Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, October 8, 2025
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26 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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Neo-Confederate Texas Republicans are increasingly militant and willing to purge members who don’t tow an increasingly narrow line which is far right and Christian Nationalist. Too bad Texas Democrats are too disorganized to take advantage of the disarray.
Texas GOP to consider blocking lawmakers from 2026 primary ballot in first test of new censure rule
The Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows is potentially one to be censured and barred from primary ballot.
Got my flu and Covid shots yesterday. I wasn’t quite the very first in the county to get the Covid shot, but I was the fourth. They just arrived yesterday morning.
Things are tense, in the public health sector. Despite it being just two Public Health nurses and myself in the office, we were all whispering when we discussed how ridiculous RFK’s new rules were. Wyoming has not signed on to his Covid vaccine recommendations, everybody who wants a shot gets one, regardless of age.
Shingrix booster next week!
I woke up way too early and in drifting around YouTube came across Diana Damrau singing the Queen of the Night aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute.
No pitch correction, no autotune, no overdubbing, just a human voice. The years of work that went into this, the discipline, the insistence on perfection, the depth of devotion to making beauty. . . I don’t have music, I only have words and I don’t have the words to describe what this singer does. There’s a precision and accuracy we tend to think of as coming from science, not art. But the tiny imperfections, the slight sharpness in one note, or a millisecond’s delay in one attack are the proof that this is not one of our soulless machines, but one of us.
It made me think of the biblical story of Sodom and Lot. God was annoyed – he often was before his rebranding – and was ready to destroy the corrupt city and would only stay his hand if within Sodom there was one righteous man, one justification for the city’s continued existence.
Homo sapiens has so much to answer for, so much ugliness and evil, but we can imagine standing before a judgmental god demanding to know what the hell we’ve done with his creation, and being able to reply that yes, we are shameful creatures and probably deserve the fire and brimstone. And yet, we can we can make this.
Why can’t people learn?
Tradition is important. Unneeded change is annoying. Especially in an age of rapid change all around us.
Texas Tech’s minimalistic logo rebrand is the change no one asked for
One guess on what is driving this? Money and consultants.
Disclosure: Two of my kids went to Texas Tech.
@Scott:
What? You think they’re the Democratic Party?
@Scott: Looking forward to the Cracker Barrel style response to this.
If there’s one thing “Conservatives” fear, it’s change.
@Scott:
Those banned should be encouraged to run as independents.
Does anyone know whether ICE agents, etc. are being paid during the government shut down? What about NG called up by the President? Not that many of these thugs don’t love their jobs, but how long are they going to be on the streets if they are not getting paid for the thrill?
@Sleeping Dog:..run as independents…
In the general election? Sounds like a plan.
Maybe it would split the Republican vote and give the Democrats a chance to win more elections.
We’ve been taking a course twice per week on the new federal acquisitions law. Early on, the lecturer promised we’d see AI use cases, along with examples. that began yesterday. Surprisingly, I found one useful bit, though Ai is not strictly required. More later.
He also listed a bunch of things one shouldn’t do. one of these was “Have AI make up an ISO certificate.”
Well, duh.
Such things are issued by specialist auditors who do little else but verify compliance with such standards. They also are certified by government authorities to do this. And the certificates can be checked in online databases, both with the certifying house and the government agencies.
But I tried to see if it could be done. So, I asked Copilot about it. It said it could not issue one (double duh), but could make a mock certificate if I wanted one. I provided some more data, and I can say I’ve a legitimate looking ISO-9001:2015 issued to Katarina C**** of Nareednia, Inc.
Would it be too hard to force the LLM to put in a watermark saying “SPECIMEN” or “MOCK CERTIFICATE”?
I think I’ll get a HACCP certificate next, issued to Deanna Troi of Starfleet, LLC.
As to the useful bit. It turns out the platform where the federal government agencies publish all requests for proposals has an option to download all the active listings to a CSV file. this can be opened with Excel, and the LLM can search it. But then I can also search it with the spreadsheet software’s search function, too.
That would be a sloppy easy to search, BTW. I commonly filter stuff on the platform by selecting a bunch of categories. But it might work as a backup to my daily search, in case I miss something.
@Tony W: Sometimes a marketing change is needed for a stagnant business, like Cracker Barrel. This is not the case. This is the case of someone going “I’m new here, I need to be doing something, so let’s do some marketing”.
With the result of thousands of fans going NA! I don’t think so.
Trump calls for jailing Democratic leaders as troops prepare for Chicago deployment
Yeah? Well, Trump should be in prison for his assault on Constitutional rights and a lifetime of predatory behavior.
These recent obscene displays of power crazed toxic narcissism have been encouraged by deranged FOX media which has been running agitiprop sequences stating that Portland and Chicago are adopting strategy from “Rules For Radicals” while displaying images of Obama and Saul Alinsky.
MAGA-land generally only knows what it has been spoonfed by its hermatically sealed echo chamber. But despite being acutely misinformed —-
Most Americans don’t want troops deployed without an external threat
This includes 83% of all Americans polled, and 78% of Republicans.
Trump and his Project 2025 minders have resurrected a full blown McCarthy-esque “Red Scare” with the beginnings of an entertainment sector and education institutions “blacklist.”
Capitulate, or fight for America’s hard-won, true birthright to live in a society that seeks human dignity for all its members regardless of status or traits.
—–
No King’s Day this October 18th. Rallies everywhere.
@Scott:
There’s been a trend to remove shadows and highlights that made for 3D effects in logos, icons, and desktop operating systems. Also away from skeuomorphic icons in phones in favor of flat icons.
The fad wheel will turn. it always does.
@Scott: I see that Texas Tech is growing while college enrollment is generally declining. They must be doing something right. Logos are something I don’t pay much attention to.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
That’s my thinking.
@Scott:
“Neo-Confederate Texas Republicans are increasingly militant and willing to purge members who don’t tow an increasingly narrow line which is far right and Christian Nationalist.”
Showing how politics would be handled in a world with strong parties.
@Scott: @Moosebreath: this was my first thought. Dr Taylor regularly points out that parties do not have this type of control, so has something changed legally in TX to allow this?
Half-baked speculation for the day:
In science fiction* for movies and/or TV, world building is far more important than anything else (ie story, characters, maybe even visual effects).
The world building need not be great or even deep, but must resonate with the audience in some way.
This is not to say any SF stories with world building will succeed. Largely because pretty much all SF stories need world building in a way contemporary fiction does not. It is to say if the world building is popular, the movies or shows will be as well. The quality of the writing, plotting, characterization, etc. may influence relative popularity.
So maybe the world’s population isn’t so much tired of superhero movies as of the super hero world build.
*I assume this also applies to fantasy. Not having seen much fantasy, I can’t tell.
Ubisoft backed off plans to make an Assassin’s Creed game that took place during the Reconstruction where you would play as a former slave who kills Klansmen.
https://www.gamefile.news/p/scoop-ubisoft-cancelled-a-post-civil
Apparently they thought it might be divisive in the current American political climate, as we are still not sure who won our civil war.
I guess Assassin’s Creed: Charlie Kirk is completely out of the question.
In his substack today, Paul Krugman (spoiler lert) argues the high and rising price of gold reflects fears by international investors, including national central banks, that US debt is no longer a safe asset.
Caveat:
I need a word that means something like “I hope this doesn’t ever happen and that it happens soon.”
@Gustopher:
Or who the good guys were….
@Kathy:
World building is important, and one of the best things you can do for yourself as a writer of spec fiction is make your world expandable. Don’t lock it down in Book One. For one thing, if you’re writing a series you don’t necessarily know how many books. We sold 6 books of Ani to start and had no notion that we’d be writing ten times that many. With Gone I created the obligatory map but 80% of it was just lightly-defined territory, possibilities I might or might not explore. I learned that from JRRT, the god-tier world-builder. There’s a lot of his Middle Earth we never got to see.
An example of too-defined world-building is Dune. Fantastically original first book. (With great character work, too.) Then Herbert climbed right up his own ass with nowhere new to go. Spice, worms, and then some religious crusade? Ditto Orson Scott Card with Ender. I hate when Sci Fi gets prescriptive, trying to ‘teach’ me. Just tell the fucking story.
The flip side, the out-of-control world-building, would be Harry Potter, not that her billion or so readers noticed the way spells and abilities popped in and out of existence as needed to service the plot. Brilliant initial world-building, and first class character work, but she should have gotten a grip on her magic.
Star Wars is, to me, an example of thin world-building followed by utter cowardice about expanding that world – until Andor came along way too late. But what can you expect from movie people? (Apologies to @Eddie and @wr.)
I’ve been trying to read some fantasy series I’ve missed or avoided. Got about a third of the way into The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson before I dropped it. The pacing is way too much of what I call ‘voguing,’ having characters strike poses and strut up and down the catwalk hoping for an idea. So then I tried Robert Jordan’s WoT and he’s a better wordsmith than Sanderson, but how the fuck do you just openly Xerox Tolkien like that? I would sooner hang myself than write something so derivative. No one has ever called me derivative, I never get reviews saying, ‘this reminds me of. . .’ If I’m ripping off anyone, it’s me. I’m not an LLM.
@Michael Reynolds:
I think my point can be boiled down to: People get to be fans of the world building more than of the characters of the story.
IMO, Star Wars succeeded largely due to light sabers, and cool ship designs. Especially the fighters. None of them make logical sense in space, given physics and orbital mechanics, but if they’d gone with realistic designs like spinning sections, or weightless conditions inside, and so on, the movies wouldn’t have been as popular. Nor would they have sold the crazy amounts of merch.
What are the odds Bibi will resume bombing soon after all remaining hostages are released? And with El Taco’s blessing?
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 keesp bugging me about Win11, but doesn’t tell me this..
Well, Copilot managed a reasonable HACCP certificate for Starfleet
I’m not sure whether I’m more amused than worried…
And notice it managed to misspell compliance and changed the name from LLC to I.I.C. in the description.