Beam Me Up, Shaun

I don’t know about you guys, but I am really looking forward to the new Star Trek movie coming out in a week. I haven’t been this excited since the last new Star Trek movie was coming out in a week, but unfortunately my high level of excitement usually only lasts about 23 minutes into the movie when it becomes apparent that it is yet another dud which falls short of Gene Roddenberry’s magnificent vision of the future. There is always hope, however, that this time will be different.

Talking about Star Trek to someone who is not a fan is like discussing the Pope with a Parsi, they probably won’t get it; but good cinema should transcend all our preconceptions. For example, the Harry Potter movies were not nearly as homo-erotic as I thought they would be and Charles Bronson’s Death Wish series turned out to be only a marginally apt metaphor for the remaining potential of his acting career. Fact is, I like a lot more movies than I dislike and I tend to give credit for making an effort, even when the results suck beyond the most cynical anticipation. That’s why I have been able to endure multiple screenings of even Star Trek V, which was as bloated and incoherent as a Michelle Bachmann speech.

Basically what I like about Star Trek is that it imagines a world where smart guys rule, the evil-doers always either come to understand the error of their ways or get disintegrated, and freaky shit happens ALL THE TIME. Gene Roddenberry imagined a future when humans had gotten past Republican negativism and straight-out adopted a technological Marxism that eschewed all that dictatorship of the proletariat crap. It is, after all, science-fiction, but it is so hopeful and so about wicked space battles that you don’t want to know if it’s intellectually flawed. I want to believe in a positive future for humankind which doesn’t involve the complete eradication of kick-ass guy stuff. In Roddenberry’s world there is no racism, sexism, botulism or baptism, and that all suits me fine.

Captain Kirk is the father I never had and almost everything I learned about being a man came right off the late 60’s TV screen. Loyalty to friends, commitment to ideals, but not so much commitment that you can’t contemplate even better ideals and you are obligated to do retarded shit that defeats the whole purpose; enjoy a good fight, even with a lizard-man, but always help your vanquished foe to his feet and give him some dilithium crystals for the voyage home, never panic, lie with a straight face when virtue is on the line, don’t judge a creature’s value by its appearance, always try diplomacy first, have fun, even when Doomsday is on your ass, and the color of woman’s skin is the most irrelevant of all considerations. Not a bad roadmap for a journey into manhood.

I will have my fat behind parked in the theater’s stadium seating on May 8th, God willing, and I will be hoping to see J.J. Abrams work his magic on my life-long companions aboard the Enterprise, but I will love every minute of it, even if it sucks, because I know not even a bad recitation of the Gettysburg Address can mask the power behind its ideas.

Ground Control to Uncle Tom

I recently had the pleasure of becoming aware of one Byron York, who is apparently the chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner, which as nearly as I can determine is a newspaper distributed free of charge to approximately 93,000 white people in northern Virginia. Mr. York is a proud graduate of the University of Alabama and wrote a book, which I have not read, titled The Vast Leftwing Conspiracy. In other words, he has a brain tumor the size of an orange, was partially strangled by the umbilical cord at birth and he wets his bed.

Mr. York has recently done an admirable job of employing simple arithmetic principles to discover that President Obama is way more popular among Black Americans than among Whites. Mr. York analyzed a recent Washington Times poll and determined that President Obama’s favorable to unfavorable ratio among self-reported “White” Americans was only 2.33 to 1, while the same analysis for self-reported “Black” Americans resulted in a calculation error since there were no Blacks with an unfavorable opinion. I can only suppose that Mr. York is trying to give comfort to his fellow NDSAP members by revealing that “real” Americans only reject their poisonous bile by a 2.33 to 1 majority. Wow, congratulations.

Now I realize that even approaching the issue of race in America can get you punched in the nose or your house burned down. People get real emotional about this stuff. I also do not believe that all self-professed Republicans or “Conservatives” are racist, but I do know that implied racism is entirely too tolerated by the segments of this society who claim to want nothing more than limited government and fiscal responsibility. Why does Mr. York care what the racial breakdown of the President’s support is? For that matter, why does the Washington Times care? It certainly isn’t because the public’s thirst for descriptive statistical data is so powerful that it must be sated by minute analysis of all possible permutations of public opinion. We probably just like to focus on our differences so we can classify, categorize and exclude. That way we get to be better than somebody, even if we pretty much suck.

I have heard the counter argument implying that I am really the racist because I expect Black Americans to continue their servile, slavish devotion to the paternalistic Democratic Party without the intellectual freedom to follow the dictates of their conscience. Like, dude, nobody cares what I think; most Black Americans have rejected the Republican Party and its “conservative” philosophy based upon a sound analytical model, and putting some Black guy with a personality disorder in charge of the RNC isn’t fooling anybody.

I was 12 years old when the public schools in my home town of Macon, Georgia were finally racially integrated. I was almost three when George Wallace stood in the door of Foster Auditorium at Mr. York’s University of Alabama. Unforgivable evil has been perpetrated in this nation in my lifetime and I am not prepared to dismiss Black Americans as somehow politically irrelevant because they happen to not have forgotten who pissed in their cornflakes. Americans are Americans; we all get to pay taxes and we all get to vote. The half of the Republican Party not working assiduously to suppress the Black vote seems to have forgotten this, which is why they will be cast upon the scrap-heap of history. Not even the Whigs will be more extinct by the middle of this century.

Bird-Brain Flu

I can say, completely without irony, that the chickens will always come home to roost. That is in fact what chickens do. Some inferential statistical analysis of the empirical data on chickens will indicate a strong correlation between the state of being a chicken and the act of coming home to roost. The problem is that objective, scientifically valid data is hard to come by these days. I’m not going to spend the hours necessary to recount the bizarre war on science that has been raging for the past 250,000 years, most recently no longer the province solely of the Church, but led in fact from the basement of the White House in the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the recently disposed Bush Administration. Now in case you are about to forward on to the next blog instead of reading more of my fanatical, irrationally obsessive hatred of Republican idiocy, take heart; I am going to denigrate a bunch of other people too.

Actually, it is pretty simple. My thesis is that denying science and being driven by preconceptions and arbitrary religious limitations on thought are unpatriotic, even treasonous. America continues to suffer the schizoid contradiction of being fascinated with, and addicted to, new technologies, while at the same time being largely scientifically illiterate and deeply suspicious of the scientific process. In my opinion, the logical consequence of this denial of reason is the United States ultimately being surpassed in economic, political and military power by a host of other nations. While we are debating which line of stem cells may be used for Federally funded research, mad scientists in other nations are cloning humans in order to create an army of undead warriors with super-human strength and no conscience; we need in on some of that action because the College Republicans do not have super-human strength.

Sarah Palin and her witch-hunting pastor are respected as defenders of American virtue by a significant minority of the American people and substantial elements of the American public think that “Intelligent Design” should be afforded the same scientific respect that the concept of evolution by natural selection is given in America’s classrooms. What is lost here is that chicken bones and rosaries will not protect us from the Chinese death ray or North Korea’s Kung Fusion bomb. When the Russians perfect time travel and go back and change all of Barrack Obama’s high school grades, we’re going to be pretty much screwed.

We rule the world because we have invisible airplanes and can see what number Bin Laden dials on his cell phone from our orbiting satellites. We have remotely piloted, missile launching drones, can simultaneously monitor all the world’s communications looking for key phrases like” the bomb I just planted at 12th Avenue and West 57th Street will detonate in 12 minutes”, and have gun sights that can see through concrete to find the soon to be dead inhabitants inside.

We are powerful because we understand how the world really works. Religious faith can be a wonderful thing, but God certainly did not stuff this massive computer into our craniums solely to absorb the vibrations from healing crystals. So here it is, there is no Bigfoot. Aliens do not visit Earth. The Earth is getting warmer and it is likely primarily the result of man’s actions. Evolution is a real natural process that resulted in, among other things, our existence. Fortunetellers are frauds; the Loch Ness Monster is a tourist scam, and ghosts are the result of misinterpretations of events and over-active imaginations. There is no nation-wide conspiracy of Satan-worshipers sacrificing babies; Oswald killed Kennedy all by himself; and the World Trade Center was destroyed by several homicidal Arab gentlemen who hijacked passenger jets and rammed them into the buildings.

Knowledge is power; power is control; and control is survival. Survival is good. Being technologically inferior is bad. If you don’t want to fund volcano monitoring or prepare for flu pandemics, then you want people to die needlessly. If you hate science, you hate America. If you don’t want us to know and understand more about everything than the rest of the world does, you’re a traitor giving comfort to the enemy. If you are against basic scientific research or think scientific research must be subordinate to religious principles, you are responsible for the destruction of this nation. It’s no accident that Captain Kirk speaks English. It’s that simple. So there,

You're Not My Father

And one more thing. Our former Vice President, to whom I shall refer as “Darth Sidious” in order to avoid any confusion with Al Gore or Henry Wallace, has claimed that “enhanced interrogation methods” saved many American lives. By the way, Wallace, who was Roosevelt’s second Vice-President (the one right before the one who nuked Japan), with great prescience in1944 defined an “American Fascist” as ‘one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings’. Sound like anyone we know?

Now back to the Dark Lord Cheney. I have very little confidence in Vice-President Sidious’ claims that stuffing wet socks in people’s mouths results in accurate representations of closely held secrets, but let us accept for the sake of argument that this is correct. In fact let us suppose that torture is one hundred percent effective in eliciting the complete truth from anyone to whom it is applied. Let us extrapolate the implications of this.

All the lie-detector operators will be out of work. If we just torture anyone we suspect of having committed, or having knowledge of, a crime, case closed. We won’t have to wonder which one of our teenage children took the twenty out of the dresser drawer, just apply the electrodes and mystery revealed. If you suspect your spouse of infidelity, break out the manacles and get busy. In fact, we could figure out if somebody was just thinking about doing something evil by a regular program of random torture.

Now some of you are saying, “Quit being so melodramatic! Nobody is talking about torturing law-abiding Americans”. Well, nobody is talking about it now, but we really don’t know who the Bush Administration snatched off the street and sent to Romania to be “interrogated”. We do, however, know that the typical evolution in a society is characterized by the slow erosion of freedom as the government claims the necessity to exercise ever more power in order to preserve peace and safety. Ever heard of the Weimar Republic? Know anything about the French Revolution? Have any knowledge of the early history of the Soviet Union?

I am simply saying that I would rather accept the threat of random violence from detestable losers like Al-Qaeda than accept that my government’s powers are not limited and that any President can unilaterally decide what is legal and what is moral. I don’t believe that Darth Cheney is correct, but yes, we might have been momentarily safer by violating every principle we hold dear, but as Mathew asks, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

Cold Truths

I have to apologize to the one person other than myself who actually reads this blog, but I simply cannot refrain from further commentary on the unforgivable abuses of power perpetrated by the immediately preceding Presidential administration. Many of my friends, and almost all of the people that don’t like me, say, “just get over it!” But I can’t, mainly because I don’t want to, and I’ll tell you why.

I was in the United States Army for a few years back in the late 70’s and spent almost three years in (then) West Germany. I cannot honestly say that I joined in a fit of patriotism, but I have always been something of a flag-waver, and I have come to look back on my days of service with great pride; perhaps more pride than is warranted by my actual contribution to national security, but it’s still probably the most truly useful thing I have ever done. During my time in the Army, I was fortunate enough never to have had to shoot anyone, or to be shot at; in fact, the closest I ever came to combat was a bar brawl in Helmstedt, but I did my part to protect Europe against Communist aggression.

A lot of that part involved guarding the motor pool against Bolshevik infiltration at 3:00 AM on many a January morning when the temperatures were well below zero Fahrenheit. I guarded those jeeps, half-ton trucks and deuce-and-a-half’s as if they were my mother’s honor, and no Trotskyite scum was going to get so much as a lug nut while I was on the job. I was bored and cold and tired and wished to be virtually anywhere else, but I really believed in what I was doing. At the advanced age of 18, I had determined that the Soviet Union was a morally bankrupt empire run by a cabal of bitter, cynical old men who didn’t dig Ted Nugent. On that point, time has almost certainly proven me correct.

What I and my fellow soldiers were not doing there out in the cold was protecting the right of a US President to declare someone an Enemy of the State and imprison them indefinitely without trial. What we were not doing was supporting the right of the US government to eavesdrop on the American people’s phone conversations. And we were most certainly not trudging around freezing our asses off to ensure the right of the CIA to violate law and common decency by brutalizing terror suspects, no matter how heinous their suspected crimes. We were not there to promote the ideology of the soulless misanthropes that lurked across the border conspiring to pollute our bodily fluids. We were the good guys and we were there to preserve life, love and the right to party, and if any bed-wetting Commies dared so much as to harm one hair on the head of our German friends they were going to be popped with an industrial-strength can of furious whoop-ass as can only be administered by fearless heroes hopped up on liberty and Led Zeppelin. And Ivan didn’t want any part of that shit.

Turns out, Ivan really didn’t want any, and the Soviet Empire evaporated like the desert dew under the weight of Ronald Reagan’s incurable optimism and massive defense spending. And then came Bush and Clinton and another Bush and then tragedy. And even a soft, diabetic semi-centenarian like me was ready to go back out and guard the motor pool of freedom against the despicable rat-turds that had so callously killed and maimed so many men, women and children who were simply going about their daily routines minding their own business. I was just as worked up as everybody else was and wanted somebody to pay, pronto.

Then came the Patriot Act and the sidetracked ignoramus adventure in Iraq. And then came Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and doubt and confusion and anger. And now we have torture being defended by former Vice President Count Dracula and vile, hydrocephalic Republican Congressmen. As I recall, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When we say that truths are self-evident, we mean they are not debatable by reasonable people; we are saying that if you don’t understand these truths, you are a moron. We don’t say they are self-evident unless they are inconvenient; we don’t say they are self-evident unless obscured by threat. We just say, this is the way it is, bro; deal with it. And “all men” means, I suspect, all men. Not just white men who drive luxury imports, not just good Christians who bath regularly, not just people who love America, but every last man (person) on the planet. If God endowed the rights, I know damn well George W. Bush ain’t authorized to rescind them.

There was also some other deal I read about excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. Now some people may argue that water boarding is not cruel, and perhaps not unusual, but I can’t buy that. The guys that were guarding that motor pool with me would never have allowed that kind of crap to happen on their watch. If you were a Commie, they would have blown your head off your shoulders if necessary, but when the fight was over they would have given you a cigarette and some water and told you to sit down and be still or they would blow your head off your shoulders. And I’m not prepared to accept that the Constitution is just another set of statutes and that if you aren’t in Des Moines it doesn’t apply. Our Constitution is more than rules of procedure; it is a statement of principles, the logistical articulation of those truths which we hold to be self evident. It is not negotiable, not fungible, and not violable. It cannot be dispensed with when times are tough or enemies abound, and it can’t be reasoned around by disingenuous self-interested power seekers attempting to frighten the public into surrendering the rights I froze my ass off to protect.

Boson Buddies

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) sputtered to life for the first time on September 10, 2008, deep beneath the Swiss countryside near Geneva, smashing protons into each other with considerable violence in the hopes of producing some instructive debris (as a complete aside, the LHC is not to be confused with the Chrysler LHS, which is no longer in production, but which was also sometimes smashed into things with considerable violence). Unfortunately, there was a loud “clank” on September 19, 2008 and the LHC ceased to function due to electrical problems with some humongous magnets that resulted in six tons of liquid helium gushing all over the place. This failure occurred well before any meaningful experimentation could be conducted, so the universe has preserved its secrets until at least September of 2009, when repairs are expected to be completed.

But what exactly are these secrets? And why have the collected nations of the world invested so much money in liquid helium in order to ferret them out? Actually, I’m merely a City Planner and I have no real understanding of high-energy physics, but I have read a few interesting things on the Internet. The LHC was constructed primarily to search for the Higgs boson, a theoretical sub-atomic particle which (theoretically) gives mass to other particles. It is the vanilla fudge of the Quantum world, packing the pounds onto an otherwise waifish assortment of quarks, muons and anti-neutrinos. It is also thought that the energies achievable by the LHC will allow insight into other freakish notions like extra dimensions, dark matter and electroweak symmetry breaking (don’t ask). The potential value of this knowledge depends on whether you ask a scientist or an accountant, but the theory is that solving these fundamental mysteries will lead to even more fundamental mysteries to solve. The physicists don’t really know if they will actually even learn a damn thing from their 4.5 billion dollar gadget, but that’s how they roll.

The thing that I wonder about is not whether the average human (or the above average Republican) has the innate intelligence to begin to understand the obtuse concepts and wacky musings of these lonely geniuses, but rather, what’s the use of smashing tiny, tiny little things together in order to maybe learn stuff that may, or may not, be of any practical value? Why aren’t all those Poindexters out using that brain power to do stuff we know is achievable, like turning cats into gasoline or finding a cure for stigmata?

Sadly, we may never know. But perhaps they figure if we smash enough stuff together we can peep up under God’s skirt and get a full frontal gander at the source of creation. Perhaps they think that the pursuit of knowledge is valuable in, and of, itself. Perhaps they hope we will learn that Large Hadron Colliders are way cooler than stealth bombers and binary chemical weapons and that tiny little explosions are substantially more adorable than big ones. Maybe they hope we will all discover that if we make smashing sub-atomic particles together our priority, bigger things may need to be smashed less often. Maybe they think that if we spend enough time and enough effort chasing impossible phantoms, perhaps we will catch one.

Planet Terror

I’m tempted to keep ranting about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and the other stalwart patriots who so skillfully protected us against the horrors of a nuclear-armed Iraq, but even I grow weary of raking through the same fetid muck of amoral arrogance that has so stained our national character. Sometimes moving on is the only healthy thing to do. So, let us move on…

…to Zombies!

WHAT ARE THE TOP TEN ZOMBIE MOVIES OF ALL TIME?!

Like so many things, this one has been done to death (pause for groans), but it’s only my opinion, after all. The caveat is that the movie can only be on the list if I have seen it; the good news is, I have seen a few. It should be noted that I do not consider voodoo zombies to be real zombies and zombies that are not actually the living dead, but rather only infected with the holy ghost or some other such tragic condition, are only begrudgingly included, no matter how entertaining they may be. Also note that movies staring actors with the emotional range of zombies, such as Keanu Reeves, are not eligible for the list.

10) Land of the Dead – Dennis Hopper and zombies. Nuff said.

9) Zombie – It’s Italian and has a shark fighting a zombie. It has to be good.

8) Dawn of the Dead (Remake) – A guy with a gun shop shoots a zombie that looks like Jay Leno. Hard not to like that.

7) Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things – Disturbing in a tacky 1970’s sort of way. Also, great parenting advice.

6) Re-Animator – H. P. Lovecraft and the living dead. Two great tastes that taste great together.

5) 28 Days Later – Not real zombies, but great soundtrack. Nothing like Slumdog Millionaire.

4) Fido – Andrew Wyeth meets George Romero. And the mean kids get what’s coming to them.

3) Dead Alive – Peter Jackson’s finest movie, maybe.

2) Shaun of the Dead – The heroic struggles of the forgotten everyman against the arbitrary and capricious nature of existence. Also, zombies play video games.

1) Night of the Living Dead – Still the king in the way that Aaron is still the king; it may have been surpassed in the record books, but it is sincere, honest and decent, everything we look for in a zombie flick. They’re coming to get you Barbara.

Bode's Law

Scientists at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science Conference in Hatfield England , which is just north of London , have announced the discovery of an earth-sized planet closely orbiting a star 200 trillion kilometers away out in space somewhere. It is speculated that the surface of the planet is too hot to support human life, which equates to just about as hot as Salma Hayeks’s role as the vampire stripper Santanico Pandemonium in “From Dusk Till Dawn”. It orbits its red dwarf host in approximately 3.15 days, which would make Madonna approximately 5781 years old if she were from that part of the galaxy, which seems about right in light of recent photos. The significance of this discovery is that it is one of the smallest planets yet identified outside of our solar system, and astronomers speculate that as search techniques become more sophisticated, a greater number of earth-sized and even earth-like planets will be discovered, dramatically increasing the apparent probability of earth-like conditions and, like, earth-like life.

As is usually the case, as our knowledge of the facts increases, many preconceptions fade and new paradigms emerge. The possibility of an incredible diversity of environments and forms of life on these thousands and millions of planets throughout the universe gives rise to much speculation on the appearance and behavior of these potential extraterrestrial denizens. I myself have speculated on these possibilities and offer a few exoplanet scenarios:

The Rush Limbaugh Planet

This planet is characterized by a methane and cigar smoke atmosphere. The entire planet is off its axis and wobbles such that its inhabitants have difficulty distinguishing between up and down. The primary form of life is an enormous, gas-filled bladder which can heat its internal gas by vigorous motion of its over-sized mandibles, giving it buoyancy to float above and attract the attention of the lesser life forms, which resemble sheep with under-developed cerebral cortices.

Planet Jiuliani IV

The atmosphere is comprised entirely of nitrous oxide. The planet spins so fast that Jiuliani's star rises and sets very quickly. The most prevalent life form pair-bonds numerous times during its life and even mates with its close genetic relatives. Males of the species may intermittently take on female form, but the adaptive value of this behavior is unknown. The species is also known to undergo other chameleon-like changes, depending on the political environment.

Planet of the Apes

This planet is self explanatory.

The Planet of Cheap Hookers

This planet is patronized chiefly by Senators from Louisiana.

Planet Hollywood

This planet is uninhabited and strewn with useless memorabilia from many over-rated action movies.

Forbidden Planet

This planet is populated by monsters from the id and serves principally as an allegorical commentary on the dangers associated with man's rapid technological advancement, especially as it relates to the application of new technologies to weapons development. The existence of this planet begs the question of whether the human species has the wisdom and emotional maturity to control and peacefully employ its technological power, or whether we will be destroyed by our own growing insight into the fundamental forces of nature.

Shoe Planet

Has many pairs of shoes at very reasonable prices.

Always Be Sincere, Whether You Mean It of Not

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoXgRtDysLY

We Have Ways of Making You Talk

Apparently our Central Intelligence Agency stuffed a wet towel up Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s nose just short of 200 times in an effort to get him to divulge further secret plots against America . I wonder whether it was the twelfth or twenty-fifth time when the Shaikh sort of figured out they weren’t going to actually drown him. Perhaps the last 100 times were just an effort to let him know we were serious in our desire to be kept up to date on Osama’s psychopathic and delusional hatred of modernity. We certainly were not seeking the secrets of the Shaikh’s hair care regimen. I would never suggest that anyone working on behalf of our national security would indulge in petty sadism and I’m sure our interrogators were all happy, well adjusted individuals who revere constitutional principles and Judeo-Christian ethics, but for my part they can forego the fraternity initiation rituals and stick to proven investigatory techniques.

Speaking of proven investigatory techniques, the news media report that we also put one of our Al-Qaeda guests in a box with an insect in order to elicit the kind of discomfort that results in comprehensive truthfulness. The reports don’t say what sort of insect it was, and the average journalist is highly unlikely to be able to distinguish an arachnid or a myriapod from an insect, but the whole idea strikes me as somewhat comic. I can just envision a bunch of Jihadis hunkered down in their dank, viper and scorpion infested cave while a Predator drone loiters overhead. Achmed says to Abdul, “We must abandon Jihad and return to agrarian subsistence; else wise the infidel Americans will put us in a box with a very scary bug”.

So what has happened to our mighty nation and our inviolable principles? How have a handful of deluded sociopaths (Al-Qaeda, not the RNC) frightened us so much that we no longer know how to behave like civilized people? It scares me to imagine what sort of nonsense we might stoop to if we were faced with a persistent, effective threat. I’m not certain about some of my fellow citizens, but I would prefer to live in a nation where being a scum-bag is not considered essential to national security..

Hoorah for Texas, Sort Of

Why does the media keep referring to former President George W. Bush’s foreign policy as “Cowboy Diplomacy”? What did cowboys ever do to deserve such a derogatory association? I can only imagine that most cowboys are hard-working, decent people who respect the law and secretly admire at least the cinematography in Brokeback Mountain, not crazed egomaniacs with messiah complexes. I do feel sort of bad for the cows, but not bad enough to stay out of McDonald’s.

Ironic, Isn't It?

Who would have ever guessed that Charles Barkley would emerge as one of the most intellectually substantive public figures of the early 21st Century?

Stay With Us Henry

Really, it was not a cheap shot at Texas. They elected the douche-bag Governor. I just have trouble fathoming the bile being spewed because somebody wants to have energy efficiency, rule of law and decent relations with the rest of the planet.

Get Lost Texas

I am not a mathematician, but it must be possible to derive the net change to the nation's average IQ should Texas secede from the Union. I will bet a few dollars that it would go up.