it would still be horrendously large. Estimates for the Apollo program, not including Gemini, hover around $250-$300 billion adjusted for inflation.
Tyson also mentions a few times we know how to get to Mars, and points to the many probes and rovers on its surface and in orbit. Sure. We know exactly how to get a crewed mission to Mars. What we don’t know is how to build a ship to get them there.
The one way trip lasts around 9 months. Imagine a crew of three. How much water would they need in order to, you know, not to die of dehydration? How much food not to die of starvation? and how much oxygen not to die of asphyxia?
IMO, the sheer amounts required would make for such a massive ship, that it would cost a hell of a lot to lift everything into orbit and then accelerate it towards Mars. There are no shortcuts. They can’t collect air, water, or food enroute. The obvious solution would be to recycle. We lack the technology to recycle human waste in such amounts for that length of time.
You could try to send resupply vessels to overtake and meet the crewed ship enroute, but that carries its own huge costs. and what if one or more are delayed or fail entirely? Apollo 13 had air and water and food sufficient for the planned length of their mission, but that didn’t account for damage to the service modules, and the need to turn off one of the fuel cells that turned stored hydrogen and oxygen into electricity and water. It wasn’t just the need to use the lunar module’s engines to alter the trajectory that kept flight controllers engaged full time with the mission.
But if Adolf is willing to risk it, I’d even donate $1 to his efforts.
@Kylopod:
Another, more well known, example of gibberish lyrics which worked spendidly.
Air Canada has cancelled all flights to Cuba, due to El Taco’s oil embargo. Aviation fuel may be scarce in the island for a long while.
This isn’t just inconvenient. It’s dangerous.
Air Canada could route flights through Mexico, say with a stop at Merida on the return trip. This would mean carrying extra fuel on the outbound trip, in order to be able to take off from Cuba and fly to Merida. This would add cost and pollution.
The dangerous part is that no one will plan on Cuba for a diversion, seeing as landing there may end with the whole airplane stuck there for who knows how long. This would affect flights to and from the Caribbean, but also from North America to South America and viceversa.
Ok, not very dangerous. Diversions are rare, especially emergency ones, and there are lots of airports in the region (see how big the tourist industry is in the Caribbean). But it could affect decisions under bad weather elsewhere, especially in an emergency situation.
Imagine your flights suffers a decompression. It would descend to 10,000 feet, where people can breathe the ambient air without dying of hypoxia. But then it might need to fly farther because Havana or Santiago are out of fuel.
Or imagine another 737 MAX door plug panel blows out. Picure an extra few hundred kilometers with a gaping hole at 10,000 feet.
@Kathy:
Cuba has run out of friends. The lights are going out and there’s nothing they can do to sytop it. Cuba either fails to oust the Castro regime and sinks into medieval darkness, or it spontaneously generates a new government, or it breaks into warring factions. I don’t see a good outcome. Miami Cubans who imagine the US pouring resources into a post-Castro Cuba are dreaming. They’ll be left on their own – they don’t have the wherewithal to bribe Trump.
@Kathy:
The one I heard was “Alex the Seal.”
“Drop Site”
“Read his dispatch here”
…