Natives? Check. Blacks? Check. Mexicans? Also check!

The European settlers continued to displace people.  That's what alien settlers always do.  That is happening even now in contemporary times, like how the indigenous Miskitos are under assault in Nicaragua.

In the young USA, the leaders decided that they ought to displace Mexicans too.

Mexico was as large as the US in land area, and had a larger population:

"As early as 1825, John Quincy Adams had instructed the American minister to Mexico to try to negotiate a new boundary," writes Jill Lepore.  Yep, the new country was not even 50 years old.  trump's attacks on Mexico are merely the latest in this long history.

Why were the European settlers so interested?  The Mexican territories of "Coahuila and Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico, and west of the state of Louisiana, proved particularly attractive to American settlers in search of new lands for planting cotton."

Perhaps you have an immediate question: Working on the cotton fields meant slave labor; so, if somehow acquired by the US, would Texas allow slavery?

The anti-slavery north protested.  Mexico considered Texas its province, though a rebellious one.  The US wanted to annex it, and more.  The US laid a trap for Mexico in order to begin a war.  It was only a matter of time before Mexico fell into that trap.  Almost exactly to this date--on January 25th--back in 1845, "the House passed a resolution in favor of annexation."  And about slavery in Texas?  The resolution included a compromise: "The eastern portion of Texas would enter the Union as a slave state, but not the western portion."

From the 3/5ths compromise, the US has been at such dealmaking in favor of slavery; yet, we have a president in office who loudly wondered why they had never struck a deal in the past in order to avoid the Civil War!  What an ignoramus that 63 million elected only because he appealed to their racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and more!

President James Polk had grand dreams to extend the American empire; "Texas was only the beginning," Lepore writes.  He hoped to get Mexico into an armed confrontation, and it happened.  He asked Congress to declare war.

What would happen if the US won the war and gained territory?  Would Mexicans there now become Americans?  Quite a few leaders were against it.  "Ours is the government of the white man."  Would the new territory then be slave states as well?

As the war with Mexico came to and end in the second half of 1847, Polk "considered trying to acquire all of Mexico" from 26 degrees N all the way to the Pacific.  But, it was finally settled at 36 degrees north.  With a formal end to the war in February 1848, "the top half of Mexico became the bottom third of the United States."

Jill Lepore writes: "As the United States swelled, Mexico shrank."

Climate change? Bah humbug!

In November-December of 2015, record rain fell in Chennai.  After visiting the city during the winter break, I wrote in an op-ed:

While scientists are cautious when postulating the cause-and-effect relationship, the role of climate change has not been ruled out. ...
Of course, the natural disaster was amplified by mismanagement of the land and water. Homes and high-rise buildings had been constructed at a frenzied pace in what were previously water-drainage areas, marshlands and lake beds. Thus, the floodwaters speeding along the natural contours of the land ended up in basement garages and ground floor units.

It feels like deja vu all over again, when I follow the horrific updates from Houston.

David Leonhardt writes in the (not failing) NY Times:

Obviously, some extreme weather events are unrelated to climate change. But a growing number appear to be related, including many involving torrential rain, thanks to the warmer seas and air.
“The heaviest rainfall events have become heavier and more frequent, and the amount of rain falling on the heaviest rain days has also increased,” as the National Climate Assessment, a federal report, found. “The mechanism driving these changes,” the report explained, is hotter air stemming from “human-caused warming.”

Leonhardt adds this:

In Houston’s particular case, a lack of zoning laws has led to an explosion of building, which further worsens flooding. The city added 24 percent more pavement between 1996 and 2011, according to Samuel Brody of Texas A&M, and Houston wasn’t exactly light on pavement in 1996. Pavement, unlike soil, fails to absorb water.
Add up the evidence, and it overwhelmingly suggests that human activity has helped create the ferocity of Harvey.

Houston became Chennai on an even larger scale!

The climate scientist, Michael Mann, who helped us understand the famous hockey-stick graph, is emphatic: "climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly."

There is a simple thermodynamic relationship known as the Clausius-Clapeyron equation that tells us there is a roughly 3% increase in average atmospheric moisture content for each 0.5C of warming. Sea surface temperatures in the area where Harvey intensified were 0.5-1C warmer than current-day average temperatures, which translates to 1-1.5C warmer than “average” temperatures a few decades ago. That means 3-5% more moisture in the atmosphere.
That large amount of moisture creates the potential for much greater rainfalls and greater flooding. The combination of coastal flooding and heavy rainfall is responsible for the devastating flooding that Houston is experiencing.

Mann continues about the stalling, which has made Harvey pour water from the skies.  This stalling is not only with hurricanes and cyclones though:

 More tenuous, but possibly relevant still, is the fact that very persistent, nearly “stationary” summer weather patterns of this sort, where weather anomalies (both high-pressure dry hot regions and low-pressure stormy/rainy regions) stay locked in place for many days at a time, appears to be favoured by human-caused climate change. We recently published a paper in the academic journal Scientific Reports on this phenomenon.

Hot days are hotter than ever and stay hot for a lot longer.  Wet days are wetter than ever and stay wet for a lot longer.

In another op-ed, after the devastating cyclone that tore through Chennai, I wrote in January 2017:

Such extremes are consistent with climate weirding. ...
Climate scientists warn that we have to prepare for more and more extreme events that result from climate weirding. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted that “a changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration and timing of extreme weather and climate events, and can result in unprecedented extreme weather and climate events.”
Of course, it is not merely about the rains. Heat waves, too, for instance, are increasing in both frequency and intensity. Unlike wind and rains, heat waves are not action-made for cameras — heat waves produce no images and videos that go viral. But heat waves kill more people than rains and cold spells do.

In that op-ed, I suggested that we Americans look at ourselves in the mirror:

We in the United States need to stop denying the human cause in the global climatic changes in this industrial era. As a country with an affluence that is the envy of the rest of the world, we need to assume leadership in addressing global weirding.
These will be enormous challenges during a Trump presidency and with a Republican-controlled Congress.

The 63 million who voted for trump and his climate-change-denying minions can now add Houston to the growing list for why they stand accused.

Source

Political theatre: never a dull moment :)

For those of us who can't get enough of the fantastic political theatre, which is the best entertainment that money can ever buy, the latest actor to step up to amuse us all is the Texan of all Texans, Governor Rick Perry.

Comedians and cartoonists have enough material already to work with until whenever :)

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Religion in American politics: Happy Yom Chechecheche!

A couple of weeks ago, the governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, who is a Republican, said the following loudly and boldly (in his Martin Luther King Day message):

anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother.

That puts to rest any thought that discussions on the separation of church and state ended with the defeat of Christine O'Donnell, who famously raised the question "Where in the constitution is the separation of church and state?"

Let us check in with Texas to see what they think about non-Christians:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Jewish Speaker of Texas State House
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

I thought my life was complicated .... :-)

Until I read this ....

This will be my first Thanksgiving as a vegetarian—excuse me—as a black vegetarian from the Southern United States. As in Texas. As in raised on meat as much as milk. My dad barbecued every weekend. Sunday dinners revolved around collards and green beans with turkey chunks in every forkful, salads and baked potatoes were always sprinkled with bacon. Thanksgiving always included fried turkeys.

This year, I’ll be bringing the Tofurky.

A wonderful short essay.  Read it here
The best line there is this one though:

Vegetarianism is the dietary equivalent of Republicanism in the black community

A "Christian Sharia" in Texas? OMD!

According to this news item from the Times (HT),

A Texas man is due to be executed next month despite admissions by jurors that they consulted biblical passages advocating death as a punishment to help to decide his fate.
Before sending Khristian Oliver to his death after he was convicted of murdering his victim — who was bludgeoned with a gun barrel — jurors read passages of the Old Testament, including one that states that a killer who uses an iron object to kill “shall surely be put to death”.

Note that there was no reasonable doubt regarding the guilt of the accused.  So, the issue is not with establishing whether or not the accused was indeed guilty.  But, it is with the punishment--even though capital punishment is legal in Texas, and even though "the jurors were instructed by the judge not to refer to anything that was not presented as evidence in the courtroom" the jurors' decision to go with the death sentence was guided by passages from the bible :-(

Amnesty International called on the Texas authorities to commute Oliver’s death sentence because since his trial, jurors had admitted that they read the Bible while they decided whether he should live or die. In particular, they said that Bibles were passed around with specific passages highlighted, and that one juror read aloud to his fellow jurors the passage, from Numbers XXXV, 16: “And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death.”

This is not a new case--the homicidal act was in 1998.  And apparently the consultation with the bible was known soon after, which is why the death sentence had been appealed:

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals said last year that jurors had wrongly used the Bible and that it had amounted to an “external influence” prohibited under the US Constitution. Yet the court said there was not enough evidence to show they were prejudiced when they decided to send Oliver to death row.
In April the US Supreme Court — the final chance Oliver had to appeal against his death sentence — refused to hear the case, despite being urged to do so by 50 former and current federal and state prosecutors.

Hmmm ....refused to hear the case?  How awful!  So, does the refusal legitimize jurors consulting the bible to award punishments?  What if a few other juries decide to follow this "precedent?"  Isn't the role of the Supremes to essentially make sure we have the correct constitutional precedents for law?  Oh wait, according to Chief Justice Roberts their job is only to call balls and strikes.  Yeah, right!  And this is not a case where he didn't have to worry if it was a ball or a strike :-(

BTW, what an odd coincidence that the Christian jurors consulted the bible to arrive at the death sentence for the accused whose name sounds the same as the faithful, with one difference in the lettering: Khristian!!!

I’m ready, Warden.

That was one of the

quotations taken from inmates’ last statements in Texas. The statements, delivered before family members, relatives of victims, friends and the press

The compilation is here.

Here is another:

I would like to say goodbye

Asian Immigrants should "Americanize" names? WTF?

As the LA Times correspondent notes, speechless we are:

Republican Betty Brown said this week she thinks Americans of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent should change their names to make it easier for poll workers to identify them.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the comment came late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Ko told the committee that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have problems voting because they may have a legal trans-literated name and then a common English name used on driver’s licenses or school registrations.

Brown, who with her husband Ron operates a ranch near Terrell on land that has been in her family for four generations, suggested that Asian Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible. She said:

Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here? ... Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?

No word on how Ko responded. Perhaps, like us, he was speechless.