Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, May 6, 2026
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13 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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BlueSky.
Yes, the US military continues to attack civilian boats.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/05/us-military-vessel-strike
Yesterday evening the home desktop PC felt slower than usual. Eventually things loaded and ran, but then the screen went black, and an error message said there was no boot drive found (WTF!!)
I restarted it manually, it loaded and ran again, and eventually the same thing happened.
Both times, I was trying to upload a photo to Bluesky.
I let the PC rest while I ate dinner, opting to watch Stargate SG-1 in the meantime. Later it started back up, and ran well enough. i did not try to load Bluesky or upload anything to it.
We’ll see. It may be the HD, which was replaced a couple of years ago, has gone bad. Or it may be something peculiar about the combination of uploading on Bluesky on Chrome.
I still need to replace it. It’s vintage 2012 or so. I want to wait for Win12, lest MS render all Win11 machines obsolete with it. And to see what kind of blunder they go for in that release (I still ahve nightmares about Windows 8).
@Kathy: The evidence is not solid, but personally I would be suspicious that my system had been compromised by a trojan, actually. The slow performance is one indicator. I don’t think BlueSky is particularly implicated, but it may involve some activity that the trojan doesn’t like.
The poor performance, plus the mention of no boot drive (obviously false) are the things that get me wondering about this.
Good luck!
@Jay L. Gischer:
I’ve anti-malware and antivirus software. they’ve not reported anything.
The machine was ok after the HD was replaced, then gradually slowed down. This is normal. On days when there’s a Windows update, it slows down further until the notification for the update shows up. I’d never seen a missing boot drive error until yesterday.
We’ll see. fortunately, all my important files are in the cloud.
I may shop for a new one next week when I’m on vacation. as RAM prices increase (thanks near-useless LLMs!), it might be good idea to buy one now. On the other hand, if the bubble pops soon, RAM prices ought to collapse…
I’ll likely get a laptop, and use the 24″ current all-in-one as a monitor. I also need to dig up my old Vista PC and extract some old files and software. I think I have a paid for shareware backgammon game still in it.
The first ever national earthquake drill took place today at 11 am. I was returning to the office from the bank, so it caught me justa few paces from the front door.
the seismic alert went off on schedule, louder this time. Ditto the cell phone alerts. the street speaker based alert sounded for one minute. I was watching the evacuation of the office, and it definitely took longer than a minute. it’s plain impossible to get that many people out sooner.
Obama and Colbert need their own show.
@Jay L. Gischer: BlueSky is written with AI, and they did DoS themselves last month because of that, so… it’s still probably not BlueSky but if any website could do it, might be them.
Also, one of their lead developers tried to cool down their phone by dipping it into a swimming pool, under the mistaken belief that it was waterproof.
Kyle Rittenhouse hospitalized
Hope he gets well although I wonder what kind of medical insurance he has.
@Kathy: It’s good that you have anti virus stuff. It helps quite a bit. It is not foolproof, however.
My home gaming system got compromised once and all the anti-malware stuff in the world couldn’t find or fix the problem. It was a rootkit, I reckon. Windows would notice that some process was trying to contact an IP address that seemed to be in Singapore (this was about 2005 or so). That was a real “yikes” moment for me. I eventually just wiped the drive and reinstalled everything. I lost all my game saves because I was afraid to trust any executable, sound or image file on that system.
And just to stoke paranoia even more, I would not put such files on the cloud. Files that you can’t look at and confirm that they are what you think they are could be vectors. The scanners are good, maybe very good. But not perfect.
But it’s up to you to decide the risk profile. You know what’s at stake. Not everyone has triple-locked reinforced doors on their houses, either.
@Scott:
I hope the spider’s ok.
@Jay L. Gischer:
I’ve been mulling over a re-formatting of the HD, as that restores some speed to the system. With all the important stuff in the cloud, it might even make sense.
Speaking of which, I really should reformat the laptop. Between being a Windows 8* native, which meant adding the Start8 shell to make it work at all, and then upgrading to Win10, it’s gotten really slow.
*I’m contractually obligated with myself to bash Win8 whenever it comes up. So, again, I called it WINDOS: Windows 8 Is Not a Desktop Operating System.
The latest pandemic candidate is the Andes strain of the hantavirus, which can spread from person to person.
TL;DR: it’s easily spread, but only during a short window. It seems to have a long incubation period. No word on treatment, no word on any development of vaccines. The death rate seems to be 40%.
Of course, there have been few cases and little research. And we learned from the trump virus that variants can change things quickly.
If the early boasts by Moderna bore any relation to reality, they should be able to make an mRNA vaccine for this in short order. It’s the testing for efficacy that would be nearly impossible.
@Scott:
Sympathies and best wishes for the spider’s speedy recovery.
ETA as far as little Kyle, I’m hoping none, and that his parents cosigned on the admissions paperwork. But then again, Luddite is an a-hole.