General News

THE PRICE OF THE ALAMO

We recently saw the Alamo in our visit to Texas. The Alamo is a storied place in American history. It is where a band of American settlers in Mexican Texas refused to surrender when besieged by a larger Mexican force. They fought to the death.

Despite the place of the Alamo in American history the battle there wasn't about America. Texas was one of several regions of Mexico that attempted to break away at the time. It was about Texas becoming an independent republic. It would be years before it became part of America. Mexico had allowed Americans to settle in sparsely-populated Texas in an effort to counterbalance hostile native Indian tribes.

But there is a price to pay for glamorizing the seige of the Alamo. 

Armed standoffs, by either a group or an individual, have a prominent place in American history. If you do a web search for "standoffs" it will display the most recent ones. A search for "list of standoffs" will show the many prominent standoffs of recent decades.

All of these standoffs have an element of being a reenactment of the Alamo.

BLUE DENIM

Denim became popular in America's Old West. The West began to be settled, on a large scale, after the end of America's Civil War, in 1865. The Civil War was won by the Union, against the Confederacy. 

Is it just a coincidence that the blue of denim is exactly the same color as the army uniforms of the victorious Union? Would denim be gray if the Confederacy had won?

POLITICS AND SPACE EXPLORATION

The use of feats of space exploration for political purposes is nothing new. A prominent part of the Cold War was the Space Race. What about India's space program? Was it a coincidence that the mission to Mars arrived just as Xi Jinping was visiting New Delhi? And now the mission to the moon has arrived just as the most important BRICS conference ever is beginning.