Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, June 10, 2026
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30 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.
Just testing.
What? Not in two weeks?
JD Vance claims US ‘very close’ to peace deal with Iran
Link goes to Guardian article about Starbucks advertising mishap due to use of AI without human oversight. The ad mocked the death of the hundreds of unarmed protestors by South Korea”s strongman leader in 1980 and also the torture death of a student in 1987. The AI suggested the ad but the executives in charge, supposedly, didnt look at the material. The AI apparently drew source material from a right wing group that has long claimed the protestors were all secret North Korean activists, for which there is no evidence. It looks like right wing conspiracy theorizing is a worldwide phenomenon.
Steve
@Scott:
He hopes that the prediction will be forgotten by then. What it will amount to is another agreement to continue talking.
@Scott:
Yeah, this absolutely sounds like a peace agreement is close:
Good news everyone!
The S&P 500 index has rejected Adolf’s petition for fast track listing of XpaceS.
I don’t know that much abut finance and stocks and such, but the valuation the nazi wants for his ISP company has been described as literally insane (paraphrasing here), by people involved in the financial industry.
The important part is that index funds buy shares in all companies in an index, like the S&P500 index. Allowing XpaceS in would have made every person with an index fund investment, either directly or though retirement accounts or pension funds, owners of XpeceS shares.
And it looks like OpenAI and Anthropic might not fare any better at the S&P
@Kathy:
With any luck XspeceS shares will crater. Though Tesla is a meme stock that’s share value is buoyed by Musk fan boys/girls, so who knows. The $1.7T value assigned the IPO is fraudulent.
I don’t blame anyone for wishing Musk ill. He’s blighted us so significantly.
AND, SpaceX has created some very real value. Their cost per kg to orbit is a fraction of what competitors would/did charge. Given how much stuff we have in orbit that we rely on, that’s a good thing. Nor do I think Gwynne Shotwell is a raging drug-addled white supremacist. Interestingly enough, she seems to be good at getting Musk to keep his distance from operations – which he is terrible at.
I have no idea if the valuation, in particular, is good or bad. But this is the problem with Musk. He created a world that was so promising and then went nuts, but didn’t remove himself from the chain of command. Or maybe he went nuttier?
@Jay L. Gischer:
No idea. She’s certainly placed herself at the service of a raging drug-addled white supremacist.
I grant XpaceS has reduce launch costs. However, of their impressive number of yearly Xalcon 9 launches, well over half are paid for by XpaceS to put up more Xtarlink satellites. That’s why I call the company an internet service provider with rockets.
BTW, lots of airlines are adding Xtralink to their fleets. In flight internet is not new. Flight mode on phones no longer deactivates either WiFi or Bluetooth. All reports are that it is great. High speed, low latency, and uninterrupted service gate to gate*.
All reports I’ve read also state it’s free, and that this is a contractual requirement from Xtarlink.
This is huge. In flight internet access otherwise is a luxury for most, often given complimentary to premium passengers and high status frequent fliers, but otherwise carrying a high cost for most people. And there’s no limit to how many devices you can connect, either. If you travel with two laptops, five phones, and six tablets, you can hook them all up free, and do nothing but download huge files off the cloud if you want. No data caps, either.
One could praise Adolf for such generosity. In the real world, however, one should ask, what is Adolf after?
IMO, he wants a monopoly, or as near as he can get to one, on inflight internet, which then he can enshitify to his absent heart’s content and later make an absolute killing.
Lex Bezos at BO is deploying a similar system, but he’s years behind and won’t catch up fast enough. And going by Amazon’s example, he has the very same motives Adolf does.
Enjoy the Xtarlink connectivity in flight while you can. In a few years, you’ll be paying through the nose for it.
*One worthwhile experiment would be to try to catch a Xtarlink connection before boarding. Years ago, I was able to stay connected to the airport’s free WiFi while inside the plane, until they shut the door. Maybe you can start downloading massive cloud files early.
@Sleeping Dog:
Not to mention XspaceS is now also the proud owner of XAI and Xitter. The former is a money sink whose most notable accomplishment is producing child porn, and the latter has lost most of its value since Adolf’s impulse buy.
I’d like to share a piece with you about the right-wing freakout over The Odyssey as realized by Christopher Nolan.
The point of the freakout is that they aren’t winning. They were never winning. Once you start performing masculinity, instead of just being who you are, you are losing. It’s kind of like explaining.
One of the things I observed in my martial arts years is that the more people progressed (male or female or whatever) the less they performed, and the more they just let themselves be who they were, but not in some selfish way. In my ryu were straight guys, straight women, grandmothers, even probably a non-binary or two. More than once, I needed to demonstrate to someone that I knew something that they needed to know – not the least fact of which is that somebody who doesn’t look like Adonis can still fuck them up. (Not that I did. But some of these big guys really don’t get how dangerous a woman or smaller man with some intent and some skills can be.)
I just can’t get over how aesthetic this whole “manosphere” thing is. The internet is a visual media, I guess.
@Jay L. Gischer:
Wow.
I like Wes Anderson, give or take, but every accusation of him creating an art that harkens back to an imagined past of incredible whiteness is completely on point. Very much an answer to the question of “What if Tim Burton was obsessed with mid century modern furniture instead of the art of Edward Gorey?”
I’m not really interested in Nolan’s The Odyssey unless it really focuses on Odysseus as couch surfer spinning tales for food as he slowly meanders home. World class couch surfing, as he explains why all of his crew is dead but it’s definitely not his fault.
Every story of Odysseus paints him as a trickster and a liar. There is no reason to believe any of the flashbacks.
It’s a little jarring that Athena appears in the “real” sections and helps him slaughter all the suitors. If memory serves that’s the only fantastical element that actually occurs in the story.
Fatso now says he loves inflation.
Something, frankly unintelligible, to do with sneaking 22 tankers out of the Strait under cover of darkness.
Is it true? Is anything he says?
And in any case over 100 ships transitted the Strait, per day, before Fatso closed the Strait. Sneaking 22 ships thru after having been closed for over 3 months is meaningless.
I paid over $75 to fill my Outback this am. Thanks, you fat f’er.
Someone mentioned Beth in another thread and, in popped a thought that we haven’t heard from Gregory Lawrence Brown aka Mister Bluster for a couple of weeks.
Unfortunately, he is no longer with us. Send some good thoughts his way.
@Scott:
I’m so, so sorry to learn this. I always enjoyed his posts. He was a gifted storyteller.
Say hello to Teve for me, Mr. Bluster.
@Scott:
Ah, I understand that the wifi is strong and the coffee free in the beyond, RIP
@Jay L. Gischer: I’m amused by this kerfluffle. The Odyssey is actually not a factual account. Polyphemus never existed. Argos did not live for twenty years to await his master’s return. Helen is the result of a union (of questionable propriety) between Leda and Zeus in the form of a swan. Swans have 80 chromosomes with a W and a Z sex chromosome not XY like us. Her ethnicity is impossible. I think we have lost something by insisting on accurate representation of the figures from myths. Wasn’t it more powerful to sit around a fire while a great poet evoked the characters out of our imagination? When I was a child, my mother told me fairytales, and my internal pictures of Hansel and Gretel or the Golem of Prague are indelible without the intercession of Hollywood. BTW, there is no Santa Claus, James Bond, or Harry Callahan.
@Scott:
Thank you for relaying the news. his Bluster will be missed.
@Slugger:
Ethnicity in the ancient world is a sore point for many. For instance, Romans were probably shorter and swarthier than the popular imagination, and the movies, would lead one to believe. Besides, they intermingled a lot with others. Especially in the latter centuries of the Western empire, when goths and other Germanic peoples came to dominate the legions (which might have lightened their complexion if not their economic situation).
Was Helen black? Probably not. Just as probably, she wasn’t a white aryan goddess on the mold of Ursula Andress or Taylor Swift.
But, really, who gives a damn. Is it a good movie, and does it have good acting? that’s what should matter.
Too many individual links, but everything should be in the Guardian’s live blog
1) Hestgheth is doing a bad impression of a man, saying the US can engotiate with bombs.
2) El Taco loves “the inflation”
3) Justifying the above, speaker Johnson lends credibility that dementia might be contagious.
4) El Taco wants Putle to downsize the various intelligence agencies.
To the last, I don’t know if they are overstaffed or not, though overall the government does not seem to be (see the IRS moving IT an HR personnel to process taxes).
You don’t want an understaffed intelligence agency, or several of them. fewer field agents, fewer analysts, will mean less information will get brought in and some will go unexamined. The information may be of lower quality, too. This is deadly dangerous for any country, and far more for one that is involved in so many regional and global matters as, I don’t know, the US.
@Daryl:
MAGA Mike says I didn’t hear Fatso say what I heard Fatso say.
@Scott:
Sad news, indeed.
@Slugger: “Helen is the result of a union (of questionable propriety) between Leda and Zeus in the form of a swan”
Yeah, and what color are swans? Got you, libtard!
@wr:
You’ve never heard of The Black Swan???? Yet you claim to be a movie person. Humph.
@Scott: Oh, no. I am so sorry to hear this. He will be missed.
@Jay L. Gischer:
The author didn’t get the memo—Erika Kirk and Sydney Sweeney are now the subject of transvestigations.
Also, the Washington Post is apparently* reporting that Trump’s latest checkup involved TWENTY-TWO (22!!!) medical specialists.
* Apparently, as I no longer have a subscription so this is via Bluesky.
@wr: There are six species of swans. The old world has the mute and whooper swans, and the new world has the tundra swan and the trumpeter. Yes, they are white as adults. However, in the southern hemisphere there is a black swan and a black necked swan. Interestingly, DNA shows that the mute swan and the black swan are the closest relatives to each other. The biology of these beautiful, beautiful creatures is very fascinating. None can produce offspring with humans. I have the four northern hemisphere birds on my life list and have seen the others in zoos.
@Gustopher: I feel that whiteness is a problem only when it is assumed, when it is normed, and it is assumed that not white is “other”. But Wes Anderson’s films seem to be specifically about white people, and their cultural/racial heritage, and the habits and customs this has engendered. It examines things that are otherwise taken for granted.
@Gustopher: Well, Athena appears to Telemachus as Mentor, and helps him put a ship together to go out to look for his father.
It is the insertion of this tale, which has all the precise elements of a hero’s journey that really makes me step back and ask, “Just what was Homer up to with this poem/story?” It is an inverted hero’s journey. Odysseus isn’t venturing forth as a young man to confront the Dark Father at the heart of the evil – aided by a mentor and encountering temple guardians. That’s Telemachus. Odysseus is just trying to get back home to his wife and his hearth, and his dog. He’s trying to survive this ordeal that Agamemnon subjected him to.
And the things he does to survive aren’t pretty and nice and heroic, either. The Odyssey is an inverted Hero’s Journey, and it was meant to be that, I feel sure.