Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, April 29, 2026
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30 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
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BlueSky.
Let me just say that I’m not impressed.
‘Alpha’ troops and more ships: Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao outlines vision for service
This is what he is concerned about:
And this:
These people are just weird clowns who unfortunately have been given power and authority.
The video of Trump cutting in front of Queen Camilla to shake hands is just SO SO CRINGE.
How is he so continuously embarrassing? How??? Does he wake up every morning and say “I wonder how I can appear to be even MORE of a narcissist?”
JFC.
@Scott: Hung Cao and Whiskey Pete seem to share the same homoerotic fantasy about the military, and they are determined to make their dream come true. One can picture them as kids, outside their clubhouse, in front of a handwritten sign: No gurls.
@Jen:
Just like this: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10155840473111037
Trump is a classless pig; always has been, always will be.
@Charley in Cleveland: They thought the He Man Woman Haters Club was real.
@Jen:
If King Taco is of higher rank, and in what passes for his mind manypeoplesaythat he’s the highestest rank, then it was his prerogative, nay his holy duty, to slap down the impudent wench who forgot her place.
I need to shower now…
I hope this further energizes Texas Democrats and further demoralized Texas Republicans. Not sure what is most motivating to either group.
Talarico leads both Cornyn, Paxton in new polls of Texas’ U.S. Senate race
The Fixer court has finished the demolition of the voting rights act.
That’s what I expected they’d do, but I’m still mad as hell.
The worst American in politics since 2000 is definitely John Roberts. Just a total hack and fake, built to lick the boots of corporations and scams, and for no real reason. He has nothing to fear. He built this court into its shithole state, all for the love of shilling and nickel-and-dime logic.
@Modulo Myself: Indeed. Much evil flows from Roberts. Always remember he said judges call balls and strikes. He didn’t say anything about calling them fairly.
And he hardly does it for no reason. His wife has pulled in 20 mil as a legal recruiter.
@gVOR10:
That was always an odd metaphor to use regarding fairness. Like umpires in a game? The people whose calls can be disputed forever?
The thing is he couldn’t point to actual objectivity. Because a) it doesn’t exist outside of logical positivism and braindead regurgitation of official statements. And b) the disciplines that come closest to the objective are the ones that the groups he panders to loathe, like scientists.
Meantime at the Capitol, the (other) drunk is defending the proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget, as “historic,” and a “war fighting budget.”
General Caine adds “global risk is scaling.”
I take this to mean El Taco has more wars to get started.
May 1st is the 60 day deadline for the War Powers Act. By then, Congress has to do something about the Iran quagmire. Either fund it or stop it. A matter so urgen must be tackled with a clear mind, after a long, long, recess. Apparently, if you ignore the constitution, it’s not illegal.
@Scott: Hung Cao thinks vegetarians make bad warriors? You mean vegetarians like the Spartans? (Not strict vegetarian, but mostly). Tokugawa Ieyasu, the warlord who unified Japan? Roman gladiators?
I am not a vegetarian. I make no judgement on people who like to eat meat.
AND, I don’t at all like folks who turn their preferences into received wisdom.
@Modulo Myself: I don’t know. I think Mitch McConnell is still a strong contender. But Roberts still has time to add to his record, whereas Mitch seems done.
@Jay L. Gischer: In my mind I took this to its absurd limits. I mean: What kind of meat? Only red meat, no fish or chicken? Only wild game? Shot with an arrow? Butchered by hand? Roasted on open flame? Or eaten raw? Which yields the most fierce warriors?
Moving on to less depressing subjects, I caught a couple of videos of Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about crewed missions to Mars. In these he talks about motivation and the economics of the venture, not the technical aspects*.
I was somewhat gratified he made some of the points I’d figured out on my own. Namely that there’s no return on investment. He adds national prestige comingled with national security, and motives like pleasing the monarch or a deity (these pretty much no longer apply**).
Dr. Tyson later says Adolf or Lex could do a vanity mission to Mars. Meaning they could fund one and send people, or go themselves. But that they’re unlikely to get to Mars using their own money.
As return on investment goes, there’s not even a case for going to the Moon. Tyson claims the current interest lies entirely on China’s claim to be developing a Moon landing program.
Now and then one heard about Helium 3 deposits on the Moon. This may be so. It forms part of the solar wind, and in permanently shaded areas of the Moon (ie in craters at or near the poles), it may have accumulated in the dust, as the Moon lacks a magnetic field to deflect particles.
Helium 3 would be the best fuel for use in fusion reactors, because it won’t emit neutrons as a byproduct like plain hydrogen and its isotopes would. Unfortunately, we don’t have any fusion reactors yet (and sometimes I wonder whether we ever will). And one can make He3 on Earth by first producing tritium, a byproduct of fission reactors, and letting it decay over 12, 24, 36, and 48 years. This is expensive, but less so than mining it on the Moon.
*In fact, he dismisses the technical aspects by saying something like “We have an SUV-sized rover there. We know how to get to Mars.” true, but he skips tow important points: 1) radiation en route, and 2) we’ve never returned a probe or rover or samples from Mars. One does not expect a mission to Mars to be one-way.
** I’m sure El Taco will demand a crewed trip to Mars by the end of his term, right after he cuts NASA’s budget some more.
@Scott: “Which yields the most fierce warriors?” Before being shipped to the Mekong Delta our group had to undergo Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training. This entailed being sent into the coastal areas of Virginia for a number of days to live off the land while trying to find a secure base and avoid capture (Impossible but that’s another story). We couldn’t hunt so the instructors supplied a live chicken which we had to kill, butcher and cook. Nothing makes a warrior like unsalted undercooked chicken stewed with cattail roots. Did it make me a better chopper crew member? Damned if I know.
@Scott:
Raw human flesh gnawed off the bones of fallen enemies.
@Kathy:
Possibly raw wolverine that one has strangled oneself.
@Kathy:
Gee, I wonder why?
South Georgia wildfires scorch over 55,000 acres as crews race to contain hot spots and protect homes (CBS News)
Seems like these climate change fires should be getting more coverage, on top of the 800,000 acres burned in Nebraska wildfires this year already, alongside the 300,000 acre Oklahoma/Kansas fires.
Adolf laments being a fool for funding OpenAI
Unlike for, you know, performing a nazi salute multiple times live on national TV, alienating his Texla customer base, making irrational promises as a thin veil for crippling the government, overpaying for a data mining app, showboating with a perilous situation overseas as background, blowing up rockets successfully, among lots of other things.
BTW, Adolf also has been raising doom and gloom fears of AI. Not the actual damage it’s doing, like his own Grok doing child porn, but the science fiction kind like The Terminator. granted it’s not an irrational concern (and you’ll never see me use science fiction pejoratively), but present problems should take precedence over future ones. especially when agentic AI is being pushed on us before it’s anywhere close to ready or trustworthy.
@Kathy:
There really should be prosecutions over this.
It’s worth remembering that there are not imaginary children created from the bowels of Grok combining the attributes of countless anonymous children into some unique non-existent child, but pictures of actual children altered to become child porn and still readily identifiable as those children.
The fact that Grok is also almost certainly trained on CSAM is another issue.
@Mr. Prosser:
What matters most is the attitude that if somebody here has to die, let it be me -instead of one of my brothers.
@Kathy: I think now, this election cycle, is the perfect time to start flooding the zone with calls to switch to proportional representation.
@dazedandconfused: I don’t think we looked at ourselves that way, we were all together, bonded and ready for each other. If one was wounded they went out with the rest of us, no one abandoned. If one of us was killed they came out too, if we could do it, but living and wounded first.
@Jay L. Gischer:
I think it’s too late to fix things.
The fixers’ ruling allows red states to further gerrymander their districts. We may see lawsuits demanding districts drawn in compliance with Section 2 be redrawn before the midterms.
I won’t hazard a prediction, but I won’t be surprised if the second US civil war begins in 2027.
@Mr. Prosser: My remark and link were towards the point of that idiot Hung Cow, really.
In court today, Adolf said the following:
I don’t know whether this is his first time on the stand. I do know that 1) his lawyers are supposed to warn him of such things and give him advice on how to handle it, and 2) he’s never watched a courtroom drama in his life.
BTW, Adolf believes so passionately on an open source, non-profit AI model, that he set up his own AI company as neither open source nor non-profit. One cannot find a greater confirmation of a man’s ideals, not in this world.
For the record, I really don’t much care what the lawsuit is about or what the facts of the case are, I just want both sides to be damaged as a result, and preferably for Adolf to lose.
Speaking of AI, and on what I said about agentic LLMs the other day, a coding agent named Cursor deleted all data and backups of a company that used it.
The piece does not say why it did, only that it confessed to doing it against every principle it was given. It said, “The system rules I operate under explicitly state: ‘NEVER run destructive/irreversible git commands (like push –force, hard reset, etc) unless the user explicitly requests them.’”
I’m unclear whose agent this is. the piece says it ran Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6. A quick visit to the Cursor website (which my work laptop survived unscathed), mentions OpenAI but not anthropic. I gather various companies use other companies’ models for their agents. It’s a big muddle right now.
The affected company’s founder, Jeremy Crane of PocketOS (whatever that is), said, “building AI-agent integrations into production infrastructure faster than it’s building the safety architecture to make those integrations safe”. (emphasis added).
So now they’re busy rebuilding their software and data from offsite backups 3 months old.
I wonder if they’re using an AI agent to speed things up.
I’m not joking in that last line.