Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, November 19, 2025
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31 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).
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Russia is trying to expand its warfare into a European war. We need to pay attention and make the case to defend Europe. Cannot hide behind America First BS.
Polish Rail Sabotage Blamed On Russia
Ukrainians working for Russia suspected in railway blast, Poland says
‘We are under attack’: Italian defense minister accuses Russia of waging hybrid war
The headline of the day- Fully functional, solid gold toilet sells for $12.1 million at auction
@Bill Jempty:
As reported by the Daily Beast,
So the seller got paid just the value of the gold, which maybe isn’t so bad because the price of gold has more than tripled since the toilet was created in 2016.
I tried to feed a premise to Copilot after all (slowish day at work, a rarity in Hell Week season).
It didn’t quite go cliche, but there were cliche elements in its outline. It brought in more when I asked it to introduce conflict in the story.
I don’t know. I’m told time and time again there needs to be conflict in every story. I disagree. but I also think mere disagreement is conflict, even if not high drama, high stakes conflict. Say removing vs not removing artifacts from a burial chamber.
I think I’m never going to sell a single story…
Wanna get good and angry?
When they crash the economy again (which they are in the process of doing) and ask for bailouts, we need to revolt.
When I was a kid, Sunday evenings meant watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. This guy clearly did not.
I truly wonder if our species is devolving.
@Jen: Personally, I rooting for the wolves.
@Jen:
My family went to Yellowstone a couple of times when I was a teenager. I remember them selling a book about all the ways people have killed themselves there. People messing with buffalo, elk, or my favorite, jumping directly into the hot springs and boiling all their skin off.
When I was in my early 20’s my dad let me have some reservations he couldn’t use so I took a girlfriend there. We pulled over in a look out area to look at animals. I watched a couple of stupid ass men pick up a large stick and start walking over to poke a giant fucking elk. I stuffed my girlfriend back in my MINI and got the fuck outta there. The worst part is idiots, almost entirely men, insist that they are somehow immune from these giant animals.
That trip I also got to see a giant grizzly bear rocket out of some trees and chase down an adult deer. That bear was hauling ass and brought that deer down like it was nothing. I was glad to be far far away.
@Beth: At the risk of sounding pedantic and tangential, the $1T defense budget is just the start. You have to add in the $450B VA budget (what is the VA but deferred defense spending), the $40B National Nuclear Security Administration, and finally, the $100B National Intelligence Budget and Military Intelligence Budget.
Soon you are talking about real money.
@Scott: A lot of DOE is weapons maintenance.
@Scott:
You’re right, there’s that, but also:
I am constantly told 1. taxing rich people is morally wrong and self-defeating, 2. taxing corporations is morally wrong and self-defeating (cause they’ll cut jobs/innovation/pass it on to end users or consumers), and 3. it is morally wrong to tax capital, because benevolent rich people are putting their capital at risk.
What about the labor of the soldiers who are putting their lives at risk? Why isn’t all of those those share buy-backs “waste, fraud, abuse”. Why are soldiers and their families relying on SNAP?
None of our present situations is going to change until the rich are made to be afraid again; seriously afraid.
I can just picture a bright, eager cadet at Starfleet Academy during Classical Economics class ask, “But why did they keep having bubbles if catastrophe ensued when they popped”?
I can’t picture what the older junior lieutenant teaching the class would respond.
Maybe they’d get a Ferengi guest lecturer to explain why the sheep want to be fleeced.
@Jen:
The video doesn’t show why he was on that piste and where he was coming from, but he was carrying a camera. So if he spotted the wolves in the distance and pursued them for a photo, he was an idiot, but he could have been photographing something else when the pack came along. If that were the case trying to withdraw and then standing his ground as they approached was his best option. To have run would have triggered the prey pursuit behavior in the wolves and they would have run him down in seconds. Standing presented the wolves with a dilemma, alas the interesting interaction took place behind that hillock out of the videographers sight.
@Sleeping Dog: That sort of falls under being aware of your surroundings. The wolf packs in Yellowstone are a tourist attraction, and are part of tours, so people can/do know where the areas are that they’ve been spotted, which is likely why there were others there. That man is really lucky he wasn’t lunch.
On a completely different topic, the Comey case does not appear to be going well for prosecutors.
@Beth:
Instructions here.
@Beth:
I haven’t read Death in Yellowstone in 25 or 30 years, but I remember it well. Yellowstone has quite a confluence of natural forces that could do you in — bitter cold weather, boiling hot water, high cliffs and deep canyons with loose stone, bison, grizzlies. But as I recall, ordinary chilly water is the biggest killer as people spend a lot of time near the river where a slip can be fatal, and on the lake where summer storms can swamp canoes and leave even PFD-wearing folks at the mercy of the cold water.
Morons doing stupid things around wildlife in national parks seems to be a regular thing. It’s really infuriating that white scarf guy approached the wolves prepared to use his bear spray to repel them when things got a little scary. But it’s not like the wolves were going to eat him unless maybe he actually attacked them, as fatal wolf attacks are virtually non-existent (although don’t let little kids wander amongst wolves).
@Jen: my favorite comment in that thread is “Somebody is going to jail for this and it’s not Comey.”
@becca: Watching this unravel has been WILD. She’s admitted that the Grand Jury didn’t see the final indictment that was handed up in the Comey case, and now the statute of limitations has run out.
This entire case could collapse [edited from “is collapsing” b/c who knows…] because she didn’t know WTF she was doing. She appears to have thought that of the three counts, she could just remove the one they didn’t approve, and then move the remaining counts on their merry way. Also, she *interrupted the judge* when he asked her a question. Wow.
@Jen:
I remember watching Wild Kingdom too. MEtv runs WK repeats every Sunday morning.
Ah, El Taco’s Master Plan to ensure Ukraine’s capitulation.
Realistically, it will be very very very hard for Ukraine to keep all its post-2014 territory, given how much of it Mad Vlad occupies. But right now Russia seems to be suffering more, so I don’t see Ukraine rushing to give away a lot more territory and leaving themselves open to further aggression in the future.
Not to mention this abomination was hashed out between Russia and the US, without involving Ukraine at all. the latter is not a vassal state or colony to be dealt with in this manner.
It would be good to end the slaughter, maiming, and destruction soon, but not if it’s a respite for Russia to regroup and continue in a few years.
@Jen: If the worm turns, there’s talk that Pam and Lindsay could very well be disbarred. I doubt they care.
My fondest memories of Sunday night TV are Walt Disney’s The Wonderful World of Color. Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom preceded it. I got a few years on you, and back then Uncle Walt was The Man.
@Kathy:
There’s also the bit about the Russians messing with Poland and getting their consulate shut down in return. Seems like that whole area is one Russian screw up from a major conflagration.
Moose and Squirrel
Debut November 19, 1959
ABC TV
Source
@Beth:
The odds of screwup go up exponentially if El Taco gets involved.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown: I was 5 on that date. I was a Rocky and Bullwinkle fan. I was also a fan of Jay Ward’s predecessor cartoon Crusader Rabbit (with Ragland T. Tiger).
@Michael Reynolds:
Well, the problem there is that the guillotine in the French Revolution resolved very little.
After litle more than thirty-four yers the Bourbons were back
And even if Napoleon had not taken war to the point of being crushed by a European coalition, he’d already replaced the Republic with a hereditary Empire based on a military/upper middle class/aristocratic/peasant coalition.
And after 1814 France had almost a century and a half of a multi-sided contest between reactionary monarchists, liberal monarchists, Bonapartists, right-republicans, liberal-republicans, populists, and socialists.
Which only concluded with the catastrophe of Vichy, and the resulting eclipse of the reactionaries in favour of the post-WW2 consensus Republic of the republicans both right and centre, Christian Democrats, and social democrats.
Guillotine terror may motivate people; but not always in ways that might be predicted, or welcomed.
@Kathy:
It seems to be Witkoff freelancing again, and getting gulled by the Russians, AGAIN.
Much of the reporting on this seems to originate with Dmitriev trying to “bounce” the terms into being.
Ukraine might accept a “cease fire in place”: there is NO WAY they will accept conceding territory Russia does not even hold, disarmament of Ukraine, de facto Russian control of Ukrainian foreign policy (and continued implication of a demand for Russian “vetting” of Ukrainian governments) etc.
The “capitulationist” faction in Washington often seems to forget that Zelenssky cannot implement such terms by fiat. He would need approval by Parliament, and would not get it.
More likely he’d be removed by a coalition of a majority in the Rada and the military high command.
So he won’t even try.
The best hope is that this is just another product of various dimwits in D.C. competing for the ear of the Mad King, and that once “nope” comes back from Kyiv and Europe (dipped in sufficient sugar to wheedle Trump, again) the remaining vaguely sane in the State Department etc will once again point out to trump its just the Russians trying, again, to gain by a “deal” what they cannot achieve on the battlefield.
Anchorage all over again.
Any sensible administration would have long since realised Witkoff was useless, and retired him with much praise, honours, emoluments and an un-fond farewell.
@Beth:
You might also have heard of the Russian intelligence ship stooging about near, and sometimes inside, in UK waters lighting up an RAF surveillance aircraft with lasers.
Do that often enough and you may just get a “home-on-radiation” missile where it won’t buff out.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
In Russia, there is the Boris and Natasha show. Watch our heroes do battle against the Imperialist Moose and squirrel. Special Guest Stars- Fearless Leader and Captain Peach Fuzz
@JohnSF:
It takes no brains to figure out: give the aggressor what he wants, and he’ll stop aggressing! Witcof probably thinks it’s brilliant. Maybe he ran it past CHatGPT.
El Taco claims to have signed the Epstein files act.
Given he makes such a big deal of signing even obscure executive orders, I wonder. Did he sign his legal name, or David Dennison?