Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, October 9, 2025
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23 comments
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.
More evidence that Trumpism and Republicans are a religious cult.
KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust: Tylenol-Autism Link and Vaccine Policies
Encouraging but 58% is too low for my comfort. Especially the apolitical part.
Poll: Most Americans say military should be apolitical and face only ‘external threats’
Idle thought of the morning.
The House Speaker traditionally swears in a new member. But the constitutional requirement is only that a Oath of Office be taken. Doesn’t specify the Speaker. What stops the new Arizona Representative (Adelita Grijalva) from getting sworn in by anyone authorized to do so. Like any judge, justice of the peace, notary?. Stick this nonsense to Speaker Johnson and let him flail.
Adelita Grijalva
PSA
As the Big Scary Windows 10 Apocalypse is just a week away, it turns out you can get an extra year of extended support for free
This video explains how. It’s very simple. I’ve already done it.
I wonder why MS keeps bugging me about Win11, but doesn’t tell me this.
I’ve been reading a history of the Royal Navy. I was struck by this observation, quoting an Italian admiral.
Seems relevant today.
There’s of course also the little matter of politicians not being able to trust the experts to come up with the desired answers.
There is an explosion of strange new mushrooms and fungi popping up in the woods. Big masses that look like unearthed brains, wood ears that resemble small white fonts on downed tree limbs, the generic caps are all common, but today there were tiny clusters of pearlescent ones dotted on the forest floor. I wonder if they glow at night?
There are what look like chicken eggs pushing out of the ground, white shells burst to reveal an almost orange yolk that will become a shroom by tomorrow morning. Fascinating.
There is a bill in Florida mandating the naming of state university streets for Charlie Kirk. https://www.mainstreetdailynews.com/govt-politics/proposed-bill-florida-colleges-charlie-kirk
I think they should do more. They should rename an entire school for him. Florida University Charles Kirk seems like a perfect name to me.
@becca:
Around my area of town, which is in the State of Mexico and not Mexico City, mowing the grass on medians and roundabouts has been slow (ie nonexistent). Combined with the recent heavy rainfall, the various species of grass grew really tall, and then produced spikes with seeds (grain?). The weeds are growing wild, too, some of them flowering.
You know, I learned all the way back in elementary school that staple grains like wheat are grasses. Until now, I didn’t truly understand the classification.
@becca: There are a number of mushroom identification apps available. Not sure I would trust them WRT the edibility of the shrooms but it would be fun to find out what they are.
@Scott: yeah, those orange ones resemble an Amanita variety, the family of destroying angels mushrooms.
Could be delicious and/or deadly.
@Kathy: When we let the bottomland go wild it was amazing what came up and how quickly fauna and flora appear. The native muscadine grapes came roaring back.
Some good news via Erin Reed, who writes the substack, “Erin in the Morning”.
New Poll: Voters Prefer Spanberger For Virginia Governor On Transgender Issues By Wide Margin, Despite Anti-Trans Ads
As I told a friend last night, conservative famlies have kids that transition, too. Some of those families, though not the majority, support their children. This gives them a much more concrete idea of what it’s all about.
@gVOR10: And of course, that’s ridiculous. The most senior British officer at Roarke’s Drift was a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers. Robert E. Lee was a civil engineer. Grant was a quartermaster.
Dwight Eisenhower’s studies at West Point focused heavily on engineering, mathematics and physics, because that’s the concept at USMA. It was founded as an engineering school.
It is the sort of conceit that gave us all the mediocre Southern generals. And probably some of the many mediocre Northern generals as well.
Yesterday, Kathy typed:
You are assuming that Star Wars uses modern physics.
The Star Wars galaxy is filled with the aether (luminiferous or otherwise), rather than space being a vacuum, and a fairly thick aether at that. This is why ships need to have their engines burning at all times when moving, rather than just drifting, as well as why they need to bank as they turn. And it’s how the weird space whales swim about (I expect they eat space plankton, and that there’s a whole ecosystem)
It’s also why it was reasonable to walk outside into what they thought was a cave in an asteroid with only breathing masks on, unconcerned with temperature or pressure.
The “asteroid” being warmer than Hoth, and this not being seen as odd by any of the characters suggests that cold is not the absence of heat, but rather its own separate thing, an anti-heat, with the default temperature being just a bit chilly. Something must be making Hoth cold. Phlogiston and anti-phlogiston at the core of a world could well explain all the planets with just one biome.
And the speed of light is much, much higher (or star systems are much, much closer) as travel between systems at sublight speeds is just a little tedious rather than taking many years.
Star Wars physics is cutting edge 1830s physics.
Phrenology is probably a respected science and actually usefully predictive and accurate. I wonder whether the one-armed Wampa would have one-armed children. This may also explain why when Padme died, a robot explained that she had “lost the will to live” — the will to live is clearly a measurable, physical thing here, but I don’t know if that ties directly into 1800s science.
@Slugger: In Washington state, we’ve gone one better than that. We have an entire small city in the greater Seattle metropolitan area named after him — Kirkland.
Ok, not yet, but we have precedent for things like that.
King County was named after Martin Luthor King in 1986, and then again in 2005. Before that it was named after Franklin Pierce’s VP, William King (best known for his close and intimate relationship with future President James Buchanan).
Wikipedia, in the explanation of the name change, helpfully notes that “Martin Luther King Jr. had visited King County once, for three days in November 1961.”
Anyone care to speculate on the “classified documents” that DOJ is saying are “needed” for a Comey trial?
Are internal memos within the FBI “classified”?
@Gustopher:
More like badly misinterpreted 1800s physics 🙂
I don’t really mind the banking X-Wings, or the wingless TIE fighters flying in an atmosphere, and tons of other things, because 1) popcorn movies are supposed to be entertainment and spectacle, and 2) realistic space combat would be long, tedious, and not very spectacular.
As to the second point, both Babylon 5 and The Expanse managed more realistic ship movements, but also took their liberties as well. But see point one, even if these shows are not popcorn movies.
You remind me of one thing. In the first season of the original Star Trek, there were several eps where the Enterprise is in deadly danger of burning up in the atmosphere because they lack the energy, for some reason, to maintain orbit….
I don’t thing I ever sighed so loudly in my life.
Granted planetary atmospheres extend farther than is commonly assumed, and lots of satellites experience drag that degrades their orbits until they reenter the atmosphere and burn up. But all that takes years, not hours and certainly not minutes.
@Bobert:
They can be, and there are other documents (including some personnel records) that can be exempt from FOIA requests.
@Kathy: In GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, the entire closing action sequence is dependent on ice sinking in water. The polar ice cap is being blown up so chunks of ice fall and crush the undersea base.
I can accept space not acting right, since how many of us go to space? But what are the odds that no one reviewing the script for a $175M movie did so while drinking anything with ice in it?
——
Also, Star Wars was only really popular because of the vehicle and robot designs. (And anssoc toys). Otherwise… it’s really mediocre. Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art, and the work of the people who adapted that, really did more than any actor or writer to make those first films last.
The prequels had lots of cool vehicles, and showed that even with terrible directing, acting and dialog, exciting new toys will carry the day.
The greatest flaw of the sequel trilogy was that everything was a tiny incremental change. AT-ATs have knuckles. Tie fighters are just black — no signs of advancement even when the empire had been making improvements and variations. Just utterly unimaginative.
The Clone Wars cartoon introduced shuttles that were more imaginative and which still felt like they belonged in this world. Shuttles!
As a footnote to my post yesterday about the three American physicists who won this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics, two of the three, Michel Devoret and John Clarke are immigrants, as is Omar Yaghi who won the prize for chemistry.
@a country lawyer:
So they are now stealing Nobel Prizes from Americans1!!!!111!!!
@Gustopher:
Ice doesn’t quite float on water as much as it occupies space very close to the surface. So part of it will be below the surface, often most of it will. So if the base was like two meters under water, fine. Otherwise…
Now, cool vehicles and toys aren’t enough. I can’t think of any franchise movie that didn’t sell merch since the original Star Wars proved there could be more money on that*.
Take TRON, the 80s original. It’s all world-building with a pretty by the numbers plot. The problem was you couldn’t play with light cycles or the tanks and whatever the flying portals were supposed to be.
There was a rather popular arcade videogame, and several titles for home systems that were nowhere near as good. That’s why it took decades to make a very bad sequel.
*I heard that one condition Lucas set to Mel Brooks so he could do Space Balls without legal issues, was that there should be no merch at all.
I haven’t finished this piece on heat related deaths. What struck me were the body temperatures reported, namely around 62 C (144 F). That’s twelve degrees C below the done temperature of chicken.
Ok, body temp in a hot environment will rise after death, given the body’s cooling mechanisms stop. But it also means these poor people were partially cooked by the time their bodies were found.
It’s as bad as that.
@gVOR10:
@Jay L. Gischer:
The ironic thing being, the Royal Navy has always combined both technical expertise and inclination to combat.
A navy short of either is unlikely to perform effectively.
In general, the “European way of war” since the early modern era has been marked by this duality; the Royal Navy has simply been a very proficent exponent of it.
The most effective commanders, generally, have been those with a very sound grasp of the technical aspect of war; logistics in particular combined with a willingness to “roll the iron dice” after doing everything they could to enusre the odds were in their favour.
The fascist valorisation of the “triumph of the will” derived perhaps in part from the experience of war as corporals.
And also from the general late 19th/early 20th “romantic radical” celebration of Will and Force; see eg Nietzsche, D’Annunzio, and even Carlyle, earlier.
Japan embraced similar ideas for rather different reasons
It made for stirring populist rhetoric.
But in practice, tended to eventually lead to military disaster.