Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, January 7, 2026
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52 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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A petroleum engineer’s perspective:
“Page 1”
“Page 2”
ETA: “Naphtha” is petroleum industry jargon for unfinished gasoline, usually an intermediate stream in an oil refinery.
@charontwo:
“Page 3”
“Page 4”
Way back when I was a working engineer, one of the projects I worked on was the design engineering of the “upgrader” he mentions.
@charontwo:
The glop in the underground reservoirs is too viscous to be moved by tanker, so it must be upgraded (cracked and hydrogenated) to “syncrude” before export to Texas refineries.
AI is killing YouTube for me. I have been a pretty heavy user of YouTube but the hassle of weeding out AI shit has a discouraging effect. Here’s every AI Video: Watch the same thing you already watched yesterday from a human creator, but dumber. The A stands for artificial but the I does not stand for Intelligence, still less Imagination.
It is so fucking boring, such a waste of space, such an irritant. The YouTube page that used to offer various interesting possibilities is now littered with plagiarized video garbage.
On the plus side I’m reading more books.
Poll: Major allies see US as unreliable and destabilizing
“Krugman”
This is what they voted for.
U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz wants legal status for migrant workers in struggling construction industry
@Michael Reynolds:
You probably use YT differently than I do, which is following a handful of creators across a few subject areas. I’ve also turned off my history, so the algorithm doesn’t work well. So far I’ve not run into much AI, but a video presented did pique my interest and when I went to it, I noted a content advisory from YT. Basically it said that the vid was all or in part AI. Following the link to YT’s explanation, it seems that YT is scanning all newly uploaded vids for AI content and placing an advisory that can’t be removed it AI is present.
Curious, I went to that creators homepage and found a few dozen vids, all created in the past few months and all AI. So yah, there’s a lot of slop there.
Texas oil and gas producers, Trump’s biggest supporters, are keeping very quiet on Venezuela.
Trump says the U.S. will fix Venezuela’s oil industry. Texas experts say the idea faces hurdles.
@charontwo:
That’s it exactly. I’ve been watching two incompatible analyses. 1) It’s all about oil. 2) The oil ain’t gonna happen.
The squaring of the circle comes with realizing that Trump has no fucking idea what he’s doing or why. Rubio wants to bring down the Cuban regime, Miller wants Venezuelan immigrants raus. And they said the magic word ‘oil’ to President Amyloid Plaques and then showed him Maduro making fun of his dancing.
Trump is becoming a ventriloquist’s dummy. His goon squad knows full well his brain is fried, they’re smelling his diapers, they’re hearing the babbling incoherence, they can see him falling asleep on his feet, so before the king dies they’re going to prop him up like a Weekend at Bernie’s parody and ride him around like an Emerald Wasp on a cockroach.
Venezuela is what happens when an ignorant, senile, and likely mentally ill president ignores experts and listens to the fantasies of a warped ideologue like Stephen Miller. Miller has been practically screeching about how the U.S. is a superpower and will take what it wants because that’s what superpowers do. If Iraq/Afghanistan showed we – as a nation – learned nothing from Vietnam, then Venezuela shows we learned nothing from Iraq/Afghanistan.
Re-upping CSK’s post from late yesterday: Aldrich Ames, notorious turncoat who caused the deaths of many assets, has died in prison.
His NYT obituary is appropriately worded:
Stephen Miller is so desperately pathetic trying to act like such a cool and manly man.
I remember watching tv sitcoms after the British Invasion made such a huge impact on the American music scene. The Paul Henning sitcom protrayal of British rockers was over the top, the opposite of cool. Even as a child, I laughed at their ridiculous characters.
Miller reminds me of one of those characters. A guy only someone like Jethro Bodine would think “cool”.
I guess Texas A&M now is going to ban the teaching of Plato.
https://dailynous.com/2026/01/06/texas-am-bans-plato/
Or at least parts of it.
Mad Vlad is going to call a certain orange Taco a bad dog.
Headline: US military confirms seizure of Russian-flagged tanker
@Michael Reynolds:
@Sleeping Dog:
AI is completely ruining YouTube for me, as well. Anything AI should be labeled as such. That biggest problem is that so many people have no idea they’re watching AI. They believe that the woman is actually fending off a mountain lion and protecting her baby in her suburban front yard.
It’s ridiculous.
If I were king, I’d ban algorithms.
@Michael Reynolds:
With respect to dancing, Trump is today accusing Maduro of copying him.
In a sign of how stupid the times are, my Google news site is showing these two headlines:
USA Today: Fallout maps show how an attack on nuclear silos would impact US cities
Al Jazeera: How strong are Latin America’s military forces, as they face US threats?
So, are we missing the boring times when Democrats ran things yet?
@Sleeping Dog: Yeah, this is how I use YouTube, too. I have a set of creators and I follow them and watch their stuff.
Of course, I have to try new stuff, to see if I can find a new creator I like, and that leads me into AI garbage.
Suggestions are full of stuff that looks like AI. Anonymous, narrated stuff on topics the algorithm thinks I like. And then there are the ads that are obviously AI generated.
“D J Trump“
@Michael Reynolds:
@Sleeping Dog:
@EddieInCA:
I use Youtube pretty much exclusively to watch Football (Sunday Ticket) or watch recorded DJ sets. It’s pretty hard to AI those since most of them are recorded live either in a club or on a specific set. But the other day I got served up a Star Wars thing that looked kind of interesting. I wasted about 5 minutes of my life before I realized that they were just repeating the same exact information just with different phrasing. If it was a 3 minute thing I probably wouldn’t have known. I wouldn’t have learned anything interesting, but I wouldn’t have caught on.
What’s getting to me sort of tangential to the AI nonsense is trying to decide if I want to pay for it so that I don’t get ads in the middle of a set.
I’m mostly in agreement. I’m pretty convinced that algorithms should fall outside of Sec 230 coverage. I think that would solve a lot of what normal people find to be problems. It would probably damage the ability of these buttholes to influence people and get everyone riled up.
The only quibble or issue is that I’ve found a lot of DJ’s and music I really love because they were in the suggestion box. I gotta imagine there’s a way to reign in the bad without destroying the good.
@charontwo: :
“…that money will be controlled by me…”
Oh, I’m totally sure it will be, Don. I’m sure it will be.
@EddieInCA: I’ve been a regular user of the Internet since before it was the Internet (ARPANET) and I can say one thing with certainty: All unmoderated forums eventually turn to shit and become useless. No exceptions.
I think the era of “we can look up anything on the internet and find useful answers” is over. We are heading back to relying on “trustworthy sources of truth” and tossing everything else in the same bin we used to put the pamphlets handed out by the crazed looking homeless people in the supermarket parking lot.
@MarkedMan:
I think you’re right. Any time I see some clickbait news headline on YouTube I check with MSM to see if there’s anything to it. Very often it’s 100% clickbait with little to nothing useful behind it. And that’s with actual human-created stuff. The case for gatekeepers is increasingly strong, but it will only matter to the upper 10-20% of consumers. If Q taught us anything it’s that most people will swallow anything.
@Michael Reynolds:
Specifically for science news, I no longer even click on stuff that seems startling, very unusual, or revolutionary. I figure if there’s anything to it, I’ll find it again shortly from reputable sources.
As to Youtube, I find people worth following now and then. Sometimes the algorithm will spit out something of interest. Those I don’t follow, as they’ll keep showing up in the feed for several weeks whether I click on them or not.
@Beth:
Interruptions when listening to a collection of Beethoven’s concertos or Vivaldi’s sonatas are annoying, but I wouldn’t pay a penny to remove them. Same for videos I find of interest that have three ad breaks within six minutes. I’d rather ignore ads than pay the oligarchs to remove them (for now).
I see this as an iteration of how to solve airport congestion: Revealed: how aviation emissions could be halved without cutting journeys.
The gist is to do it “by getting rid of premium seats, ensuring flights are near full and using the most efficient aircraft,”
And you reduce airport congestion by having fewer flights with larger airplanes.
Both are true. Both are impossible under current conditions.
Passengers, overall, value convenience almost as much as price. You want to flight when it best suits you. This means offering several flights per day. And that means using smaller airplanes.
On the emissions matter, the problem is more subtle. There are tow basic business models: full service and low cost.
The former relies on premium seats, and their exorbitant prices, to make a flight profitable. Especially so for long haul flights, where the luxury* feels sybaritic. The latter relies on as many full flights as possible per aircraft. It’s also hard to make it profitable with long haul flights, as demonstrated by several long haul low cost failures that are too numerous to list, and stretch back to at least Laker Airways in the late 70s.
You’d need some policy action, like taxing premium fares at a really high rate to make them unprofitable. maybe a reverse load factor tax, too (ie the lower the load factor, the higher the taxes on all fares; maybe also higher landing and parking fees).
Side note: I’ve seen lots of claims, but little hard data, that airlines the world over make most of their profits, not necessarily their income, by selling points to credit card providers. The purpose for people to accumulate points is to score free tickets, especially in premium seats. Take first and business class out, and the demand for points also suffers.
*While I’d call the food and drinks offered in premium class luxurious (albeit wildly overpriced), as well as the lounges available to premium passengers, the seats are luxurious only compared to cattle class. You have far more comfortable seats, not to mention beds, in your home, or even in a two star hotel. And far more space, too.
Is it just me or did these assholes decide to take Christmas break off and have decide it’s time to seriously get to work making the world a worse place as hard as they can?
Feels like they’re shifting into a higher gear. Hope that means the old man is dying.
@Beth:
Hope springs eternal.
More likely is they fear they’ll lose the midterms, and need to enact the full fascist Taco system now.
Live updates: ICE says agent, ‘fearing for his life,’ kills woman in south Minneapolis
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/07/shooting-south-minneapolis-ice-agents-federal-operation
Looks like a killing by an untrained, out of control ICE agent in Minneapolis.
@MarkedMan:
Glad to “hear your voice again”, always appreciated your input.
@Scott:
It didn’t take DHS long to circle the wagons — they already claimed that the shooting was justified and that the woman was a domestic terrorist. What if the investigation shows otherwise… will that see the light of day?
MAGA’s fear and Hegseth’s hatred of strong intelligent women continues…
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/06/nx-s1-5667583/pentagon-review-women-in-ground-combat-roles
@charontwo:
Thanks for these. I’m sure I read something similar somewhere on Tuesday, but forgot to bookmark it and haven’t been able to find it again since.
In short, Venezuela is a high-cost producer, and unlikely to get the investment needed with any degree of political risk.
And requires a global oil price of about $60 (?) per barrel at least to break even.
The energy industry econmics in relation to the politics of Venezuela and the Cuban links have a long way to play out yet, I suspect.
Long story short:
I did get some coworkers to buy into the 24th December lottery drawing (bad bet). We won nothing. So we doubled down (gambler’s fallacy) for the January 6th drawing (coincidence). We “won” a refund* on some tickets (luck). So we decided to buy tickets for today’s lotto (worse bet).
So why play, when I know how bad the bets are?
Partly tradition, partly for fun (of sorts), partly because I’d rather take a short break buying lottery tickets online than doing Hell Week work. And always following Kathy’s First Law: bet only what you can afford to lose.
* “Refund” is the technically correct term, and it is a prize awarded by the lottery. The bottom line is you get your bet back. I don’t regard it as a win. More like a non-loss.
@Kathy:
I maintain an unholy cocktail of ad blockers to remove YouTube’s ads. I think the key component is the Brave browser, and I should be cleaning up the others at some point.
I don’t know how anyone can live with the ads.
@Scott:
At a press conference, Mayor Frey said he had a message for the community, and for ICE.
@Kathy:
Make that two tankers.
M/T Sophia seized in the Caribbean (though this one does not appear to be Russian flagged)
Regading the Marinera aka Bella 1, it seems RAF maritime patrol aircraft and the Rotal Navy RFA Tideforce were involved in supporting the operation.
The whole Marinera business is a bit odd.
It had been arriving off Venezuela from Iran, and turned about ran north before, apparently docking at all, and then Russia declares it re-flagged en route (legally dubious anyway), and reportedly sending naval ships to meet it.
And you also have to consider the risk factor for both the US and the UK in this operation, for a tanker that seems to have been empty of oil.
Or is there something else about that tanker?
@Gustopher:
A few months ago I installed Malwarebytes, and noticed ads on Youtube began to play, stopped, begam again, stopped again, then spent like five to ten seconds trying to load, then gave up. It still wastes about as much time as an ad you can skip, but it spares me hearing about Grammarly and Clickup (whatever they are*).
the downside is sometimes it doesn’t work, and ads play merrily on. I then disable and re-enable the ad blocking function, and ads get blocked again.
I don’t mind banner ads in websites, unless they cover up content. That happens a lot on mobile browsing, and seldom in desktop browsing.
I’d no idea Brave existed. I’ll take a look at it. And wonder why they haven’t been sued by the makers of Transformers.
*Not looking to find out what they are.
@JohnSF:
The Adam Tooze piece I posted here a day or two ago is also a good overview, some info I had not seen elsewhere.
“Adam Tooze”
ETA:
Apparently $62. for WTI is the current breakeven for new hydrofracking wells in the US shale formations. At least $80/bbl is needed to make Orinoco heavy oil breakeven, maybe more.
ETA: It’s possible (dunno) Tooze may ask you to subscribe to see the piece. I am a paid subscriber, but most of his stuff is visible to free subscriptions.
@EddieInCA:
The woman/dog/toddler saving a baby from a mountain-lion/car/moose/bear takes up space that would otherwise be filled with scary black guys or foreigners attacking white women, and insane conspiracy theories.
Reshaping America’s fears to be suburban megafauna rather than people with darker skin seems like it could be a good thing, even if it relies on lies.
Now that I see what I’ve written, I think we need to add a bunch of AI videos of stereotypical Latino gardeners saving babies from mountain-lion/car/moose/bear things.
@JohnSF:
In Tom Clancy’s novels, Jack Ryan often said of puzzling bits of intelligence “It may make no sense to us, but it has to make sense to somebody.” By that he meant it must make sense to the people doing it.
This does not apply to the Taco so-called administration.
@Kathy:
Brave is technically a different toyline, although it used some of the same molds as Transformers, as both were made by Takara at that point.
Was the Brave toyline and cartoon popular in Mexico? It’s really obscure in the US and now I’m reassessing my entire mental image of you based on you knowing about it. I’m actually seriously considering whether that was just a bizarre autocorrect error to bring up Transformers at all.
Latest news out of NIH.
Firing of neuroscience institute chief adds to NIH’s leadership vacuum
tldr: Walter Koroshetz, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), was fired on Dec 26. No reason given.
A lot of my research has been funded by NINDS over the years, including my very first NIH grant. I know Walter, he’s a good man, and he deserves better than this.
Leadership refresh is important for any organization. But not like this.
This sentence from the article says so much about the health of our nation’s scientific enterprise:
@Kathy:
Maybe not to Trump admin; but assuming this op had Tideforce as component, it’s a major political risk for the UK governemnent.
Could be just “humour the Orange Emperor”, I suppose.
But I think the UK would be a lot more inclined to run risks if there was some reasonable cause.
Another indicator: it seems the seizure of the Bella 1 was authorised before it even docked in Venezuala and took on oil.
Could be I’m over-analysing, but it has a fishy feel to me.
Incidentally, the US still seems (?) to be going after at least three other “reflagged” tankers:
Veronica renamed Gallileo; Dianchi renamed Expander, Malak renamed Sintez.
@Gustopher:
I thought you were making something up, so I googled it.
No, I’d not heard of a Brave toy line or cartoon prior to today. It wasn’t a typo, either. The logo for Brave, which I take it is a stylized lion, looked to me a bit like the Autobot sigil in the 80s cartoons (I did see those).
@Eusebio: the videos show she was trying to flee. Apparently she and her wife were in the car recording an ice raid and she partially blocked the street and an ice agent took umbrage and tried to get her out of her vehicle. Instead, she tried to drive away and he shot her pretty much point blank in the head. The Police chief supports that reporting in the presser. He was either masking rage or holding back tears or both, but he was obviously shaken.
Of course, Trump and Gnome were their usual degenerate selves in response to the tragedy.
Mayor Frey did not mince words about ice, but he called for peaceful protest, not violence or retribution. Quite the contrast from the bloodthirsty admistration.
RFK Jr to be Declared an Honorary Virus.
This is beautiful satire.
It’s The Atlantic, so you’ll need an account. Or… if you have an RSS reader, add The Atlantic. You can read full articles via RSS–no registration, no ads.
@becca:
There’s video of the murder here. Warning: it shows the cold blooded shooting.
The video clearly shows a callous cold-blooded murder. After the shooting, apparently, ICE agents blocked a doctor from going to the woman’s aid. She was 37, and a mother. I saw someone saying if you can watch that video and think it was justified, you should be put down like a dog, but it’s a grave insult to dogs to be associated with these specimens.
A year ago there was a journalist who moved from NYC to Montana talking about his fellow men in the neighborhood, and how childlike they were. Men in their 30 having hysterical fits, yelling at women, and acting the center of the world. Behaving exactly like ICE agents, in essence. I think there’s an endless supply of these people who can be poured into the pear-shaped ICE uniform and handed a gun.
Walz has nothing to lose. He should be working on getting this fucker into custody, and if the police won’t follow his orders, well then it’s time to go after that.
Yet again, there are bad apples everywhere. This ICE shooter clearly screwed up and should be charged. What’s new is that the heads of these agencies and the president himself rushed to his defense, lying about what happened. Absolutely appalling.
@Gustopher: I use firefox and adblock+. I haven’t seen an ad on youtube in +17 years.
No buffering no issues.
@Kathy: Malwarebytes has gone downhill over the years. For me it’s an install use then uninstall if I “need” to use it. IT’s definitely developed some serious bloat.
@Kathy:
Price and convenience often lead passengers to choose itineraries with stops and connecting flights, even when non-stop flights are available to their destination. Non-stop flights are more efficient, other factors being equal, so perhaps airline scheduling changes and consumer tolerance for fewer departure times would contribute to higher overall efficiency.