Texas Progressives

Off the Kuff is all over redistricting. 

Related? Will the Texas GOP win its gamble that it can continue to run strong with Hispanics?

SocraticGadfly notes new climate modeling that says Southwestern drought will likely last the rest of this century. Having already noted that a drying Rio Grande won't fix itself means that US-Mexico water treaties, as well as Texas-New Mexico interstate compacts, are null and void by the laws of nature.

Sid Miller may have a hankering for ganja puffs as well as Jeebus shots.

One of the big failures of Charles Perry's big beautiful water constitutional amendment is that it has no provisions to stop the likes of Kyle Bass pumping the hell out of groundwater then shipping it hundreds of miles.

Greg Abbott's veto of a bill that could have protected Dripping Springs is a poster child not only for his anti-environmentalism, but the Lege's failure this spring to pass a constitutional amendment that would have created either a special session, or time at the start of the next regular one, for veto overrides.

The Lege is eyeing further attempts to strangulate local governments on property taxes.

But youth camp safety (to the degree the Lege would protect kids from rich camp owners anyway, per my piece on the Kerrville floods) will likely get screwed. (The Texas Living Waters Project a;so looks at the state of flood response in the special session.)

RIP Flaco Jimenez.

The International Court of Justice has ruled nations have an obligation to address climate change. I'm sure the next Democrap prez will ignore that just as much as Trump. After all, the Paris accords are voluntary, toothless Jell-O due to two people: Xi Jinping and ... Dear Leader.

Neil at Houston Democracy Project says Texas Democratic Party electeds & rank and file must find path to common course similar to what happened in South Korea last year when martial law was declared.

The TSTA Blog worries about the end to desegregation enforcement in public education. City of Yes would like for cities to be built for both children and dogs.

The Barbed Wire teases Love is Blind: Austin, which we're sure will be totally normal and generate no discourse at all.

The Dallas Observer finds a local case of ICE coming for a Trump supporter who surely wasn't expecting it.

Texas 2036 has concerns about ditching the STAAR test.

Olivia Julianna gives Dems permission to be ruthless.

Sorry again, Joe Costello, and again — part 2

I'm riffing on part 1 of how I said he was wrong about "republic vs democracy," as he's now entered not one but two pieces about the rise of political parties.

In part one, he's generally right about the development and emergence of modern political parties in Britain, the United States and France, and largely right about their co-option in part two. 

But, he's wrong as rain about this being a modern phenomenon. The Blues, Greens, Reds and Whites of Byzantine times were quasi-political, especially the first two. 

The Guelphs and Ghibellines in the Holy Roman Empire, then the split into White and Black Guelphs? These were also quasi-political, if not fully so. And, they were organized in a party way.

Again, Costello knows better, or should. 

Update, Oct. 7, 2025: A "nice" short piece about Chicago vs ICE, but ... I guess you don't care about Gaza. 

Hiroshima 80 years on

Cue the knee-jerk reactions from non-skeptical leftists who won't read, or knee-jerk reject the findings of, Richard Frank's "Downfall", Marc Gallicchio's "Unconditional," and A.M. Giangreco's "Truman and the Bomb."

 See expanded thoughts on the first, and somewhat the second, books here. 

Per all three, I don't like the use of the bomb, not just once, but also the second time at Nagasaki, but embrace it as the least bad option in terms of lessening not just U.S. deaths, but allied deaths and even Japanese deaths. (A tight sea blockade of another six months would have killed far more Japanese by starvation, not to mention ongoing non-nuclear bombing, etc.)

I have broad related thoughts here on the 70th anniversary. I talk here about rejecting the idea of "justified" vs "unjustified."

I note here that, no, Russia didn't cause the surrender.

Let us quote Hirohito’s Imperial rescript, at that link.

Despite the best that has been done by everyone – the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of Our servants of the State, and the devoted service of Our one hundred million people – the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.

Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.

One can try to read the Russian invasion of Manchuria into the end of the first paragraph, the “general trends of the world have turned against her interest.”

But, it’s still secondary to the second paragraph.

It’s also hypocritical as hell in the last sentence of the second paragraph, Hirohito’s claim to claim that he was surrendering Japan to prevent “the total extinction of human civilization.

Per “Unconditional,” let us quote the end of that rescript.

“Seeing that the situation had developed not necessarily to his advantage, Hirohito finally relented.”

That’s what we faced.

Don’t let the non-skeptical leftists continue to pull the wool over your eyes.

One can dislike US imperialism and dislike the former Japanese imperialism far more at the same time.

And, since the 75th anniversary post, I've read Bucky Sheftall's "Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses" and was not that impressed. 

==

Companion piece: No, Nagasaki did not directly lead to or contribute to the division of Korea.

LibreWolf: Issues so far

Yes, it runs faster than Firefox, and it doesn't "phone Google."

 That means two things.

One: Things like highway route numbers don't render on Google Maps. So, you have to use something else.

Two: Google Images does not work AT ALL. 

There's some lesser issues, but those are the biggies. 

==

Update: It doesn't like Bing or Yandex on their reverse image lookup any more than Google. I don't know who "backbones" Yandex, but I assume, like the search engine itself, it's Bing and thus ultimately Microslob on Bing.

Also? Won't let me copy-paste something out of a Word document into Goodreads. (I'll check on that again, by accident if nothing else, in the near future.) I can type in the review box, but can't paste anything there. Is this because Goodreads is Amazon? Unknown. 

Alt-history: Nixon chooses a different Veep in 1973

Per Jeff Toobin's solid "The Pardon," Richard Nixon had several alternatives to replace Spiro Agnew in 1973.

Other than eventual choice Jerry Ford, John Connally, whom Nixon had almost considered in 1972, was atop that list as Nixon's personal preference. Connally seemed to have awe-stunned Nixon the same way JFK did. But, as Toobin noted, the tip of the milk price support scandal was already popping up in early fall 1973.

The others were St. Ronald of Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller. Politically antagonistic, though not so much personally, both would have posed problems for possibly splitting the party. Per my piece a week ago, 10 months later, Ford seems not to have taken notice.

Speaking of that political piece? What if Dick Nixon chooses Shrub Bush? He probably would not have faced much more confirmation problem than Ford. Like Ford, Nixon probably would have regarded him as a lightweight. 

Abandon hope and abandon the Desert Southwest while you still can — if you can

 Expect the water behind Glen Canyon Dam to become even scarcer, and the red rocks surrounding that, even hotter,  in years and decades to come. (Author photo.)

Via Inside Climate News, a new study from The University of Texas says that the recent ongoing drought in the Southwest is likely to last THROUGH 2100.

That is far longer than the drought that drove the Anasazi from the land 700 years ago.

The lead graphs deserve an extended quote:

The drought in the Southwestern U.S. is likely to last for the rest of the 21st century and potentially beyond as global warming shifts the distribution of heat in the Pacific Ocean, according to a study published last week led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Using sediment cores collected in the Rocky Mountains, paleoclimatology records and climate models, the researchers found warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions can alter patterns of atmospheric and marine heat in the North Pacific Ocean in a way resembling what’s known as the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), fluctuations in sea surface temperatures that result in decreased winter precipitation in the American Southwest. But in this case, the phenomenon can last far longer than the usual 30-year cycle of the PDO 

“If the sea surface temperature patterns in the North Pacific were just the result of processes related to stochastic [random] variability in the past decade or two, we would have just been extremely unlucky, like a really bad roll of the dice,” said Victoria Todd, the lead author of the study and a Ph.D student in geosciences at UT Austin. “But if, as we hypothesize, this is a forced change in the sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific, this will be sustained into the future, and we need to start looking at this as a shift, instead of just the result of bad luck.”

The story goes on to say:

“Planners need to consider that this drought, these reductions in winter precipitation, are likely to continue, and plan for that,” said Tim Shanahan, an associate professor at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences and co-author of the study.

Yeah, that's not happening until, per Max Planck, an old generation of planners (and politicians in general) all die. 

But wait, it gets worse:

The study also revealed that current climate models are underestimating drought conditions, Todd and Shanahan said, and they hope to find better ways to approximate aridity going forward.

So, it's even worse than we have thought. 

I said that instead of HARP and HAMP in the The Great Recession, Dear Leader should have paid new moves with underwater loans to leave Phoenix and Las Vegas and never come back. And, to prevent realtors, developers and mortgage brokers from getting federal guarantees on new mortgages until all the old houses were sold, at a minimum.

Update, Aug. 13: Yale Climate Connections reports on a Nature study on the PDO that largely mirrors the one above. It also notes this issue is making El Niño effects and predictions tougher to determine.

Update, Aug. 20: Aridzona mayors, all surely eyeing the rooftops of development, have their greedy paws out for "their" portion of river water, while not asking their legislature to fix the four-lot development loophole on water supply, and also inviting ZERO leaders of Indian tribes in Aridzona to their "poor us" confab. 

This nation, once again, is so fucking screwed.