Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, October 13, 2025
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16 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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Happy Monday!
More Texas kindergarteners are coming to school without measles vaccination proof or exemptions
Texas Guardsmen photo mocked online after Hegseth’s ‘fat troops’ speech
At the Texas A&M Game.
JD Vance – consummate liar, sophist, a**hole….on ABC with George Stephanopolous, who asked him what Homan did with the bag of cash:
The Trump administration has closed ranks around Homan’s corruption, and plays word games when asked about it. If the corrupt Attorney General says the corrupt FBI director “investigated” and found no wrong doing, then the corrupt Border Czar didn’t take a bribe, and apparently the corrupt Vice President believes there is nothing odd, much less criminal, about Homan being paid for “services” via a bag of cash. “Nothing to see here. Move along.”
I’ve been having several dreams where someone asks me for something and I either don’t hear what it was, or didn’t understand what they wanted. When I ask them to repeat or clarify, they don’t. And this goes on and on as I get ever more frustrated and angry.
The last one was yesterday. In the dream, my mom asked me to write a check, but wouldn’t tell me for how much or whom to make it out to. I don’t recall what she said, but she was complaining I didn’t want to help her, and this check was very important. On top of that, I had to get to work, but couldn’t until I wrote her check.
This eventually degenerate into a screaming match, which at least gets me to wake up.
Establishment of the Navy, 13 October 1775
This resolution of the Continental Congress marked the establishment of what is now the United States Navy.
“Resolved, That a swift sailing vessel, to carry ten carriage guns, and a proportionable number of swivels, with eighty men, be fitted, with all possible despatch, for a cruise of three months, and that the commander be instructed to cruize eastward, for intercepting such transports as may be laden with warlike stores and other supplies for our enemies, and for such other purposes as the Congress shall direct…”
Slow day at OTB…
I came across an odd fact while listening to the Captains Speaking podcast recently. The hosts are B737 pilots and talk about various aspects of flight and aviation. Recently one of them told of having his destination changed after they had fueled for their original route. Now they had too much fuel. But the problem was with the expected fuel burn they’d land overweight.
This can be done and it is done in emergencies, but it’s not good practice. So, he had to find some way around it. they wound up taking a longer route at a lower altitude and higher speed (!), to burn enough extra fuel to land within weight limits.
Why not drain fuel at the airport? He didn’t explain, but mentioned it wasn’t an option. then the co-host casually says fuel drained from a commercial jet cannot be reused and must be discarded.
He did not explain why. Now I’m searching the web to find out. it strikes me as really odd.
@Kathy: Many year ago I took a flight out of Dayton OH on a 727. Shortly after takeoff there was a loud whine from the tail. Dayton is home to Wright-Patt AFB, heard about four voices around the cabin say, “Cavitated a pump”, i.e. starved the input to a hydraulic pump, destroying the pump. The captain announced we’d return to Dayton but needed to burn off fuel. It’s a long way from western OH to any ocean where they could dump. Spent the next hour or so flying up and down the OH/IN border at low altitude and full throttle with flaps and gear out, which not only added drag to burn fuel, but ensured they were down in case we had additional hydraulic issues. No drama on landing except for all the firetrucks lining the runway.
@gVOR10:
I can’t say for the 727, but the mainline equivalents today, namely the A320 and B737 families, don’t have means for dumping fuel. Jets like the B747, B777, A350, and A380, can dump fuel in-flight, and don’t need to be over water to do so. They do have to be at or above a certain altitude, so the fuel will disperse in the air.
There are several issues with an overweight landing. One is stopping distance. A heavier aircraft has more kinetic energy (1/2 the mass times the square of the speed). Another is damage to the landing gear, which could conceivably collapse given a hard landing (where force equals mass times the acceleration). that’s why there are maximum landing weights.
@Kathy:
Speaking generally, with respect to something like jet fuel that must meet certain chain-of-custody and inspection and testing requirements, I can understand that. While fuel drained from a perfectly good jet may work fine in other jets, it would have been outside of the approved fuel supply system, the inspected and certified storage tanks, and the quality testing procedures in place for the fuel.
@Eusebio:
Thanks.
My searches suggest there may be contamination issues as well.
It all seems superficially rather paranoid and too strict. I’d bet a large sum 999 out of 1,000 times leftover fuel taken from one jet would work perfectly fine and without any issues in another jet, but there’s be that 1,000th time where it would cause some problem.
What that time would be is unpredictable, and the same goes for the kind of issue it might cause. I can see the latter could range from a brief engine backfire that resolves on its own in seconds, and does nothing more than scare a few passengers; all the way to dual engine failure too low to relight the engines.
So, it’s the uncertainty.
@Kathy:
On top of potential contamination, it’s because there is typically no equipment to do that available at airports. Hops so short that a big-iron jet doesn’t burn enough fuel to make landing weight are rare, and the work-around of extending the flight or changing the profile of it is always doable.
@dazedandconfused:
Yeah, usually overweight landings are a result of a grave emergency, like losing one or more engines. Otherwise smaller planes can circle to burn fuel, and larger ones can dump it (though I think dumping fuel might be a bad idea if one engine is on fire).
I suppose unloading fuel might be more of a maintenance and repair thing. And then there’d be small amounts of fuel left.
@Kathy:
Man, that launched a memory at me. When I was in my late teens/early 20’s I worked for my dad at his semi truck repair shop. He had a 6 bay shop and plenty of space around it so he rented out parking spaces to drivers.
So, there were these two immigrant guys. One, a dump truck driver was Croatian. The other, an over the road driver was Serbian. The Croatian guy was like an old greying Mediterranean uncle type with his shirt open enough to see his chest hair and also the fact that at like 60/70 was made out of steel cables.
The Serbian guy was tightly wound. He was very clear, he hated Croatians, Bosnians, Kosavars, etc, very much. But, he hated Serbians and Communists orders of magnitude more. He would harass other Serbian truck drivers by blasting Turkish music in to the CB when he heard them. He hated Communists because they took away the love of his life and he never saw her again. Also, she looked exactly like princess Diana. Very intense dude.
One day the Serbian decided his fuel pump was shedding metal into his fuel tanks and destroying his engine. He paid to have the fuel pump replaced and the tanks cleaned. When that didn’t fix the problem, he decided that he needed to park his truck on an incline. He asked the hated Croatian if he could get some leftover asphalt so that he could build his incline. I’m sure the Croatian scammed some money out of him. They each thought the other one was stupider than everyone else.
Without asking my dad if he could do this, he spent the better part of an afternoon building two ramps out of some raw dumped asphalt. Which he then parked his truck on. This apparent worked cause he would drain a couple gallons out of each take and show us all the metal in there. The metal we were too stupid to see.
The Croatian the. Sees him dumping the fuel in our waste oil tank and says, “don’t do that, I’ll take it!” The Serbian saw this as a pure victory. He got the metal out of his fuel tanks and into the idiot Croatian’s.
He was so happy and thought we were all the stupidest idiots on the plant except for the Communists. That place was nuts.
@Beth:
I suppose the Croatian could filter the fuel and use it.
You have some really strange and interesting stories.
@Kathy:
Oh, yeah, that’s what the filter on the fuel pump is for. Those fuel tanks were full of gross weird stuff you didn’t want to end up in your fuel injectors. It was usually a pretty big filter too, if I remember correctly.
So the Croatian never bothered to pre-filter the Serbs rejected fuel. He just dumped it in his tanks and laughed.
Comrade Reynolds and I were opining on the motivations of various groups (I posit that the larger a group involved, the more there is likely to be a thought through motivation, if only to keep the little people in line), but it sparked a though in my otherwise empty head.
I strongly recommend the movie Closely Watched Trains — it’s a Czech movie (based on a very good novella by Bohimul Hrabal) about a boy who gets caught up in the resistance against the Nazis because of his sexual inadequacy. As the Nazis are retreating. It’s very funny, in a dark sort of way, and gently sweet, in an amazingly cynical and bitter sort of way.
Released during the Prague Spring, when the regime as loosening restrictions on speech and art. It directly challenges the myths of the Great Socialist Heroes defeating Hitler for Great Socialist Reasons. And about two years later the Russians decided they had enough of stuff like that and invaded, crushing the increasingly independent state of Czechoslovakia. So, it’s an important historical document too!
(Also, the main character’s last name is a moderately archaic word for female public hair — this is not mentioned in the movie at all. It’s that kind of a movie)