Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, April 2, 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.
Many words were spoken.
Very little was said.
What was said was mostly false.
Thus it has always been with Fatso.
Movie recommendation.
Watched Blackberry on Netflix. Basically a fictionalized (highly) story of the rise and fall of the Blackberry. But very entertaining!
Didn’t watch the President’s speech last night. Nor have read anything about it. However, if the stock market futures are any indication (down around 1.5% across the board) it was not well received. Crude oil prices are also up, about 8%.
“Wajeeh Lion”
More at the link.
@charontwo:
I feel like that should read: “the massive political and financial capital Saudi Arabia has invested in cementing ties with the Trump family and regime.”
From link above:
Also UAE , et. Consider this:
“Link”
Etc., etc.
@Jon:
Another ETTD example.
(Everything Trump touches dies).
ETA: Why I put my brokerage accounts into defensive posture as soon as I saw the election outcome.
You know, I can’t build an LLM without the proprietary source code.
TL;DR: Anthropic has issued 8,000 copyright takedown requests following the accidental exposure of the complete source code for its AI model, Claude.
“Copyright for me but for thee!”
Screw them.
So Trump wants to get rid of Medicare, Medicaid and SS because he needs the money for wars.
He said so on camera yesterday…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/news/trump-says-medicare-and-medicaid-may-not-survive-as-war-spending-takes-priority/ar-AA1ZZsz4
The man is on a murder spree both foreign and domestic.
The New Republic is predicting that Pam Bondi and Tulsi Gabbard are the next in line for Trump’s chopping block.
@CSK:
Not that either of them has any business in a real cabinet in any country, and the same goes for Klaus Barbie, but it looks more like El Taco is getting rid of the women in his cabinet.
@CSK:
Bondi’s out!
@Kathy:
That would be my guess, too.
@Neil Hudelson:
All that sh!t on her nose (thank you South Park for that indelible image) and in the end it wasn’t enough for the manchild. The schadenfreude is abundant on this one.
Won’t improve the situation at DOJ one bit, though.
@Kathy: gotta get the vajayjays out of politics. Hard to overturn the 19th Amendment otherwise.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/us/household-vote-women.html?unlocked_article_code=1.X1A.Xmfr.keTmEs9Pd8Py&smid=url-share
@Neil Hudelson:
Apparently she failed to secure indictments against Trump’s political foes.
ETA: According to MSNBC, Jeanine Pirro and Alina Habba are I the mix to replace Bondi.
@CSK:
Well, it’s hard to prosecute someone who hasn’t committed a crime.
If Habba gets the post, she may be the first attorney general who gets disbarred while in office.
@CSK: As if the blatant and unprecedented abuse of the DOJ by the president wasn’t bad enough.
Please tell me that the accelerating insanity will result in a 400-seat majority for the Democrats next year….
@CSK:
If Blondi couldn’t get indictments, how can they consider Piro? Got one indictment that the jury laughed it out of court in returning the verdict is less than an hour.
I’m for Lyndsey the insurance lawyer.
How is it to be home?
@Sleeping Dog:
Fine, thank you!
The Artemis 2 crew need tech support to look at problems with MS Outlook.
@Sleeping Dog:
Saying they’re considering Pirro (so the shortlist includes women for PR purposes) is different from actually considering Pirro.
@Kathy: The Artemis mission will take people the furthest anyone has ever been from Elon Musk.
@Kathy: I think I understand well why somebody these days might make a simple judgement of “AI BAD”. I mean, there really is a whole bunch of terrible slop out there because of it. But remember, every single bit of that slop is the result of a human asking an AI to do something and then a human publishing it.
We are the greatest slop producers the world has ever known. Pigs have nothing on us.
AND, if there’s a good guy in the AI biz, it’s Anthropic. These were the guys who wrote into their contract with the DOD things like “don’t just use the ai to do targeting without a human signing off on them” Things that made Pete Hegseth mad, because he so very much wants to be able to blame the AI when things go wrong.
Many other points here. They are not funded by either Thiel or Andreesen, and so they are rivals to those guys. Meanwhile, they have a better product. So T and A will (and probably already have) undoubtedly use whatever pull and/or resources they have to give Anthropic problems.
Meanwhile, I’ve been hearing from people who know employees and I like these guys.
Sooo, my ask is that you be more specific, not that you refrain. Just learn more about the object of your derision and focus it on the people-the individual decision makers -who really, really deserve it.
@Gustopher: Bahahaha. Omg
Hegseth ousts Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George
CBS News
@Jay L. Gischer:
ahhhhh ….. no. There are no good guys in the AI business and, if there were, it would for sure not be Anthropic. Being slightly less bad than Grok or OpenAI is not the same as being good.
And good lord they’re not rivals with Thiel; they had partnered with Palantir to get Claude all throughout the DoD in the first place.
@Jay L. Gischer: Anthropic is still partnered with Thiel’s Palantir, since 2024. That alone justifies Kathy, good guys seems generous. Anthropic feigning shock at Trump admin abuse of Claude is a little like the frog/scorpion fable. Did they not know who they were crossing the river with? Or did they just not care til they were stung?
I bank with USAA and often tell non-members who express admiration that yes, USAA’s decent… relative to the low bar of other banks. But they’re still a bank. They still do customers dirty.
Anthropic is still bit too entangled with shady business to be given the Costco treatment this soon. Maybe later.
@Jay L. Gischer:
Eh, you can automate those parts away.
Scrape whatever topicality you need from trending topics or churning through a few creators and consolidating their cruft into techno-cruft.
I think you could replace 3/4ths of the right wing outrage economy with AI — it’s all the same, you just need to know what the outrage du jour is. Gay Klingons, a Columbia student protesting Israeli genocide, woke floor patterns… whatever.
@DK:
Consider poison dart frogs — poisonous, and brightly colored. The species as a whole does better with the individuals being more vulnerable but taking any predators with them (either killing the predator or making them sick enough to change behavior)
The scorpion is a threat, but makes an argument about reasonability and self-interest before consigning both himself and the frog to death in the river. It’s the scorpion’s nature to sting, but it might also be the frog’s nature to take him across the river. Remove a predator that regularly kills at the cost on just one frog.
Frogs might gather around and tell the tale, but the story is one of self-sacrifice, with a moral of “drown that fucking scorpion.”
This doesn’t explain Anthropic, but I assume they’re either dumbasses, or were on board with it, or figured they could make a deal with the devil to do what they already wanted to do with no ill-effect — expecting that they would be RFKJr, rather than Pam Bondi.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
Ah, yes, Randy George, the pornographic variant of Curious George.
(I suppose Bi-curious George could also be pornographic, but for a different audience)
@Gustopher:
Eventually leading to the evolution of scorpions smart enough to kill the frogs either before or after the river crossing bit? 😉
Or possibly a sting-immune scorpion-eating frog?
@Kathy:
“Microsoft. Making your life more interesting.”
@Gustopher:
Probably make more sense, have better grammar, AND BE LESS PRONE TO ALL CAPS!!!
Therefore, not fooling anyone. 😉