Sunday, March 28, 2021

What is Liturgy?

Many people today are familiar with ritual, but are not familiar with liturgy. Ritual is a set of actions done in accordance with social custom or normal protocol. For instance, Westerners ritually shake each others hands upon meeting, and ask the ritual question "How are you?" Liturgy is a special subset of ritual, it is a ritual done not for secular purposes, but for theological purposes. Why is liturgy necessary? Liturgy is necessary, in part, because Scripture is hard to understand:

He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. ~2 Peter 3:16

Liturgy is a call-response prayer in which the prayer leader proclaims a passage from sacred Scripture and the rest of the prayer group responds by proclaiming a matching response from another place in sacred Scripture. Upon hearing the Word of God, the participants move in conformance with that Word, standing, kneeling, sitting or genuflecting, in order to better understand the Word’s impact on themselves and the world.  The Scripture passages in both the call and the response are pre-selected to match the liturgical calendar, that is, the Scripture passages used in liturgy are meant to match the day and season of the year, or to match the sacrament that is being conferred within the liturgy.

As a result, liturgy always includes three elements, all of which are universally available to the liturgical Christians of that denomination: 

  1. Daily Scriptural prayers at set times of the day (Liturgy of the Hours)
  2. Actions and commemorations keyed to each year's calendar (Liturgical seasons and liturgical calendar)
  3. Liturgical services proper (e.g., Sacrifice of the Mass aka the Divine Liturgy

The purpose of liturgy is two-fold. First, by its unrelenting emphasis on Scripture, it is meant to assist both the celebrant and the congregants gain an understanding of how God’s mind works, and what God wants of us. Second, it is meant to “wash the world in the Word”, liturgy is intended to use the grace of the Scriptures and the sacraments that it wraps within its embrace, to sanctify the whole world.

Both magic and liturgy involve ritual, but the reasons for the two kinds of ritual are very different. Early man felt himself surrounded by unseen, powerful forces. Like a stranger using a handshake to prevent violence, early man used ritual magic in order to attempt to control the unseen forces around him so that he will not come to harm. Pagans used the ritual of magic to control, or at least placate, the gods.

Early Christians saw the world quite differently. They knew there was only one God. They knew God could not change or be changed. For liturgical Christians, the purpose of the specialized ritual they call liturgy was not meant to change God, it was meant to help man understand God's intentions. Early Christians used liturgy to help adapt man to God's purpose. Christians viewed man as fallen, so they the need to wrap many of the most important activities of life inside of liturgical actions, so that their own actions would be correctly oriented towards God.

Liturgy is the opposite of magic. Magic is meant to control the gods, to get the gods to do what men want them to do. Liturgy is meant to change man, it is meant to help man do what God wants us to do. 

Liturgy, then, is to live Scripture, employing the whole person, both mind and body, wherein the whole person, both mind and body, responds to grace. Just as the individual grains combine to form the bread, the individual grapes combine to form the wine, so the individual Christians combine to act as One Body.

Now, some object to liturgy because it seems contrived to pray a set, stylized prayer at specific times during the day. Liturgy doesn't stop you praying when and where you want, but it allows you to consistently pray with other Christians.

Say, for instance, you had a friend. You wanted to spend some time in prayer with that friend. You would schedule a time and place to do this, correct? Well, all baptized Christians are brothers and sisters in Christ, so liturgy is a way of scheduling time to pray with your brothers and sisters when you have never - and will never - meet them.  

When you and your friend pray together at your scheduled time, you share your prayers with each other, right? You might pray quietly, but you might also want to pray out loud, so that you two could hear each other's prayers and each make the other's prayer part of your own prayer. 

Same with liturgy. Except the brothers and sisters are speaking different languages, all over the world. So, by agreeing on what Scripture passages you will pray ahead of time, it allows everyone to "hear" each others' prayers, even if these prayers are spoken in a different language thousands of miles away, even if they are not spoken at all.

So, liturgy is a way to pray with all the friends in Christ, past, present and future, whom you have not yet met. 

Friday, March 26, 2021

Making Software Companies Liable

It is long past time to start suing software companies for the security holes in their products. There is precedent. The automobile was invented in 1888, but the court system reacted to the new technology by essentially asserting the driver assumed all responsibility for safety, the auto manufacturer virtually none.  This attitude towards safety and security continued until 1965, when Ralph Nader released "Unsafe At Any Speed", exposing the dangers modern auto manufacturers knew were baked into their products, but deliberately ignored. At first, the response was dismissive. 

A TIME essay the following year portrayed Nader as a polemicist who was trying to paint auto accidents as solely the fault of the machines, with no account for driver error, and asserted that the book was “an arresting, though one-sided, lawyer’s brief that accuses Detroit of just about everything except starting the Vietnamese war.”

But, after a series of Congressional inquiries into auto safety, the courts soon sided with Nader's analysis and began holding auto manufacturers responsible for the people riding in their products. It took nearly a century for the auto industry to move from "new technology" wherein the user assumed all risk to "established industry" wherein the industry had to take responsibility for the safety of its products.

Modern software design and development arguably dates from the late 1960s and 70s, when mainframes began to infiltrate the business segment of American industry. In the succeeding fifty years, software has come to dominate almost every aspect of every industry. It is certainly time for this industry to take responsibility for the safety and security of its products. 

However, when we see remarks like this, it does not engender confidence that this has happened:

"Open-source developers say securing their code is a soul-withering waste of time (TechRepublic, Dec 9,2020) A survey of nearly 1,200 FOSS contributors found security to be low on developers' list of priorities....Moreover, responses indicated that many respondents had little interest in increasing time and effort on security. One respondent commented that they "find the enterprise of security a soul-withering chore and a subject best left for the lawyers and process freaks," while another said: "I find security an insufferably boring procedural hindrance.""

GitLab's "2019 Global Developer Report: DevSecOps" survey of over 4,000 software professionals agrees:

"Nearly half of security pros surveyed, 49%, said they struggle to get developers to make remediation of vulnerabilities a priority. Worse still, 68% of security professionals feel fewer than half of developers can spot security vulnerabilities later in the life cycle. Roughly half of security professionals said they most often found bugs after code is merged in a test environment.

At the same time, nearly 70% of developers said that while they are expected to write secure code, they get little guidance or help. One disgruntled programmer said, "It's a mess, no standardization, most of my work has never had a security scan." Another problem is it seems many companies don't take security seriously enough. Nearly 44% of those surveyed reported that they're not judged on their security vulnerabilities."

And then there is this gem from freelance developers:

Of the 18 who had to resubmit their code, 15 developers were part of the group that were never told the user registration system needed to store password securely, showing that developers don't inherently think about security when writing code....The other three were from the half that was told to use a secure method to store passwords, but who stored passwords in plaintext anyway....

Of the programmers who actually bothered to submit a password storage system that was encrypted, almost 75% of the solutions were deprecated. That is, the solutions used already-compromised ciphers. The "solutions" were broken before they shipped. Of the 75% who failed, nearly 20% used Base64, which isn't even an encryption algorithm.

The 2019 study showed that current developers aren't any better than unsupervised students.

It is perfectly obvious that companies aren't demanding appropriate security training, so no one is providing it. Why aren't companies demanding it? Because software companies cannot be sued for creating insecure code. As one technical article pointed out:

"There is no software liability and there is no standard of care or 'building code' for software, so as a result, there are security holes in your [products] that are allowing attackers to compromise you over and over."—Joshua Corman

The end-user license agreement (EULA)—a dense legalistic disclaimer that only 8% of people read, according to data collected in 2011—essentially states that people do not have to use the software, but if they do, the developer is not responsible for any damages. EULAs have been the primary way that software makers have escaped liability for vulnerabilities for the past three decades.  

This laxity on the part of software and hardware companies has produced a multi-billion dollar international crime industry in which: 

Only 3 cyber incidents out of 1000 see an arrest [much less a conviction]... By comparison, the clearance rate for property crimes was approximately 18% and for violent crimes 46%, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Uniform Crime Report (UCR) for 2016.

But the use of information technology is so ubiquitous that:
... the US Department of Treasury has designated cybersecurity incidents as one of the biggest threats to the stability of the entire US financial system....  
Third Way’s analysis estimates that the enforcement rate for reported incidents of the IC3 database is 0.3%. Taking into account that cybercrime victims often do not report cases, the effective enforcement rate estimate may be closer to 0.05%. [emphasis added]...  
The FBI reports that using the IC3 data to develop law enforcement referrals, it only secured nine convictions in 2016, down from nineteen cases the previous year.
Make no mistake: the cybercrime wave has been created by the poor coding practices at every software firm in the world. This has to end. For years, the IT industry has been urging everyone to wrap their products, data and business processes 'round with an IT blanket. But, when that same IT wrapper's poor design and lack of security began enabling the corruption or destruction of the products, data and business processes that were entrusted to them, the IT industry suddenly decided it is not responsible for the result. 

It is impossible to refer to members of the industry as "IT professionals" when those same people refuse to take responsibility for the security disasters their indifference has helped create. That isn't a professional attitude. It isn't even an adult attitude. It's time for IT to grow up.

If an organization is successfully hacked, someone in the IT supplier chain needs to be fined and/or jailed. Maybe it's the software company, maybe it's the integrators, maybe it's the developers, maybe the C-suite that runs the company, maybe the hardware people. Maybe all of them, or maybe just a selection. It doesn't matter. Someone or everyone in the chain needs to face consequences. Until IT people start facing serious consequences for their failure to care for the data and processes entrusted to them, they aren't going to change. We've waited fifty years. How much longer do we wait? 


UPDATE: Well, this ZDnet article on website password storage is rather chilling. This article describes how passwords SHOULD be stored, and this one gives more technical details.  

UPDATE II: It's 2022, and nothing has changed.

Sunday, March 21, 2021

Physics and Innovation

 Physics doesn’t take a vacation because of innovation... the simple facts are these:

During the average commute, ANY car uses about 7 hp per minute, (or the equivalent) or 420 hp in an hour. Converted to watts, that is 313,320 watts or enough energy to power 5 houses for an entire day.

The average commute in an electric vehicle, like any other vehicle, uses the same power.

So... if 5% of the homes acquire an EV, it is like that city has added 25% more houses, only the power consumption as they charge overnight, (8 hours) triples the load on the grid to the equivalent of 75% more houses.

What grid can handle nearly doubling the load?

Who is going to pay for it?

Saturday, March 20, 2021

Why China Won't Go To War

 China can't afford to go to war. War used to be a way to employ excess sons. China no longer has excess sons. Every man's death in war extinguishes an entire family line. Each death also hastens the aging of the population by removing decades of man-years per corpse from production.

In addition, invading the most likely flash-point, Taiwan, creates its own problems. The world is currently experiencing a massive chip shortage. The biggest fab labs in the world are in Taiwan. If China were to invade, the Taiwanese would almost certainly destroy the fab labs to keep them out of Chinese hands. China uses 61 percent of the world’s chips in products for both its domestic and export markets, importing around $310 billion worth in 2018. That is, China depends on chips just as much as everyone else does.

And each year the Chinese do NOT go to war, their whole population gets one year older, exacerbating their demographic problem, and making it less likely they will risk a high-casualty conflict.

We are a paper tiger due to the politically correct crowd infiltrating the military, but China's a paper tiger because it's demography doesn't really allow a full-scale, high-casualty war. 

It's a Mexican stand-off between an old man and a transsexual.

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

Biden's Senile Dementia

So, they are green-screening Biden now.

Watch these two videos and pay close attention to Biden's hands as they interact (or rather, as they don't interact) with the microphones at the bottom of the screen. One video is much more egregiously faked than the other is.

Apparently, the senile dementia has progressed to a point where they have him practicing they same lines in front of a green screen until he gets it right, then they photoshop in the adoring press.


Same interview, different angle, same problem:


Now, this is an obvious, high-school level mistake. The question then is, are his handlers truly this incompetent, or are Americans being deliberately baited by being presented with an obviously faked interview event? 

If the former, then Biden's senile dementia has progressed to such a point that he has to be made to continuously practice his answers in front of a green screen until one of the takes is good enough to publish, then the adoring press is green-screened in. Also, his handlers are grossly incompetent at their jobs.

If the latter, Biden may or may not be suffering from senile dementia, but he and/or the people handling him have decided - for whatever reason - to make it obvious that they are deliberately manipulating the world's perception of events. Is it more charitable to consider the people around him idiots or malevolent? 

And therein lies the problem: sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malevolence.



Wednesday, March 10, 2021

2020 Census and Illegal Immigrants

 From the Encyclopedia Britannica:

"Granting slaveholding states the right to count three-fifths of their population of enslaved individuals when it came to apportioning representatives to Congress meant that those states would thus be perpetually overrepresented in national politics. However, this same ratio was to be used to determine the federal tax contribution required of each state, thus increasing the direct federal tax burden of slaveholding states."

Replace the word "slaves" with "illegal immigrants" and the exact same argument is taking place right now with the 2020 Census. The abolitionists (the conservatives) don't want illegals counted, the pro-slavery (liberals) DO want them counted for purposes of representation.

But conservatives wouldn't have a problem with counting them (while liberals would) if it increased the federal tax burden on states with high numbers of illegals (sanctuary states).

How about we resolve it the same way the Founders did - count illegals as three-fifths of a person, and call it a day?

Oh, and if you're wondering why the Constitution doesn't mention how to handle illegal immigrants in the census counts, it is because there was no such thing as an illegal immigrant for the first century of this country's existence.  The Constitution does not list the ability to restrict immigration among the enumerated powers possessed by the federal government. Thus, technically, the power to restrict immigration is reserved to the states. There was no federal law restricting immigration until 1875's Page Act. That means it took almost a century for Congress to violate the Constitution, usurp states' rights and create an unconstitutional federal restriction on immigration. Congress had to wait until the Founding Fathers had all been dead several decades before they dared make this over-reach.

Addendum:

“When foreigners after looking about for some other Country in which they can obtain more happiness, give a preference to ours, it is a proof of attachment which ought to excite our confidence and affection.”   ~ Benjamin Franklin

"I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. when they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe."  ~Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, Paris Dec. 20. 1787.           

NB: The United States was 80% agricultural in 1789, today it is 80% urban.


Tuesday, March 09, 2021

USD vs. Gold vs. Cryptocurrencies

Is the US Dollar (USD), gold, or cryptocurrencies, really money? How are the three to be compared? According to the Austrian school, "fiat money [is] money that comprises things with a special legal qualification.” Further, since the Austrian school does not recognize things as having objective economic value, all money is "fiat money", even gold:

[i]f the objective exchange-value of money must always be linked with a pre-existing market exchange ratio between money and other economic goods (since otherwise individuals would not be in a position to estimate the value of the money), it follows that an object cannot be used as money unless, at the moment when its use as money begins, it already possesses an objective exchange-value based on some other use.

There are a lot of things which have "exchange-value based on some other use." Lumber, sand, gold, and, as we shall see, cryptocurrencies, can be used for things other than exchange-value. Gold, for instance, can be used in jewelry, industrial applications, etc. One way gold differentiates itself from most other things is by being an element on the periodic table, and therefore both essentially indestructible and essentially impossible to produce. It can be found (via mining), but not produced. Its quantity is limited: demand for its uses grows with population growth or increased utility, while supply does not necessarily grow commensurate with demand. 

How does this compare to cryptocurrencies and the USD? To understand how cryptocurrencies compare, we must first,  look at how the USD works, and at how cryptocurrency is constructed. Let's start with the USD. As Forbes points out:

we already HAVE a national digital currency. It’s fast, cheap and secure! It has no issue with regulators, and it’s accepted everywhere. Who knew? It’s called … the US dollar.... almost 90% of US dollars have no physical existence – they are purely digital. But this isn’t just for the USA; world-wide, only 8% of currency exists as physical cash!

How does gold compare to national fiat money (e.g., the USD) and modern cryptocurrency? Well, primarily because all national currencies have legal recognition by their various issuing governments,  all national currencies have "a special legal qualification." As national currencies like the USD occupy space on their respective government hard drives, these same national electronic currencies are wrapped up in various cryptographic wrappers. The cryptographic wrappers are extrinsic to the currency itself. None of the currencies have built-in encryption, rather, the encryption schemes used are added "after the fact", as it were. For national currencies, encryption is necessary for safe exchange, but encryption is not technically intrinsic to the currency itself. 

Encryption is necessary because neither national currencies nor cryptocurrencies have actual, physical existence.  Both exist either primarily, or entirely, inside of computers. Gold's "encryption" is, of course, it's physical existence. If you don't have it in your hands, then you don't own it, you can't use it. Gold cannot be copied. For physical printed cash, governments try to mimic gold's characteristics by making the paper bills and metal coins hard to copy. Physical cash must be held in your hands to use it. 

For the digital versions of currency, these physical characteristics are mimicked by accounting and encryption. Accounting tracks digital cash to make sure it does not get double-spent (i.e., the same dollar is not spent on two different products at the same time). Encryption of digital assets prevents their being usefully copied. Encryption also allows only the person with the decryption key to open the encryption wrapper and make use of the encrypted money, so only people with the decryption keys "have the cash in their hands", so to speak. 

Currently, neither cryptocurrencies nor gold have "a special legal qualification". But both do have alternate exchange-value uses. Gold has industrial and cosmetic uses. Cryptocurrencies have ledger uses. What does "ledger uses" mean? Let's take a look at how crypto is constructed. 

The technology is still in its infancy, but cryptocurrency has its own market niche of usefulness above and beyond the simple ability of being able to move across national boundaries with a minimum of fuss. That movement, of course, is the one use case everyone knows. Cryptocurrency is instantly accessible anywhere in the world where the Internet is available. Even better, it is possible to move a billion dollars to another person for less than $5 in transaction fees. That cannot be done with any other form of value store.

But cryptocurrency differs from gold, USD and other national currencies in several other major ways. First, the design. The diagram above is a generic undifferentiated framework common to all cryptocurrencies. It is presented just to give you an idea of how cryptos work, generally speaking.

However, the actual design of the individual blocks in each cryptocurrency's blockchain is unique, differentiating it from all other cryptocurrencies. Design differences might lay in the size of the data block, the number of coins that can be produced, the kind of data that can be stored in the data block, the time interval during which a new block is generated, the level of modularity associated with each block, etc., but the design of each crypto is unique to itself. Thus, there is only ever one Bitcoin, no one else can invent Bitcoin again. Other cryptos very similar to Bitcoin may be produced (e.g., Litecoin), but nothing else will be Bitcoin.

Unlike USD or national currencies, where encryption is added as an after-thought, encryption is built-in, a fundamental part of the design of every cryptocurrency. This makes cryptocurrencies inherently more secure than any national currency. One may object by saying that blockchains have been hacked and large quantities of cryptocurrencies stolen, and this is true, but these hacks are much less common in cryptocurrencies than they are in national currencies. Further, these hacks occur as a result of programming errors, not encryption errors. We will see why this distinction matters in a moment.

Unlike national currencies, most cryptocurrencies have a bounded upper limit as part of their design. That means only a certain number of "coins" can exist in bounded cryptocurrencies. Although crypto is obviously not an element on the periodic table, the inherent limit to the number of coins in every bounded cryptocurrency means it acts in a way similar to gold. Crypto of this kind can only be found, not created. Once the upper limit is reached, no more coins of that type can be found. Ever. Unlike national currencies, which governments usually inflate in order to reduce their own debts, bounded crypto cannot be inflated. Indeed, given the fact that people will, over time, lose their decryption keys or die without passing their decryption keys onto others, bounded crypto is relentlessly deflationary. Once max supply is reached, the supply will only drop. This is different than gold. Lost gold can theoretically be discovered again. Lost Bitcoins are gone forever. 

Like gold, and unlike national currencies, bitcoin is decentralized. While certain geographic areas may be rich in gold, or rich in cryptocurrency miners, for most cryptocurrencies, no single entity controls a typical cryptocurrency network. No one entity can decide to change the structure of the coin or the distribution of the coin. Whereas national governments (that is, powerful individuals and groups) use the force of national law to guarantee the integrity of their own government currencies, the laws of physics guarantee the stable characteristics, accessibility and integrity of gold, while the laws of mathematics guarantee the stable characteristics, accessibility and integrity of cryptocurrencies. Given the close interconnect between the laws of physics and math, the math of cryptocurrencies is as stable as the physics of gold. Just as someone could theoretically use the power of nuclear fusion to create more gold, someone could theoretically use the power of computers to break encryption, but given the physics and the math, neither endeavor is likely to occur in our lifetimes.  

But none of these are use cases. Does cryptocurrency have a use case, as gold does? The simplest answer: Yes. Examine the diagram above. The data section in every cryptocurrency block can hold not just transactions, but anything at all. For instance, the data section can hold other cryptocurrencies inside itself, It can hold not only data, but programs. Thus, a cryptocurrency can do something that no national currency, and no bar of gold, can do.

Say, for example, you need a new refrigerator. You can program your cryptocurrency to monitor the prices of refrigerators with certain characteristics, then automatically use itself to buy the optimal refrigerator when it reaches your optimal price, and automatically have that fridge delivered to your door. You can't program a thousand-dollar bill (or any national currency) nor even a bar of gold to do the same thing. Such a program is called a "smart contract".   

Smart contracts are part of DeFi (Decentralized Finance). A smart contract is an example of a Dapp (Decentralized Application). Different cryptocurrencies have different DeFi capabilities. Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, is very, very hard to program with DeFi, so nobody does it. But Ethereum, BinanceCoin and Polkadot, all second-generation currencies, are much better at it. Cardano, a third-generation currency, is even better still, and much easier to program. So, in addition to being able to transfer large sums quickly and cheaply, smart contracts specifically, and DeFi + Dapps in general, are additional use cases for cryptocurrencies.

But DeFi and Dapps are not all that can be done. Cryptocurrencies can act as immutable ledgers. Once data is written into a block, the hash prevents the data from being changed. Precisely because the data section can hold... well... data that cannot be changed, cryptocurrencies may be used as a pre-eminent way of tracking information that needs to be publicly available but also needs to be tamper-proof. So, information on chain-of-custody issues, such as car ownership and maintenance, land deeds, lien information on said land deeds, food transport, high school and college transcripts, proof of employment, etc., could be put on a block chain, available for tamper-proof public inspection. 

Even medical records could be encrypted, placed in a public blockchain, and therefore be available world-wide for use. Since these records would be encrypted, they would only able to be decrypted by the record owner. The advantage? If the owner of those records is away from home but needs medical care, the medical records are still instantly available to any medical facility in the world that has an internet connection. Instead of taking days or weeks to locate and transmit the appropriate information to the emergency medical provider, the data owner simply unlocks the medical information using the decryption keys and it is instantly available. 

So, revisit the smart contract for the refrigerator. You can program the currency to spend itself for the fridge, not only if it reaches the right price point, but also if it has the right production facility, the right transport history, and a good maintenance history. If you want to buy only American, the ledger capability allows the crypto to track the provenance of the goods, allowing everyone to guarantee that you are, really, buying all and only American. The currency itself will verify that every part of the supply-chain was American, not a bit of it foreign. Or, if you only want to buy ethically-sourced products, the crypto would guarantee that you got your wish by refusing to spend itself unless the entire supply chain for the product was ethically-sourced, according to the criteria you set. Try doing that with a fifty-dollar bill.  Or a bar of gold. 

In an age where timely access to information is worth money, the blockchain is an efficient way of seamlessly making stored information quickly available while simultaneously guaranteeing the integrity of the information. Crypto is not just a store of value that is almost universally and instantly available, it is also a contract instrument and an immutable data ledger. Gold has its uses, national currencies have theirs, but DeFi  + Dapps, that is, easy access to widely available, easily transportable, tamper-proof public records, is a very valuable use case. And that is why cryptocurrencies are booming.  

Now, are cryptocurrencies in a tulip-like bubble? Yes. There is no question that many of the blockchains that currently carry significant value are not well-designed and will therefore not survive. Thousands of companies are trying to figure out how to use blockchain right now, just as thousands of companies were trying to figure out how to use the internet back in the 1990s. Most of those groups will fail. But there will be some jewels, just as there were during the dot.com bubble. Remember, Amazon, Google and Netflix all started during that late 1990's bubble. If you invested in them then, you are a multi-millionaire today. If you invested in the bubblelicious losers, you stood a good chance of losing your shirt. 

The same thing is happening right now with blockchain. Some will be jewels that survive and thrive, but most will fail. For instance, Dogecoin has no inherent value, no developers adding value, and an infinitely growing supply. It's definitely a bubble blockchain. For all its notoriety, Bitcoin is almost identical to Dogecoin. While it is is superior to Dogecoin in that it has a capped, or bounded, supply, it is hard to develop on, so it has few developers. However, it has first mover advantage, which means most people buy into it, not because it is good, but because they have heard of it. This will not last.

Ethereum has a mediocre architecture, a fairly lousy fee structure, and no upper bound to the number of coins that can be created, but it has a lot of developers. Ethereum has first mover advantage in the DeFi/Dapps space. Those developers and that first mover advantage give it much more value than Bitcoin. Cardano has a much superior architecture, a superior fee structure, an upper bound to the number of coins and lots of developers, so it also has much more value than Bitcoin. When Defi/Dapp ability is added in August, its value will increase again. Other coins vary in their characteristics as well. If you want to invest, keep in mind that blockchain is definitely in a price-discovery bubble (and has been since it was invented), but it also definitely has a few blockchain gems. You have to do your due diligence and determine which blockchains have enough value to survive the bubble. Those are the ones that will drive value. 

Salvation for the Rich


Sure, literate people can read God's Word for themselves, but that doesn't mean everyone can understand it for themselves. Scripture itself says it contains "things hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction" (2 Peter 3:16). Worse, Bible-only theology limits salvation to those who can read. A large percentage of the world is illiterate. Even when the Bible is translated to their language, they can't read it.

The advantage of the sacramental economy used by liturgical Christians is simple: the sinner doesn't need a high-tech skill (literacy) in order to be saved. All the sinner needs is to be breathing, and s/he can be baptized, confirmed, chrismated, etc.

The Protestant system has always been salvation for the wealthy, not the poor, because literacy has always been a skill reserved to the wealthy, and unavailable to the great mass of the poor.

Demonstration:
While only 12% of the people in the world could read and write in 1820, today the share has reversed: only 14% of the world population, in 2016, remained illiterate.

In 2019, the illiteracy rate among adults aged 15 years and older was 34.7 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa. In South Asia the illiteracy rate was 27.1 percent. Adult illiteracy rate is defined as the percentage of the population ages 15 and older who can not read or write.

Even if literacy is attained, at what level is it attained? How well does someone have to read in order to be considered "literate"? For instance, let us consider the 2012 edition of the PIAAC, or Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. To begin, the study has a title that could not be understood by most of the people it surveyed.

The average American reads at the 7th or 8th grade level.... 4% [of Americans] are nonliterate.... 14% have below-basic literacy levels.... 34% have basic literacy levels. [This means] Half of U.S. adults can't read a book written at the 8th-grade level. ... most cannot identify the link leading to the organization’s phone number from a website with several links, including “contact us” and “FAQ.”

On a reading scale from 1 to 500, the US scores an average of 270, which places it below average on the international comparison chart, but even the highest scoring country, Japan, scores only a 296. That means that even the Japanese, on average, can barely identify relevant information in a two-paragraph essay and interpret a generic chart with 15 items. 

So that raises a very important, but generally overlooked, set of questions for Bible-only Protestants. At what grade level is your English-language Bible translated to? Here is an estimate from the biblegateway.com website. The first number is the grade level for which the Bible is generally considered accessible; the number in parentheses is an estimated age at which a reader can fully read and understand it. As you can see, over half the translations cannot be understand by half of Americans:

  • Mounce — 12+ (ages 17+)
  • KJV — 12+ (ages 17+)
  • RSV — 12+ (ages 17+)
  • Geneva — 12+ (ages 17+)
  • WEB — 12+ (ages 17+)
  • NRSV — 11+ (ages 16+)
  • NASB — 11+ (ages 16+)
  • Amplified — 11+ (ages 16+)
  • MEV — 11+ (ages 16+)
  • LEB — 11+ (ages 16+)
  • ESV — 10+ (ages 15+)
  • J.B. Phillips NT — 10+ (ages 15+)
  • NABRE — 9+ (ages 14+)
  • NIV — 7+ (ages 12+)
  • CEB — 7+ (ages 12+)
  • NET — 7+ (ages 12+)
  • GNT — 7+ (ages 12+)
  • ISV — 7+ (ages 12+)
  • NKJV — 7+ (ages 12+)
  • HCSB — 7+ (ages 12+)
  • The Voice — 6+ (ages 11+)
  • NLT — 6+ (ages 11+)
  • CEV — 5+ (ages 10+)
  • GW — 5+ (ages 10+)
  • The Message — 4+ (ages 9+)
  • Living — 4+ (ages 9+)
  • ERV — 4+ (ages 9+)
  • NCV — 3+ (ages 7+)
  • ICB — 3+ (ages 7+)
  • NIrV — 3+ (ages 7+)

Once we get to the lower grade levels, another question arises: is this even really a translation? After all, shouldn't we be reading the Bible in the original Hebrew and Greek, the language of the prophets and apostles? If we aren't reading it in the original languages, are we really reading the Bible at all? If you are willing to say an English translation suffices, then how dumbed down does it have to get before it is no longer truly a Bible at all, but just a summary, a paraphrase, a gloss, instead of the Word of God?  

History is filled with Bibles whose translations or printings were not wholly accurate: the Murderer's Bible (left out the "not" in "thou shalt not kill"), the Wife-Beater's Bible, etc. So, if there is one faulty word, let out or added in, is that book no longer the Bible? How much can be paraphrased (because all translations are inherently inexact, and therefore paraphrased - how to correctly translate passages in Isaiah is a great example of this) before the work is no longer a Bible?

Even if you read the books in the original Greek and Hebrew, which books are you reading? There are several ancient versions of Isaiah, for instance. Which is Scripture, and which isn't? Only a rich person with a lot of resources would have the time to both learn the necessary Hebrew (or Greek, for the Septuagint version), much less be able to make an informed choice. And what if he chooses incorrectly? How would a less informed person know that the translation in front of him isn't actually the Bible?

For the liturgical Christian, these questions are interesting, but not threatening. But for the Bible-only Protestant, these questions are downright deadly. Once we admit a third-grade Bible is still a Bible, then how is a sermon delivered by one of the Apostolic Fathers *NOT* also the Bible? 

After all, when we translate the Bible to a third-grade level for young readers, aren't we doing EXACTLY the same thing the Apostolic Fathers did in their sermons - translating the difficult language of the Bible to a listening audience who can't read the original? If you admit a third-grade English, Japanese or Russian edition is "the Bible", when all it is REALLY doing is recasting the original Greek and Hebrew into a form third-graders can understand, then how can you deny that every sermon that explains, i.e., recasts a specific Biblical passage into a form an audience can understand, is not also "the Bible"? Where do you draw the line?

When considered this way, all of these sermons ARE the Bible. They are just live translations from the original languages into an age and grade-level appropriate language. The sermons of the Fathers are just as much God's Own Word, the very light of Scripture, as the New Century or the Living Translation Bibles used with children. How can anyone deny that a live translation of Scripture, which we call a sermon or homily, is just as much Scripture as any modern translation is? And if this is true, then when a Catholic or Eastern Orthodox points to a sermon from the Apostolic Fathers, is he not really just pointing to Scripture itself? Do not the Protestants have to accept those same sermons as bearing doctrinal and instructional weight comparable to Scripture?

These are an intensely difficult set of questions for Christians who do not admit the Magisterium. 

And these questions are problems precisely because Bible-only theology must always come down to salvation based on wealth and intelligence. The wealthy have the leisure time and the resources available to hone their literacy skills. Given a common subject (the Bible), the intelligent require less time and resources than the stupid to master the same material.

Protestant theology explicitly says you have to know Christ to be saved AND knowledge of Christ comes through Scripture. Protestant theology therefore implies the wealthy and intelligent are more likely to be saved than the poor and stupid. If you are a Bible-only Christian, there is no way to avoid this conclusion. Liturgical Christians don't have this problem. Knowledge of Christ does come through Scripture, of course, but it also comes through the direct contact with sacramental grace. As an Eastern Orthodox, Coptic or Catholic Christian, I don't need to be literate to be saved, I only need to be breathing and receptive to sacramental grace. The differences are clear. 

The problem, of course, is that half of the country is unable to understand anything I've just written. 

Sunday, March 07, 2021

Renewables destroy the environment

Industrial solar and wind farms take up enormous amounts of land, often requiring all wildlife, even all the vegetation, on the site to be killed or removed.

Wind, solar, and hydro energy all have one thing in common: they destroy habitat as well as directly kill wildlife, including listed endangered species and their habitat
Solar panels themselves are made with heavy metals mined by child and slave labor. When hurricanes or tornadoes destroy those panels, the heavy metal from the debris leaches into and contaminates soil and groundwater. Since solar panels cannot be economically recycled, they get buried in landfills at the end of their life, again contaminating soil and groundwater. See this Forbes story, or this FEE story, this Wired story, this Discover Magazine story, or this ScienceDirect story:

Thin-film solar panels (TFSPs) are widely used in integrated photovoltaic and solar power systems...Heavy metals were released from TFSPs in the burial experiment, and the rates of metal release changed with variations in both the amounts of TFSPs in the soil and the soil properties. The increased concentrations of heavy metals such as Zn, Cu, Ni, Ga, Pb, In and Cr in soil samples were correlated to the amounts of TFSPs added. The results of this study confirmed that, when buried, TFSPs polluted the soil.

This article from PV Magazine confirms the problem:

The authors of the paper cited the waste electrical and electronic equipment directive introduced by the European Union as an example other countries should follow to define new policies for the management of PV waste. Otherwise, stated the researchers, the lack of economic value in recycling such products at present is likely to see significant volumes dumped in landfill.

The presence of hazardous heavy metals such as the cadmium, tellurium, indium and gallium used in thin-film products would represent a significant threat to health and the environment if not disposed of correctly...

This Foreign Policy article documents how the solar panel industry uses child labor to provide toys to rich people:

Renewable technologies create ethical issues at both ends of their life cycle. Sovacool was part of a team of researchers who recently visited the two ends of technology supply chains: artisanal cobalt mining sites in Congo, where miners extract the metal using rudimentary tools or their hands, and electronic waste scrapyards in Ghana, a global cemetery for electronics such as solar panels. The team’s findings reveal widespread child labor, the subjugation of ethnic minorities, toxic pollution, biodiversity loss, and gender inequality along the length of the supply chain....By 2050, which is the rough expiration date of solar panels manufactured today, the technology is estimated to produce 78 million metric tons of waste—some 80 percent more than the total annual waste from all combined technologies today.

The New York Times has already documented that Chinese solar panel firms use slave labor extensively in order to feed Western desire for 'clean" energy.

According to a report by the consultancy Horizon Advisory, Xinjiang’s rising solar energy technology sector is connected to a broad program of assigned labor in China, including methods that fit well-documented patterns of forced labor.

And Green Tech Media documents the same problem:

Some of these challenges, such as those around the cobalt used in lithium-ion batteries, are well known. However, while the persistent presence of child labor in Congolese cobalt mines has left companies struggling to address supply-chain traceability, other human rights impacts from renewable energy may be flying under the radar.

Our research shows that labor rights issues are present in renewable energy supply chains, including in the manufacturing of solar panels and the cultivation of palm oil and sugarcane used in biofuels.

Wind turbine blades cannot be recycled. They are cut into pieces and buried in landfills. 

When wind turbine blades are decommissioned they are usually scrapped and thrown into landfill because they cannot be recycled. In the U.S. over the next four years alone that will be the fate of more than 8,000 blades. As wind installations increase so will that number. ...

A recent Bloomberg News article stoked concern by shining a spotlight on Casper, Wyoming, home to a graveyard for nearly 900 wind turbine blades.

Casper’s municipal landfill serves as a final resting place for spent blades, the volume of which has been growing exponentially as wind energy’s robust expansion continues. The article suggested that over the next four years alone, the United States will decommission more than 8,000 blades.

Even NPR admits this is an issue. When you've lost NPR, who is left to support you?

While most of a turbine can be recycled or find a second life on another wind farm, researchers estimate the U.S. will have more than 720,000 tons of blade material to dispose of over the next 20 years, a figure that doesn't include newer, taller higher-capacity versions.
And virtually no one calculates the energy expense in attempting to grind up or bury these blades in landfills. 

So, if you hate, absolutely HATE the environment, use wind/solar.

If you LIKE having children and other slaves work for you, use wind/solar.

Renewables destroy the environment and enslave children.

So, to sum up:
Solar uses child/slave labor to mine the heavy metals used in solar panel construction. Tornadoes and hurricanes shred the panels, resulting in soil and groundwater contamination. Panels cannot be economically recycled, so they end up in landfills where they again contaminate soil and groundwater with heavy metals.

  • If you like child labor,
  • If you like slave labor,
  • If you like poisoning the environment,
  • Use solar!

It's the rich man's toy, made by slaves, that poisons the environment! 


Wednesday, March 03, 2021

Why Electrical Vehicles Cannot Work

From a comment on the web: 

The average power line in a residential neighborhood is capable of transmitting around 500 simultaneous amps before the pole transformers start blowing. That is why you start getting brownouts when everyone uses air conditioning in the summer. As the lines heat up, they get less efficient.

Most American homes have a 100amp service, even though a lot of new construction doubles this. The normal draw of a house is around 20-30 amps, unless you are running a high draw appliance. Then you might hit 40-60. 

We barely have enough generation capacity to run everything now. In states like California, they don't have enough and have to siphon energy from other states. Where is the energy going to come from to charge all the electric cars? Nearly all of them will be plugged in at the same time. 

It doesn't matter how far the technology goes, the power need is there. The faster the charge, the higher the amperage needed. Current fast charging systems use just over 70 amps. Requiring most homes to install a second 100 amp service. But that is only good for one car. To charge two cars and have enough power for your house, you'll need at least a 300 amp service. You start to notice a problem if you and your neighbor both have a 300 amp service and charge two cars at night. That pole transformer down the street will blow in a few seconds.

The function of that transformer is to step down the voltage from a few thousand volts to the 240v your residence runs on. There are larger transformers that handle more amps, but they are in the local substation. To handle a neighborhood of electric cars, you'll need a substation for every block and a pole transformer outside every house. 

It just isn't feasible. The infrastructure needed for 200 million electric cars in the USA will cost trillions. It won't happen. The electric dream of blogs like Electrek and their brainless commenters is really a nightmare for everyone.

Tuesday, March 02, 2021

A Bit of Texas History

Texas is fickle: it seceded from two different nations in less than 30 years. Each time, Texas killed tens of thousands of men. Below is a study in Texas history. It is not heroic. Quite the opposite. If some nation were to do to us what we did to Mexico in order to gain Texas and California, we would be outraged.

Of the 79,000 American troops who took part in the Mexican-American war, 13,200 died. This creates a mortality rate of nearly 17 percent — higher than both World War I and Word War II. The vast majority were victims of diseases such as dysentery, yellow fever, malaria and smallpox. The war ended in 1848. Texas would secede from the US just sixteen years after becoming a state, and just thirteen years after the Mexican-American war, forcing an even larger casualty list upon the American people.

How did the U.S. gain Texas? Well, Americans came to Texas and Mexico as illegal aliens. Mexico had outlawed slavery and it required immigrants to convert to Catholic Faith. Americans who entered Tejas refused to give up their slaves and mostly refused to convert to Catholicism. Americans in Texas, when told to obey Mexican law, often replied, "We are Americans. We obey the Constitution." Those same illegal aliens, men and women who refused to recognize the laws of the nation whose land they inhabited, fomented insurrection against the Mexican government. 

The US had been trying to buy Mexican land for decades, but Mexico refused to sell. After America's Texans managed to cement their illegal actions via military action, a Democrat president then created a false flag operation on Mexican territory to foment another war in order to justify taking more Mexican territory.

Abraham Lincoln introduced the Spot Resolutions precisely to highlight the illegal actions of the American Democrat president. Lincoln called the war outright theft. US Grant would later say the Mexican-American war was the only war he was ashamed to have participated in.

Amazing how Republicans and conservatives have switched 180 degrees in the course of a century in their attitudes towards this theft of Mexican territory.


Timeline of Mexican Independence

1492-1810: Spain owns Mexico. 

1807-1808: Napoleon invades (1807) and occupies Spain (1808). 

1808-1813: Guerilla war In Spain against Napoleon

1810-1821: Mexican War of Independence started by local Catholic priest who led troops under the banner of Guadalupe.

1819: The Adams-Onis treaty established the boundary of U.S. territory through the Rocky Mountains and west to the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. paid residents' claims against the Spanish government up to a total of $5,000,000 and relinquished the U.S. claims on parts of Spanish Texas west of the Sabine River and other Spanish areas.

Sept 1821: Military coup in Spain, Mexico wins independence

1822: US recognizes Mexican independence

1824: Mexico allows land grants to immigrants who agreed to become Mexican citizens, become Catholic learn Spanish, and obey Mexican law .

1826: John Quincy Adams offers $1 million for Texas. Mexico says NO.

1828: Mexico and US sign Treaty of Limits. The treaty recognized the Mexico–U.S. boundary that had been established by the 1819 Adams–Onís Treaty between Spain and the U.S.

1829: Andrew Jackson offers $5 million. Mexico again says NO.


Mexico Outlaws Slavery

1810: Independence leader Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla proclaimed the abolition of slavery three months after the start of the Independence of Mexico from Spain.

1813: Independence leader José María Morelos y Pavón declares slavery abolished in Mexico in the documents Sentimientos de la Nación

1820: Ferdinand VII banned the importation of slaves. 

1823: Mexico forbade the sale or purchase of slaves and required that the children of slaves be freed when they reached fourteen. All children of slaves were free at birth. Any slave brought to Texas had to be freed within six months.

1824: During the debates over the new Mexican constitution, Stephen Austin wrote to the Mexican representative Erasmo Seguín: “There are two obstacles which slow down [American] emigration to this province and the entire nation . . . One is the doubt that persists if slavery is permitted, the other is religion.” The new Mexican constitution effectively abolishes slavery by leaving the question up to the individual states, where most abolished it.

1826: In what is seen by Stephen Austin and other American settlers as a deathblow to American settlement of Texas

the state of Coahuila-Texas began writing its constitution. In June of 1826, Austin received a letter from Baron de Bastrop, the only representative of Texas at the state congress. Bastrop warned that the congress was preparing to insert an antislavery article into the state constitution: “If I cannot succeed in removing it, or at least modifying it,” he wrote, the American settlements “will be completely ruined.”  Soon, Austin would see for himself what the antislavery threat was.  The proposed Article 13 of the new Coahuila-Texas constitution read: “The state prohibits absolutely and for all time slavery in all its territory, and slaves that already reside in the state will be free from the day of the publication of the constitution in this capital.” 

Although it was eventually watered down to give the Texas region a six-month extension, it was obvious that slavery would soon be gone from all regions of Mexico, even Texas.

1828: Americans influence in the Mexican Congress pushed through a loophole to the anti-slavery law that allowed "work contracts" created in other countries to be honored in Texas. Slaves were then made to sign life-time enslavement contracts in the US, and then transported to Texas for work in the  American settlers' Mexican cotton fields. 

1829: The last slaves are freed just as the first president of partial African ancestry (Vicente Guerrero) is elected.  The province of Tejas had an exemption to this anti-slavery ordinance that lasted until 1830, due entirely to the personal intervention of Stephen Austin. Due to this law, American settlers were on the brink of revolt.

1836: Contemporary abolitionists recognized the Texas Revolution for what it was:   

During the Texas Revolution itself, the legitimacy of the rebellion was disparaged by opponents of slavery, who held that the chief purpose of the breakaway was to ensure the future of slavery in Texas (Mexico had outlawed the institution), and by others who judged it a landgrab by armed speculators. 

1837: American slaves are fleeing south to Mexico and freedom.


Illegal Aliens From the United States

1829: The Mexican government asked General Manuel Mier y Teran to investigate the outcome of the 1825 colonization law in Texas. In 1829, Mier y Teran issued his report, which concluded that most Anglo Americans refused to be naturalized and tried to isolate themselves from Mexicans. He also noted that slave reforms passed by the state were being ignored.

1830: Mexico forbids further American immigration into Texas. However, due to exploding cotton prices and cheap Mexican land, the invasion could not be stopped. Between the time that Mexico forbade further American immigration in 1830 and the outbreak of the Texas Revolution in 1835, the American population more than doubled in Texas, from 10,000 to over 21,000. All of the American Protestant slave-owners who arrived were illegals. 

1832: Mexico outlawed the "work contract" loophole that had allowed Americans to bring their slaves in as life-long indentured servants. Texas demands Mexico allow American immigration. Mexico refuses. Battle of Velasco takes place in June. In this year, Sam Houston also arrives in Texas, well after American immigration to Texas had already been outlawed. "One runaway named Tom ... had been enslaved by Sam Houston. Houston was a president of the Republic of Texas who’d fought in the Texas Revolution. Once Tom got across the border, he joined the Mexican military that Houston had fought against." Americans, when questioned about their slaves by Mexican authorities, asserted that they were merely indentured servants, and thus legal under color of Mexican law. 

1833: Texas asks for federalist reforms, which the Mexican government rejects.

1834: The Ursuline Convent riots occurred August 11 and 12, 1834, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, near Boston, in what is now Somerville, Massachusetts. During the riot, a convent of Roman Catholic Ursuline nuns was burned down by a Protestant mob. The US is rife with anti-Catholic sentiment.

1835: Oct 2, Battle of Gonzales begins war for Texas independence. 

Austin’s deep connections to cotton merchants made him the ideal figure for this work, and it would indeed be these cotton merchants who funded the Texas Revolution. They also helped to circulate newspapers throughout the South filled with sensational stories framing the Texan independence struggle as a race war, with White American settlers being pitted against the racially inferior Mexican forces of Santa Anna, who was coming to incite slave revolts and murder the White population. Such newspaper accounts led thousands of White Southern men to rush to the defense of Texas: such men would make up a full 40 percent of the Texan rebel army. These reinforcements were badly needed, for slave revolts had begun breaking out in Texas as the potential promise of freedom approached in the form of Santa Anna’s army, and many of the settlers were more occupied with preventing slave uprisings than preparing for war. In one instance, a hundred slaves suspected of planning rebellion were rounded up, and either whipped nearly to death or hung. 

March, 1836: 59 people meet in Washington-on-the-Brazos and declare Texas independence. Most have been in Mexico for less than a year. Among other things, the document complained that Mexican rule was conducted by a “hostile majority in an unknown tongue”, i.e., Spanish. George C. Childress, the Nashville lawyer who produced the declaration, asserted that Mexicans were “a semi-civilized set, unfit to be free and incapable of self-government.”  The group produced a new constitution.

James W. Fannin authorized the sale of his slaves in order to purchase munitions because, as he noted, “this property, and indeed any other, will not be worth owning, if we do not succeed.” The Alamo and the Battle of San Jacinto soon followed, along with Texas independence.

The Mexican armies that entered the department to put down the rebellion had explicit orders to free any slaves that they encountered, and so they did. The only person spared in the retaking of the Alamo was Joe, the personal slave of William Travis.  

Slavery was immediately re-established. The Texas Constitution made it illegal for free blacks to reside in the state or for the Texas Congress to outlaw the importation of slaves. 

As more slaves came into the Republic of Texas, more escaped to Mexico. Matamoros in the 1840s had a large and flourishing colony of ex-slaves from Texas and the United States. Though exact numbers do not exist, as many slaves may have escaped to Mexico as escaped through the more famous underground railway to Canada. The Mexican government, for its part, encouraged the slave runaways, often with offers of land as well as freedom.

1836:  Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal was published and celebrated, giving further fuel to the anti-Catholic sentiment in the US. In April, Texas wins its independence at the battle of San Jacinto. 


The "Treaty" of Velasco (May 14, 1836)

The signatories were Interim President David G. Burnet for Texas and Santa Anna for Mexico. Santa Ana signed both a public document and a secret document. Unfortunately, Santa Ana had no authority under the Mexican Constitution to make a treaty. 

Neither document was ratified by the Mexican government because Santa Ana had signed the documents under coercion, as a prisoner. Mexico claimed Texas was a breakaway province, but it was too weak to attempt more military action to secure the breakaway province.

As Abraham Lincoln pointed out at the time, the documents were never called "treaties" until US President James K. Polk called them that in 1848, three years after Polk secretly tried to buy Texas from Mexico (1845).


The US Attempts to Buy "US Territory"

1838: The U.S. and Texas signed an 1838 treaty confirming the northern boundary from the Treaty of Limits. But was the Texas southern boundary the Rio Grande or the Neuces Rivers? The Mexicans claimed the “Rio Grande del Norte” in the documents Santa Ana signed was the Neuces River, the Texans claimed it was what they called the Rio Grande but what the Mexicans called the Rio Bravo.

1840: Mexico had other problems. Both the Republic of Rio Grande and Yucatan proclaim secession. Yucatan mostly reunites by 1848, but fighting in the Yucatan continues through the early 1900s.

Feb 28, 1845: Congress votes Texas admission as slave state, but doesn’t mention the southern border dispute in the Congressional debate.

Nov 10, 1845: Polk secretly sends Slidell to offer a settlement of all U.S. claims against Mexico, in exchange for recognition of the Rio Grande as the boundary between the two nations. In addition, Polk instructed Slidell to try and buy California for $25 million. Mexico immediately rejected the offer. Why is Polk trying to buy territory from Mexico if Mexico no longer owns it?

Dec 29, 1845: Texas accepts statehood. Mexico refuses to recognize either Texas independence or its annexation.


Polk's War And More $$$

January 1846: Polk sends troops to disputed southern boundary territory. U.S. forces led by Gen. Zachary Taylor advanced to the Rio Bravo. This was an open transgression on the territorial integrity of Mexico; Mexico considered the Nueces River the southern border of Texas. In response, Mexico sends troops to the Rio Grande.

April 1846: Mexican troops cross Rio Grande, kill 11 US troops at the Battle of Palo Alto, and capture the rest. 

May 11 1846: President Polk (D) now begins to insist Mexico “invaded our territory and shed American blood upon American soil.” That is, Mexico shed blood on soil that the US tried, and failed, to buy from Mexico just six months previously. 

May 13, 1846: Mexican-American War begins.

May 18, 1846: Troops enter Matamoros in Mexico proper, blockade ports of Veracruz and Tampico. "Ulysses S. Grant, then a young lieutenant, would later describe in his memoirs that among those gathered along the Rio Grande in the spring of 1846, “the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation was consummated or not; but not so all of them. For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territories.”"

June 14, 1846: Fremont assists in Bear Flag Revolt. 

June 15, 1846: Polk signs Oregon Treaty, settling dispute with Britain

July 1846: the Mexican congress adopts a resolution for the national defense. By then U.S. occupation of New Mexico had begun and U.S. naval forces had taken strategic positions in California. 

8 August 1846: President Polk asks for an appropriation of $2 million to buy the territory in dispute, as well as California and New Mexico. When Mexico hears about Polk’s bill, the newspaper El Republicano comments that the statements made by the U.S. government were proof that the real goal was to take more territory from Mexico. A war initiated with that intent was unjust and barbarous; its promoters should be considered enemies of humanity. 

The Mexicans saw this war as a fight for their territorial integrity and their national security against the unjust territorial expansion of the United States. Mexican resistance was also a defense of Catholic and Latin culture against Anglo-Saxon Protestant war-mongers. Finally, from a legal point of view, Mexicans saw Mexico as having defended the principles of international law against a U.S. invasion, a war of conquest.

Many Americans agreed with them.

Opposition to the Mexican-American War

21 Sept 1846: First battle involving the St. Patrick's Brigade, a group of Irish-American soldiers who defected to the Mexican army, along with their artillery, because they didn't want to kill Catholics. They preferred to fight alongside their brother Catholics, defending Catholic territory against the violence and rapacious theft of America's Protestants.

Abraham Lincoln's Eight "Spot" Resolutions (Dec 22, 1847)

One: "whether the spot on which the blood of our citizens was shed, as in his messages declared, was or was not within the territory of Spain, at least after the treaty of 1819, until the Mexican revolution." 

Two: "whether that spot is or is not within the territory which was wrested from Spain by the revolutionary Government of Mexico." 

The other six resolutions extended the analysis to determine whether the territory on which the casualties occurred was ever under the government or laws of Texas or of the United States (it wasn’t).

May 25, 1846: John Quincy Adams’ speech in the House said it was waged primarily to expand slavery. John Quincy Adams will join Lincoln and fourteen other Whigs in voting against the American invasion of Mexico. Though they lost the vote in the House by a wide margin, the Senate only approved the war by a single vote.

July 23, 1846: Henry David Thoreau is jailed for refusal to pay taxes to support the war, he will write “Civil Disobedience” to explain his opposition to the American-initiated violence.

February 21, 1848:  In the act of protesting the U.S.-Mexican War, John Quincy suffered a second stroke, fell to the floor of the House and died two days later in the Capitol building.

Taking Mexico's Gold

Jan 24, 1848: James W. Marshall found gold at Sutter’s Mill, California. At this point, since no peace treaty had yet been signed, California is still technically Mexican territory.  

Feb 2, 1848: The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo is signed and ratified by both the Mexican and US governments, thus placing 55% of Mexican territory, including California and Sutter's Mill, in the hands of the United States.

April 1848: Polk petitions Congress to admit the Yucatan as a state, but Congress declines when news reaches the Congress that the Yucatan had formally rejoined Mexico.