A new kind of "shit I did not say". This is a compliment I will never share with the person it is about.

D, I think of a garter snake every time we are together. Garter snakes are one of my favorite creatures. They are lovely, graceful, lively, fierce, clever, energetic, and their enemies are usually pests that are dangerous to the humans.

It is a real compliment, but I'm not sure D would take it as such.

I think that's a fairly awesome compliment, but then again, we 'ffistas hang with Billytea.

I added, "And screwed most of the Mexican landowners out of their land."

So what? Mexico's claim on California doesn't stand on any high moral ground. It was a huge series of oligarchies, derived from obscene land grants and the slaving system of the Missions. It only lasted about 25 years. So fuck 'em. They lost the war.

Though I'm reminded of the conversation I had with my Mexican-American boss whose family came from Texas. When I asked her when they emigrated to the States, she snipped, "We didn't. The U.S. colonized our part of Mexico."

I'm thinking there are extremely few current countries in the world that built on land not previously occupied by someone.

I'm thinking there are extremely few current countries in the world that built on land not previously occupied by someone.

This was Spike's argument in Pangs.

Probably none. People have been screwing each other for so long now.

Mexico losing the war meant that the Mexican government lost the right to govern the land, not the private property owners lost the right to the land that they owned within the territory. And the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was supposed to guarantee that.

Did the US ever actually keep to the terms of ANY treaty involving land out west?

Did the US ever actually keep to the terms of ANY treaty involving land out west?

I think we did actually pay for the Louisiana Purchase and Alaska.

We paid for California too. Of course, they struck gold two years later, so it was a bargain.

Why would we do that?

Treaties are to end the war. If it cuts into profits, well, why honor when the war is over anyway?

I'm reading more about Mexican history now. So they declared a Mexican Empire, then basically started recruiting among the noble houses of Europe to find an emperor? And an Austrian guy got the job? Then he and his wife adopted the grandsons of the guy who had briefly been emperor a few decades earlier, the previous time they tried declaring a Mexican Empire. And even though neither of these people was actually emperor for very long, there are still pretenders to the throne, a guy who can say that, if the Mexican Empire is ever restored, he's the emperor. The current pretender is named Maximiliano Gustav Richard Albrecht Agustin von Götzen-Itúrbide, and he was born in Romania and lives in Australia.

(I'm kind of fascinated by people who still keep track of who should be heir to a throne that hasn't existed for generations. When my family was in Italy, we went to a restaurant owned by some Hapsburgs. One of them told us all about the places that he should be prince of.)