Resident Alien

Meringues! A Tasty Bit of French Fluff in Austin, Texas

I always love coming across things that remind me of home. This reminds me of Paris, but it’s close enough. If you’ve ever been in Paris, you know there are lots of little bakeries with the most beautiful meringues and other baked goods in the windows. You just can’t walk by without buying something.

            T and I were at a great little restaurant in Austin this weekend (Picnik), and…

I often eat with one elbow on the table.

I have learned to whoop…

What Have the Dutch Ever Given Us?

I was posed a question by a troll: What have the Dutch ever given us? I found the question rather droll, Since the list is almost endless.

So, let me see. Where would we be Without Dutch imagination? Or the Lorentz ether theory? As the first capitalist nation,

It was Holland that came up with Investment banking institutions, The modern financial center, And many money-stuff solutions.

The…

My New and Improved Blogs: Yes, Plural!

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p align=”justify”>I’ve created a separate blog about fascism in America titled The Big No-No: An Outsider on American Fascism. It comes with a Facebook page. For now, titles of the emigrated posts will stay here, with links to their new homes.

I keep coming back to authoritarianism in American society and it was crowding this blog, which should focus on immigration and related issues.

Setting…

But That Was Then, This Is Now: Part 5 Black Incarceration

Image: usatoday.com

In my previous post I touched on African Americans and crime. The context was the level of ‘marriageability’ of young black men as opposed to young white men. The study What We Get Wrong About Closing the Racial Wealth Gap mentions the fact that so many young black men are incarcerated or killed as one explanation for the higher number of single-mother households among blacks.

But That Was Then, This Is Now: Part 4: The Racial Wealth Gap

Okay, so African Americans were segregated at almost every level until the Civil Rights Movement. But since then they have no excuse for being less well off, and white people haven’t done anything to hold them back since then, have they? And what about white people? Aren’t they just as badly off as poor blacks?

Well, it just so happens that several studies were recently done on the subject, on…

But That Was Then, This Is Now : Part 3 A Little Property History

(For this post I rely heavily on Ned and Constance Sublette’s eye-opeing book: The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry.)

In America, one of the main ways to build assets is through home ownership. In the previous post I already laid out the many ways government on every level, together with the housing industry, kept African Americans segregated from whites, how they…

But That Was Then, This Is Now : Part 2 Housing

Image: HousingWire.com

The first African-American disadvantage I want to address is housing, because housing determines access to education, healthcare, jobs, fresh vegetables, even.  (For an introduction, see the previous post.) A lot of white people think, or like to think, that de jure segregation, i.e. based in law — the official segregation of blacks and whites — was something of the Deep…

But That Was Then, This Is Now : Part 1 Introduction

A while ago I saw someone ask, somewhere on Facebook, “But what have whites done, since the Civil War, to prevent blacks from succeeding? Why do we owe them anything?” So I got to work, thinking I’d write a post in which I’d neatly sum up, chronologically, all the ways whites have worked to systematically exclude blacks from the American dream.

Yes, obviously slavery, before and during the Civil…

Trump’s Telephone Tangle, Untied

Image: mediamatters.org

In an interview, the interviewers generally ask questions and the interviewee answers as best he can. Here’s an analysis of Trump’s interview with Fox and friends this morning. It lasted thirty minutes.

I listened to it, and then I listened to it again, writing down the questions and any combinations of words that formed direct answers. Even then, I needed to paraphrase…

From Facebook to Flipboard: How I Avoid the Information Bubble

Image: commons.wikipedia.org

So, Facebook is in the doghouse for letting Cambridge Analytica steal information from some fifty million people. This information may then have been used to manipulate voters in the 2016 presidential election. It’s not clear at this point to what degree that has happened, but this is what’s supposedly possible: Facebook has so much information on you, from all the…

Nate Salsbury’s Slavery Spectacular

Image: newyorkhistoryblog.org

I’m reading Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire; A 500-Year History,by Kurt Anderson. He gives an inventory of all the ways in which (white) Americans have been more prone than Europeans to believe in big dreams, in get-rich-quick schemes, the supernatural, cure-alls, conspiracy theories, UFO sightings and other “alternative facts” from the beginning of white…

This Entire Fucking Country is Mentally Ill

Image: usatoday.com

So there was yet another school shooting. The eighteenth this year, I believe, and the year is only 45 days old.

Again we hear the nightmare stories of children watching and hearing their friends get murdered in the next classroom, in front of them, on top of them…

Again we see the distraught parents of murdered children and wounded children and again we watch them crying,…

Image: motherjones.com

Today’s writing prompt: Suspicious.

I recently finished reading Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Lawby James Whitman. The Germans, being the methodical bureaucrats they’ve always been, had transcripts of several of the most important meetings where the tools for the Nazi state were forged, where the Nazi ideology was translated into…

Slavery was abolished in America at the end of the Civil War, with the 13th amendment to the Constitution:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

The amendment passed Congress in January of 1865 and after much debate it finally…

Image: labdish.cshl.edu

I came across an article yesterday on Timeline.com: “The Nazi Breeding and Infanticide Program You Probably Never Knew About”. The article describes the Nazi breeding program that involved encouraging and forcing “pure Aryan” women to get pregnant from “pure Aryan” men and taking the babies to be educated by the SS, as well as the active euthanasia of “impure” babies.

Ther…

The Aldi store has come to Austin, Texas! Or rather, to Pflugerville, but that’s close enough. When I read that it was coming I was thrilled, because on the Dutch International Cookbook/Kookboek Facebook pageI regularly see posts by folks elsewhere in America and Canada showing photos of their Dutch and German finds in Aldis. Now it’s here, so today I decided to include a trip to Pflugerville in…