Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, December 27, 2025
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18 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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As Daryl noted late yesterday, they are considering installing marble armrests at the Kennedy Center.
This seems only marginally less idiotic than installing marble in the bathrooms of Eastern Airlines.
@Jen:
They’re ugly as hell, and they’re bound to be uncomfortable. For pics, see http://www.people.com/trump-shows-off-potential-marble-armrests-for-renamed-Kennedy-center-11876539
@Jen:
@CSK:
Will they also have spikes and itching powder?
I mean, you may as well maximize discomfort.
On aviation news, Volaris and Viva have announced a peculiar merger. rather than create a single airline, they’re making a holding company that will own both airlines. This is more common in Europe, where for example Lufthansa group owns Lufthansa, Austrian, Swiss, Brussels, and some other airlines. There’s also the International Airline Group, and not least Air France-KLM.
While these airlines operate separately, with their own CEO, board, pilots, cabin crews, etc., they often act as one company. For instance, if you want to fly from Mexico City to Amsterdam on Air France, you’ll be offered MEX-CDG-AMS on Air France, but also MEX-AMS on KLM booked through Air France.
So maybe if you book Viva from Guadalajara to Veracruz, you’ll be offered a Volaris flight booked through Viva.
They also share frequent flier programs, reservation systems, lounges (not applicable to Volaris or Viva), financing, etc.
Mexico has three major airlines. the two in the merger and Aeromexico. The latter will complain bitterly at having the competition consolidate. And they’d have a fair point. We’ve been through something similar in the 90s, when the government took over both Mexicana and Aeromexico, then the only real airlines, and operated them in much the same way as described above. Prices for domestic flights became ridiculous. For instance, it was cheaper to fly, say, AA from MEX to Cancun via Miami, than to fly from Mex to Cancun on AM or MX.
To complicate matters further, a big shareholder in Volaris is Indigo Partners, which has a controlling interest in Frontier, as well as in Chile’s JetSmart, among other holdings. Worse, it’s a private equity firm.
Came across this this AM:
(The piece is really long, excerpts below a very small sample)
https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/the-president-is-losing-his-marbles
excerpts:
Re: Amendment 25:
bvFTD – behavioral variant FrontoTemporalDementia:
A belated Merry Christmas to all OTB folks!
@Gregory Lawrence Brown: Darwin was only on the Beagle because the captain wanted a buddy, or maybe a mascot.
Was Darwin the ship equivalent of a house boy? I wouldn’t go that far, but I wouldn’t rule it out either.
The letters between FitzRoy and Darwin are a little unhinged. Honestly, they should make a musical about it.
@Kathy:..maximize discomfort.
Any prankster worthy of the title would use the itching powder on the toilet paper…
@charontwo:
Can’t say, I’m not a doctor, but his digressions seem to becoming more bizarre of late.
@Gustopher:
I don’t think so. The Beagle was a very small ship and carried a crew of 75. Pace off 90 ft, imagine having to live with 75 people in that space for five years. Nobody was brought as a pet. The captain expressed a legitimate concern about a guy he didn’t know well with whom he would be a trapped roommate with for half a decade is all that was. At that time he didn’t know Darwin well at all, but all letters afterward (until their falling out decades later) heaped praise upon Darwin’s character. They got along splendidly throughout the voyage.
@Gustopher:
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
HMS Beagle was always going to have a naturalist, even if Darwin had never signed up for it. It was a survey ship mission.
And even if Darwin had not been there to start fitting in the data to support speciation via natural selection, the whole idea was too close to being obvious to have been missed for much longer.
The concept of evolution was already present; Erasmus Darwin for one had had ideas about that prviously.
All it needed was for someone to link up the obvious paleontological, comparative anatomy, and bio-geographical evidence for evolution with the expreience of domestic breeding and the mathematics of populations as per Malthus.
Alfred Wallace got to the same point at about the same time.
And as Huxley said: “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”
@dazedandconfused:
This, indeed.
On a survey ship mission, the captain was free to bring along a “gentleman” to assist.
Otherwise the ship’s doctor would have done double-duty as a naturalist, iirc.
Their later falling out had to do with Fitzroy becoming increasingly a Biblical fundamentalist, and Darwin’s work indicating literalism was not just mistaken, but had obvious and rational alternatives.
It was essentially geology that had doomed Biblical literalism, way before Darwin.
@CSK:
@CSK:
There’s something vaguely “Nero-ish” about our Interior Decorator In Chief. Why is he spending time on such things? I dunno…maybe because it’s all he knows. Fiddling while his popularity burns down.
His gilded-age mindset reminds me of Rome, in a way.
It’s quite funny, in a way.
Like Gulf princelings or Russian oligarchs trying to impress with bling, and just being all the more disdained for their vulgarity and aesthetic shortcomings.
If you have to try, you’ve already failed.
European snobbery can be a pita at times, but when it comes to sneering at the wannabes, it has its uses.
@JohnSF:
That actually happened.
Darwin hesitated for years on publishing his notions about natural selection. Eventually Alfred Russell Wallace, with whom he was acquainted, developed much the same set of ideas. When Wallace sent him an essay on the subject, Darwin decided to publish.
@Kathy:
Yup.
Darwin seems to have been reluctant to publish his conclusions for years, and was perhaps trying to pin down the evidence by other studies, or perhaps aware of the controversy it would cause, and valued his quiet life?
Wallace also figured it out.
I suspect others would have done so, soon enough.
Mendel was already unravelling genetic heritability.
Lamarck was positing a diffrent mechanism for evolution, but mathematical analysis would indicate Lamarck was mistaken.
The whole thing was becoming obvious from the point that systematic geology and biogeography began, and mathematical population statistics, and Humbolt’s work on ecosystems.
Darwin had both the brilliance and the opportunity to set out an pretty inarguably clear explication of how natural selection could explain speciation.
(Albeit short of a real theory of genetics, due to Mendel getting ignored)
But it’s pretty clear that it was “steam engine time” re evolution in the mid 19th century anyway.
@dazedandconfused:
Melania’s panties?
WTF?
Has there ever been another leader of a major modern democratic state so indispubtably bug-shagging nuts?