Ex uno, plures

6 of the 11 rural counties in Colorado have voted not to secede and try to form a 51st state. My thinking is, why would we want them? If they want to secede, go for it, but don't expect help from the rest of us. If we are going to have a 51st state, I'd request Puerto Rico, or Cuba, or Japan, which have a lot more to offer us than those 11 counties. All but 1 is in Northeast Colorado. Since I like maps, here's something interesting:

And then the Niobrara oil basin of fracking opportunities:

Coincidence? Doubt it, because I've been to that part of the nation, and the atmosphere is not so much oxygen as cow shit, and there's not much there otherwise.

My guess is, given the increasing centripetal forces towards Balkanization, America's epitaph will be "Ex uno, plures", and honestly, if it happens, good riddance. Too many dumb shit-covered - proudly shit-covered - rednecks anyway. Best that we just wither up and get stupid and die. It'll start with Texas, given they've used up all their groundwater on fracking, and we water-rich denizens of the Great lakes will just point at them and laugh. (Provided, of course, we are not so stupid to sell our water rights to the oil companies, which, according to the map, oops!)

But anyway, when Balkanization comes, learn Spanish, Texans, Mexico may be your only hope.

Other things. Why are so many of the world's foremost intellectuals such... dumbasses? Richard Dawkins, called by some (not by me) the world's foremost intellectual, can't seem to go a few months without publicly shitting his pants on Twitter. For that matter, he has given us some of the more embarrassing intellectual pant-shitting events. Should we start with memes? The concept of meme is as useful as phlogiston, the liquid calorific, animal spirits, the aether, and the vital pirinciple. (Actually, phlogiston, etc. is more useful in that they have been found to be null hypotheses which, by being abandoned as invalid, advanced our understanding. But memes, so ambiguously and mercurially defined, have yet to be proved to exist. Actually, I do think memes exist, provided we precisely define them as any noise-riddled little piece of turd fragment that can be brainlessly, mindlessly copied from idiot to idiot on the Internet.

Then there's Dawkin's dishonesty about the God Delusion. First off all, pampered little dude, at this stage in our evolution, EVERYONE is deluded. Poking fun at a concept that most anyone beyond the age of eight has rejected is not exactly courageous or praiseworthy behavior. Maybe if you stuffed a little straw in that strawman it might appear more ominous, but... Secondly, the 20th century gave us LOTS of examples that religion is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the vast majority of bad behaviors. In fact, if we go by the numbers, atheists killed more people in the 20th century than the faithful!

As far the existence or non-existence of God is concerned, Dawkins is painfully dishonest. (Me, I belong to the "don't know, don't care' school of agnosticism, with the caveat that those universal constants sure do seem to be dialed in real tight to get our kind of Universe, not that that matters much, but...). Look, the statement "God does not exist" is a positive logical assertion, subject to the same burden of proof that deists labor under. Trying to weasel out by calling it a "null hypothesis" is a weasel rationalization. The luminiferous aether, the medium through which light waves wave is a null hypothesis. Eliminating it from the model of electromagnetic radiation is NOT the same as proving it's nonexistence. The Michaelson-Morley experiment proves the nonexistence of the aether.

And since no logical argument or empirical observation can definitively prove or disprove the existence of God, atheists rely upon faith in their disbelief. So, don't give me any of shit about your superior intellectual or moral stance. It isn't there, and to insist so is either stupid or dishonest, you jerk.

Do I really need to go off on Pinker, Diamond, Ferguson, etc. ? Dishonest? Attention whores? I mean, we as a species have barely been around long enough to get a handle on the universe, and our most effective tool (science and mathematics) is still in the toddler toy stage. This is not argument from ignorance, it's a statement of fact. And so I... evaluate, oh my yes!.... and reject most of this public meat-slapping passing off as intellectual discourse.