Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, May 13, 2025
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64 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor 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
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
The headline of the day– Detained Philippines ex-President Duterte wins mayoral race in his home city
@Bill Jempty: Nothing says “he’s one of us” as much as electing an accused international criminal mayor of your town. A proud moment for Filipinos everywhere. đ
@just nutha:
Somehow I doubt that will happen to Trump.
More on Trump Golden Flying Palace:
Experts: Qatar-gifted Air Force One may be security, upgrade disaster
I also suspect there must be something off about this particular 747 and the Qataris just want to get rid of it. The facts will come out.
I found this fascinating:
Sunken USS Yorktown leaves researchers âflabbergastedâ in latest dive
@Scott:
It has quickly become evident that the Qatari 747 will never be Air Force One. This âmisunderstanding of what Air Force One is meant to doâ is an embarrassment for the administration, especially since they still havenât shot down this silly idea.
@Scott: Off the top of my head, the new plane would have its vital systems safeguarded against Electromagnetic pulses aka EMP. I don’t think it would be an easy overhaul.
You can take that opinion with more than a few grains of salt. I first recall hearing EMP in this movie plus I’ve read four EMP novels by William Fortschen. The first of which was good, but the rest of the series declined in quality book by book.
Remember my comment last weekend about the Autoblow? Gentlebeings, I present the next thing in personal…er…ummm…
Words (aside from a giggling cackle) fail me.
Trying to figure out how I’d explain this addition to my investment portfolio.
Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche is the new Acting Librarian of Congress,
@Scott: Yep! A half-billion dollar grift gift from and authoritarian middle-east oil monarchy is going to cost U.S. taxpayers billions to convert into a presidential plane all because the toddler in chief has the impulse control of spoiled toddler in a toy store. So, for those who can still do math and balance their own budgets, just who is winning on this farcical deal?
If either of our trolls show up, I have a suggestion: Ignore completely unless they are willing to explain Qatar’s 400 million dollar bribe. Refuse to engage on any other topic. Just a suggestion.
I have a technical problem I can’t find an answer to. When I am on certain blogs (not this one) or on the AP news site, when I click on an article or post there is a 15-20 second delay before said article or post appears. It’s irritating. Any advice for what I need to do besides live with it?
Failing New York Times editorial starts with this totally unfair headline and sub-head:
The Great Trump Tariff Rollback
The President started a trade war with Adam Smith. He lost.
ETA: Oh, sorry, I mis-identified that as coming from the failing New York Times. It’s actually from Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.
@CSK: The getting charged by ICJ or being elected president of Queens borough?
@Michael Reynolds: I would like to see a comparison (it would be totally hypothetical and/or conjectural) of Trump trade policies toward China and those that would have been accomplished by the Trans Pacific Partnership, of which China was not a participant.
@just nutha:
Getting elected mayor. We can hope for the other.
I wonder if any other Temporary Protected Status refugees were personally greeted by a Deputy Secretary of State.
Welcoming Afrikaner Refugees Fleeing Discrimination
Irony is truly dead.
@Scott:
That’s just hilarious. Does the journalist expect fish to disarm a fighter and secure the ordnance?
Also, I keep seeing “hanger” instead of “hangar” I come across this a lot. Maybe the vaunted LLMs can be coupled with spell checkers to provide context.
@Kathy:
I had a high school teacher who delighted in highlighting these particular type of e/a mistakes. He called it “bringing down the ‘grammer hammar.'”
@Michael Reynolds:
A note re information sources:
https://www.crisesnotes.com/cfius50anniversary/
Etc., etc.
@Michael Reynolds:
“ETA: Oh, sorry, I mis-identified that as coming from the failing New York Times. Itâs actually from Rupert Murdochâs Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.”
The difference between the WSJ Editorial Board and the NYT is that if things go 100% to sh*t, the WSJ Editorial Board would be willing to criticize Trump.
@Neil Hudelson:
When I hear “hanger deck” or something similar, I imagine a huge indoor space with wire hangers in racks hanging from the ceiling.
@CSK: If you hope in one hand and
shspit in the other, guess which hand fills up first?@Scott:
[Stan Laurel voice] It certainly does, Ollie.
Here we are again in the position of it being painfully obvious that our sitting president has an extreme lack of ethics and values. Addressing this point would go a long ways towards explaining the fundamental problems with Trump, but the press constantly reports on him as if it’s not the case.
There has been plenty of evidence of this in Trump’s life, of course, but one of the earlier alarm bells as president was when he told Stephanopoulos (I think) that of course a president should accept political aid from a foreign entity, it would be stupid not to.
ETA: I’m sure there have been and currently are some Op-eds making this point, and I understand that straight news reporting has a hard time including deeper analysis. I’m frustrated that it’s not sinking in and not everyone can see the obvious character flaws for themselves.
@charontwo: Tariffs are not a feature of free market capitalism. They are a state imposition on market forces. Giving subsidies to Tesla while handicapping BYD is obviously not capitalism but state planning. I donât watch Fox, but do they engage these contradictions? I donât watch Fox because people my age who do watch are always angry. Anger should be controlled by the DEA as an addictive substance.
@Slugger: You know, I have my “Old Man Yells At Clouds” moments. And yet, I try to put some boundaries on it, and remind myself that the world doesn’t revolve around me and doesn’t have to work the way I think it should work. Not watching Fox News is one of those boundaries.
Even though some who are politically aligned with me say that it is super important in understanding the right and Trump. I think they are correct. But I don’t have to do it.
@Slugger:
It looks to me like you missed the point of my post.
My point was that the author (Nathan Tankus) who is full-time devoted to putting out newsletter analyzing the current economic and financial crises feels he needs to watch Fox News to adequately know what Trump and his enablers are thinking, what they are committed to – so as to better anticipate where things are going, where Trump and the GOP are taking things.
As Tankus said:
@reid:
Yup. Reflecting the ethical degradation of the populace which twice elected him over obviously-superior women.
Those who share Trump’s lack of scruples, but are have not yet in recovery, cannot admit his fundamental indecency and moral lapses are flaws. Instead, they see in the rapist supreme validation of their broken value system.
And if you point out they are in violation basic tenets of right v. wrong that normal people have mastered by kindergarten, Trumpers and their apologists will lash out about being judged and lectured. They will then use their hurt feelings (aka guilty conscience) as an excuse to double down on antisocial choices.
All while still swearing up-and-down how macho and tough they are compared to the world’s effete woke snowflakes.
I have seen something similar play out in therapy many times.
@Michael Reynolds:
I would respectfully ask they be ignored completely no matter what topic they bring up. There has never been a constructive discussion with either.
I’ve been thinking about interstellar travel and the infamous Fermi Paradox.
How about this: Interstellar travel is impossible because simply no ship or probe can last in working condition long enough to reach other stars at the speeds that are reasonably achievable.
I find the prospect depressing.
Trump fell asleep during his presser/meeting in Saudi Arabia. He also fell asleep during the Pope’s funeral. Maybe travel is too much for him at this age.
@Michael Reynolds:
@gVOR10:
Either way, they need be ignored completely. This means not only “do not respond to their ravings,” but rather “don’t even read their ravings in the first place.”
It’s no automatic, but with a little patience one can read the name or handle of the poster first. If it’s a troll, skip it. That’s what I do.
@Jen:
Well, I suppose it’s better than him pecking out incoherent semi-literate diatribes on Truth Social.
@CSK: I suggest “Dozing Donald” build in nap time when he goes abroad.
@Kathy: I also try to skip over replies to our trolls. But it’s hard to miss the dozen comment long strings that we sometimes get. I read to be informed or to be entertained. Neither is likely when the boys are involved. And that includes the oh so clever replies from otherwise valued commenters.
@Jen:
Perhaps if he actually slept at night instead of spending the time rage-tweeting, it might help him to stay alert during the day.
@Kathy: I asked Mr. becca what he thought about your post and he wondered if the Alcubierre drive might answer the time problem.
@Jay L Gischer: I would agree with your political alignees to the extent that it is important to understand them if you seek to reach accord with them. I, however, have given up on the notion that accord with them is an available option. The compromises are too unwieldy for me to navigate, so we have to just agree to disagree and leave things at that.
@Jen:
Or when he’s at court, a pastime he will undoubtedly resume once he’s out of office. That’s the reason he wants an unconstitutional third term.
If the rapist does not attempt a third term it will be because 1) he’s dead, or 2) Ivanka decides to run. No way he runs against her, as that would ruin his chances of bedding her.
Not even then for me. Any explanation is going to be complete horse puckie (at best) and objections will be cited as evidence as to how unfair OtB is to people outside the echo chamber. It’s a ruse; don’t fall for it.
@gVOR10: I find the boys (all 3 or 4 of them) to be entertaining, but I’m entertained by Trump policy announcements, too. The alternative to laughing at them is outside the bounds of behavior in polite/civilized/lawful society.
@becca:
Absolutely.
But I don’t think it’s possible. I forget the details. The gist is that the Alcubierre drive fits inside the constraints of relativity, but requires things that aren’t known to exist like negative energy.
A probe or ship that could travel at half the speed of light, or even a quarter, could easily be in working order upon reaching Alpha Centauri in 9 or 18 years. This would require a massive power source, like antimatter. Or exotic propulsion systems like a ramscoop, which also seems unfeasible.
Maybe I’m on a pessimistic streak (I wonder why). I’m re-reading Rama, the first novel in the series, and it struck me as highly unlikely a ship so old would be in good condition.
Of course it’s decorated in Trump’s preferred Dollar Store Scarface Style.
@gVOR10:
Oh, I don’t know.
I had a reasonably interesting discussion about Pope Leo XIII and the development of Catholic thought on “socail theology”, in which I learnt somthing.
Albeit, perhaps by accident, from a link to papal encyclical.
I suspect our friend probably missed the point, though, through being convinced the Vatican’s stance was entirely theological, and not concerned with the interactions of Catholicism and the Papacy with social change and related politcs.
@just nutha: People are also not good at remembering where they learned something. Watching raw propaganda without a structure to ensure the lies are clearly labeled as such in your brain is harmful.
Further, strong emotions can be addictive â social networking apps are designed to take advantage of this, as is Fox News. Itâs as engineered as a McDonaldâs hamburger or a corgi.
Mmmm. Corgiburgers.
@Michael Reynolds: It’s a psy-op, not a bribe though. Qatar would use one of the several ways to slip him cash if it were a bribe.
They have accurately assessed Trump as a guy who is obsessed with status and adoration. Trump worships those who are richer and despises those who are poorer. This gift is both demonstration of them having more money to burn than Trump does while at the same time paying homage to Trump’s “greatness”.
Bribe a crook? Transactional, and they just ask for more somewhere down the line. But get inside his sad, bitter and lonely soul and he’s yours forever. Why bother? Trump is a child that wields enormous power. A very dangerous combination.
@gVOR10:
Yeah, I sometimes read the replies to the trolls. Not the quoited portions though. And that makes it harder to follow, which in this case is a good thing.
The other day some commenters were arguing whether troll 1 was also troll 2. Apparently both trolls denied it. I was tempted to post whether one was the sock and the other the sock puppet, two distinct individuals, but found no place to do so.
@Scott:
@Bill Jempty:
@al Ameda:
The Qatari Air Force One idea is entirely stupid.
AF1 is a full-on airborne command post, with secured military communications, encypt/decrypt, electronic warfare systems, etc etc.
Retrofitting it to that standard would require a massive overhaul.
The only way it would make sense (for an arbitrary value of “sense”) is if it gets put aside, then attached to the Presidential Library for Trump to use after leaving office.
In other words: a personal emolument.
Whoâs in charge of who gets to be Christian?
@Kathy:
iirc correctly though, the entire point of Rama was massive redundancy.
That’s beyong our capability; but for civilisation that has been wrangling advanced technology for millienia or more, I’d be disinclined to rule it out.
My personal bet on the answer to the Fermi Question is that anvanced technology is extremely rare.
Just consider how long life on Earth got along being single-celled; then being not tool using/linguistic, then even genus Homo spending most of its history being hunter/scavenger/gatherer types.
I suspect it’s a mistake from our particular history to assume that there is a drive to tool-using sapience in evolutionary contingency.
For that matter, though more debateable re possible drivers-to-escape, even post-neolithic Homo sapiens cultures spend the overwhelming of prehistory and history in rather static modes.
@Kathy: Two thoughts â first, you can build systems are are fault tolerant and fault correcting, and second, the space ship could conceivably be relatively low tech.
For the fault tolerant system, you want something where the âerror correctionâ is part of the normal operation, so youâre confident that when it is needed it works. It also needs to be designed so inevitable downtime isnât catastrophic. You see this more often in software than physical systems, but many of the principles can be applied to physical systems, if youâre willing to spend the money.
We donât build bridges with redundancy so that when it fails you just accept the losses and switch to the backup while repairing the primary â with enough backups that you wouldnât have a real problem unless a large number were destroyed at once. We do build clusters of buildings that way â if a building collapses, we move the survivors to other buildings and rebuild on the land. (Cities have a lot of single points of failure, in terms of water and other utilities, since we dream the risk to be low)
If our spaceship is a small moon, and we have many colonies on the inside, with their own heat, power and biome, then when one inevitably fails, not only will there be redundancy, but we would need processes in place to restore the colony with resources (people, plants, animals) from the other colonies. And to ensure this process works, we would want to employ a chaos monkey to randomly slaughter everyone and everything in a colony every once in a while, or perhaps we can just let wars take care of that.
Granted, whatever society the people in these colonies on this ship have after a few hundred generations might not reflect ours at all. And they might have no idea how to stop the moon-ship when they get where theyâre going.
@Jay L Gischer:
My question to those folks is…to what end? Just general knowledge?
Pete Rose reinstated by MLB and is eligible for Baseball Hall of Fame (NBC)
Seems hell is freezing over in myriad ways these days. Say It Ain’t So Joe Jackson is reinstated as well.
@Kathy:
+2
@DK:
The chief investigator in the Pete Rose case was John Dowd, who later became one of Donald Trump’s lawyers during his first term. I guess that Trump just assumes that any lawyer who works for him is so bad any past efforts they did must be faulty?
The Rose case is pretty interesting. IIRC he denied betting on baseball until he was told if he confessed, he could be reinstated. So he made a pretty half hearted confession and of course was never reinstated. Even when he was suspended the finding was that he had NOT bet on baseball.
But the commissioner (Paul Giamatti’s father) then held a press conference stating he believed Rose had bet on baseball, then had a heart attack and died.
The evidence against Rose was always pretty spotty – things like many phone calls from his house to betting lines while he was at the ballpark managing which ended about when the game would be over, and as manager of the Reds not knowing what day the games he supposedly was betting on were and whether they were home or road games. Dowd’s work was certainly bad enough to be a Trump lawyer.
@DK:
I can’t handle it anymore. First an American is elected Pope. Then Pete Rose and Joe Jackson have their bans lifted by MLB. I better lay down before a space ship full of aliens crash lands somewhere on Earth.
@Pete S:
It appears I’m not the only OTB forum member that read Bill James take on the Dowd report. I still have the 1990 published book James wrote it in.
A manager with bets placed on his team can take actions detrimental to the franchise that employs him. Using a pitcher who isn’t totally healthy. The manager may win his bet but the actions he takes have an adverse effect on a player and his team.
@JohnSF:
The mysterious, never-even-glimpsed, Ramans did everything in threes*. Whether this was a cultural affectation or redundancy was never explained. At the end, spoiler alert, the crew sees an image of a garment meant to be worn by a being with three upper limbs.
The sequels do explain what Rama is and who built it, but I never quite reconciled them with the original.
Sagan’s idea of the Cosmic Year is kind of cliche by now, but it does provide a powerful illustration. Whether we measure the age of the universe, of the Sun, of the Earth, of Life on Earth, or even of civilization on Earth, modern understanding of science is a tiny fraction of these.
And we are advanced enough to end our civilization, or even all life on the planet.
So, agreed, the odds of other technological species contemporaneous to us are small.
We just don’t know how small.
*Maybe they were Minbari from a parallel universe.
@JohnSF: Wouldn’t “a drive to tool-using sapience in evolutionary contingency” imply an intelligent designer?
ETA: Or is that what makes the mistakeness?
@Gustopher: People told me the dog soup and dog koggi (grilled meat) were sort of greasy. (I never tried it.) I would think that ground dog (corgiburgers) might be also.
Then again, Shake Shack has made a decent living out of selling burgers where 2 of the primary flavors are salt and grease.
@JohnSF:
@Gustopher:
Consider the Voyager probes.
Granted they were designed to last only a dozen years or so, maybe 20 all told, and they’ve been working nonstop for almost 50 years now. Great. But they’ve suffered damage from radiation. Not long ago Voyager I kept transmitting gibberish until engineers managed to fiddle with the software and fixed it.
Then, too, their power sources have run down. They’ve turned off instruments because there’s not enough power for all of them (not to conserve power; you can’t conserve power in a radioisotope battery).
So, a probe designed to travel for hundreds of years would be better shielded, one hopes, and carry a longer lasting battery. The latter could be a reactor. You can even conserve power by slowing down the reaction. Now try to keep coolant from leaking for 200 years. I suppose a molten salt reactor would work better than a water cooled one.
There’s a whole more to deal with, like interstellar dust and atoms, low temperatures, etc.
Maybe a bigger probe can last long enough, but then you’re up against obtaining the energy to launch it, maneuver it, and get it to stop at its destination.
That’s hard to do while driving up the planet’s temperatures and strewing plastics all over the place.
@DK: Knowing how people think is knowing more about what they might do, what they are afraid of, what they aren’t afraid of, etc. Empathy is very powerful, even in an adversarial relationship. It’s something we train at a higher level of martial arts.
United flight attendants disrupt a PR event.
Good for them.