Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, November 26, 2025
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33 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
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
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The headline of the day- Justice secretary wants jury trials scrapped except in most serious cases
The sports headline of the day- Missing Virginia high school football coach wanted on charges of child pornography
Baseless hypothesis from a sleep deprived brain: what if dark matter is not matter, nor is it energy, but rather some other thing we can’t even conceive until we learn more about the universe?
I give this notion a probability so low, that it makes zero appear almost as large as infinity.
Well now, isn’t this interesting?
https://apnews.com/article/trump-witkoff-putin-ukraine-bloomberg-3844a3721d92dd9ae9681547a0814d88
@Kathy:
I’m an atheist so make of this what you will but what if Dark Matter is the afterlife?
Blame the gummies…
There seems to be a growing recognition of Trump’s failings, physical and cognitive. Is it too soon to start speculating about consequences? In the context of Ukraine there’s been talk of rivalry between Vance and Rubio as both are angling for the top job, Vance hoping to step up if Trump is removed and Rubio angling for the ’28 nomination. JD, or whatever his real name is, having seen Trump’s vengeful nature, will be very mindful of the adage about not striking at the king without killing the king. The 25th amendment will be invoked only if Trump is obviously hopeless, or dead. And how much will he have screwed up by then? If the 25th is invoked, the GOPs will want to pull a Rockefeller and name a GOP veep for JD. But that requires majority approval by the Senate, and the House, which everyone now thinks will be majority D in ’27. That might pressure the GOPs to move early and try to remove Trump next year.
As to ’28, does that charisma and smarts free dweeb Rubio think he actually has a shot at winning a post Trump nomination, much less a general election? And there’s still the threat that Trump will somehow try to run or put off the election.
Interesting times.
@Daryl: @Daryl:
An afterlife might be nice.
I rate the probability of that as lower than mine 😉 But it might make for an interesting story. IIRC, most dark matter is in halos around galaxies (determined by what stars orbit at what speeds and where), so you’d need to have an intrepid crew or eccentric scientist venture that far out, which would take decades or centuries even with FTL…
@Daryl:
“Have a few millions burning a hole in your pocket? Wanna make you bullshit palatable to El Taco?”
@Daryl: I wish we knew whether it was US or foreign intel who leaked the call. I’m hoping it’s our own “Deep State” punching back. But Bloomberg will never tell.
@gVOR10:
A move to oust the felon next year means that Vance could only serve the remainder of trumps term and the possibility of reelection in 28. Waiting till 27 would allow Vance the opportunity of 2 terms. So a consideration.
@Sleeping Dog:
Weekend at Tacky’s Epstein Ballroom: “One more year! one more year!”
So which is it?
This administration seems to have opinions first and make up facts and figures later.
U.S. Army secretary warned Ukraine of imminent defeat while pushing initial peace plan
Russia’s Defense Industry Collapse: Putin’s War Machine Faces Its Gravest Crisis Since Soviet Fall
I just saw that A different Democracy made the top five list of must read books on
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-liberal-currents-canon-or-some-good-books/
Even Ted Cruz is on the right side here.
In response to my letter to him he responded:
He unnecessarily added some blather about how it is Biden’s fault, how Trump is great, and how much it all costs but still it was good to see some clear outcome envisaged.
@gVOR10:
@gVOR10:
Neither has a spine to speak of, just a facsimile of empowerment derived from leaning on someone else’s spine.
@Kathy:
Or perhaps we will never have the capacity to grasp it.
Karoline Leavitt Slammed by Nephew’s Family for Ignoring ICE Arrest
Maybe Leavitt “dropped dime” on her brother’s ex? At any rate, Brazil has some tough laws in favor of maternal rights. See how this plays out.
Trump envoy Witkoff coached Putin’s aide on “peace plan” for Ukraine without inviting Kyiv to talks, leaked recordings reveal
Playing Trump’s ego like a fiddle, or balalaika.
Serial criminal serial
If Home Alone 2 were filmed in 2025, Trump would force Kevin to give the criminals the veranda and one of the rooms, make him reduce the number of traps, take all the pizza and Coca-Cola for himself — and assure everyone it was a “mutually beneficial deal.”
(Savchenko Volodymyr on Bluesky)
—- and the retort by PonsonbyDeville
Want to avoid arguments at Thanksgiving? Talk about the weather.
“Boy, it’s cold today, here in Vermont.”
“Yeah, and the libtards want us to believe the earth is warming. How crazy is that?”
What is happening to “Obamacare”? Trump promised to repeal and replace it in 2016. It didn’t happen. Now I read that it might get extended another two years. Anybody know what’s supposed to replace it? What are the shortcomings of the current system, and what are the proposed fixes?
Joint Statement in Response to FBI Inquiry
@Rob1:
I see two ways to resolve that:
1) humanity goes extinct without ever determining what dark matter is.
2) aliens or some form of real AI can comprehend it and tell us what it is. We then learn whether we can’t comprehend it, or just couldn’t comprehend the means to find out the answer.
So, betting on it is a bad bet 😛
This has got to be one of the most techbro things: ChatGPT cannot help or nudge people to kill themselves, because it goes against the terms of service.
How about a very prominent warning stating that if you seek advice on self harm or suicide, the overhyped LLM will eventually give it up?
Really, the bubble can’t pop fast enough.
Wired is reporting that defense contractors want to take away the military’s right to fix equipment, instead selling them a subscription repair service.
This feels…insane. Like “BMW heated-seat-subscriptions” insane. How exactly will this work in a combat area?
@Kathy: When your model of the universe has it that 85% of matter does not interact with most of the fundamental forces, and that 95% of the mass-energy is special, it makes sense to keep an open mind.
I’m a dark matter skeptic.
Further, I’d say that dark energy gets a bad rap by being bundled in with dark matter so often. I’m not sure it’s an energy the same way that thermodynamic energy is an energy, but it certainly can be modeled that way, similar to potential energy. It’s a geometric expansion of the universe based on how much universe there is — a completely straightforward, observable thing.
But dark matter? Nonsense. It screams “I am this century’s Luminous Ether!”
No hate on the luminous ether, given what we knew and understood it was a reasonable theory — it was a product of not knowing the right questions to ask, rather than getting the wrong answers. All hail the Michelson-Morley experiment, best “failed” experiment ever, etc.
I’m just betting that before we have a fuller understanding of what it is and how it works, that we’re going to have one of those big jumps. Maybe observable matter isn’t real, or the random technobabble in Interstellar was right all along, or something.
My prediction: it’s going to be dumb. Something we consider obvious and axiomatic will be only true at roughly the scale we observe around us.
Or @Daryl is right, and its ghosts.
Damn, spilled a whole jar of turkey broth on the floor. Dogs to the rescue!
My brother sent me something about how USAID paid for John McCain to go to Ukraine and overthrow their government in 2013, (and I guess Russia is just trying to restore Ukrainian home rule?)
What a bizarre world he lives in.
I wonder what he thinks about dark matter.
@Jen:
Why, you can leave your broken tank, armored personnel carrier, heavy guns, missile launchers, nukes even, out there in the open in any battlefield being overrun by enemy forces, secure in the knowledge they won’t be able to repair it and use it, either.
Win-Win
@Gustopher:
As I recall, the Michelson Morley experiment wasn’t so much about finding the luminiferous aether, as much as measuring it. The notion that light could travel absent some kind of medium was inconceivable.
Well….
There were good reasons, at the time, for measuring the aether. there are good reasons for trying to detect dark matter, or to look for something missing in the way gravity works.
Facts don’t take account of our reasons, no matter how good. They insist on being what they are.
@Kathy:
Ok. Suppose there’s a documented report of a dead person appearing in front of a lot of witnesses, who discloses some information known to only to the dead person and two of the witnesses.
Of course, the rational explanation is a hoax of some sort, especially since there’s no recording of the dead person’s appearance (in this day when everyone has a recording device in their pocket? Odd!)
Next suppose the dead person also said something poetic and ambiguous about maintaining the shape of colorful clouds, among other poetic imagery that makes even less sense.
Next, some eccentric scientists wonders if the incident was real, and the dead person was talking about dark matter keeping galaxies from spinning themselves apart. SO they decide to travel that very far distance to where the dark matter halo around the galaxy should be and find out what’s what.
I didn’t think so, either.
@Kathy:
All the ghosts have been flung from the galaxy by centrifugal force. It might not be a happy afterlife, but it’s probably quiet.
I hate the book Sapiens more than any other basically harmless book that I have read. It is often viewed as amazing and profound by people who are smart enough that they shouldn’t fall for it. It is trash.
I hate it even more than Brave New World, which has the saving grace of being meant as fiction. Once you get to the sexaphone, you know exactly what book you’re reading and just wonder what is wrong with people who claim to like it.
Sapiens is no Mein Kampf or Atlas Shrugged, obviously, but it’s awful.
I have finally found people who view it with the same nearly unmitigated contempt that I do. The “If Books Could Kill” podcast.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sapiens/id1651876897?i=1000737572553
Just wanted to toss that podcast recommendation into the ether.
@Gustopher:
I paid one Audible credit for Harari’s Homo Deus. I decided never to pay for his books ever again. Like Malcolm Gladwell, he’s what I call intellectual junk food, or brain candy. They’re both entertaining, you will learn something*, but there’s little to no substance in much of what they say, and especially in the conclusions or speculations they come up with; and they declare them with utter certainty.
I did read Sapiens, but in Everand, which charges me the same per month whether I read no books or all the books allowed in a month. I’m sure I’ve forgotten almost everything about both books.
*In one of Harari’s books I learned what the movie Inside Out was about. It intrigued me enough to stream it. And I’ve found it a charming, if not entirely logical or consistent, allegory that’s worth watching once or twice.