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Unmasking Texas

Texas is making itself a COVID superspreader with this idiocy. Why should we give them vaccines that will be wasted on them?

Because Texans are still human beings.

- A very distilled version of a Twitter discussion on Texas dropping mask requirements

This is a tough question. Obviously, Texas’ Governor Abbott is an orange cult knuckle dragger with no regard for reality. We are far too used to that from five years of the orange moron in the White House and need to fight it harder. But how much should ALL Texans suffer for their elected leadership actions?

First off, a reminder for the orange cult: we wear masks out of caring and consideration for others as well as for ourselves. Even if the mask wearer has the virus, it can prevent the person from spreading it to others. The masks are proven to greatly slow down the spread of the COVID virus, plus all of the COVID precautions meant we had almost a non-existent flu season this last winter. These things are good for everyone - that is reality - so of course, the orange cult wants nothing to do with them.

Texas’ cult-controlled leadership is ignoring reality and science in pretending the COVID epidemic is over. This is not new, but it is wrong on so many levels. It is a continuation of the policies of the previous insane president that directly killed some large fraction of a million people. No, we can’t prove how many, but we know there will be a non-zero number of unnecessary deaths directly caused by this very stupid move. The orange fake president and his cult are complicit in every U.S. COVID death ever. They now have more responsibility for Texas deaths than they do in other places because of this added stupidity.

Do the citizens of Texas deserve to share in the blame for this? They elected the freaks, so the human impulse is to blame them. The restaurant pictured at the top of this post is an example of an excellent counter-argument, though. The chain maintains its mask requirement and has been anonymously threatened in various ways because of it, but the existence of a chain of restaurants that bucks the stupidity is proof that not all Texans are complete idiots. On a personal level, I looked at their menu and found myself wishing that they would open in my area - not that we have a shortage of Mexican restaurants, but…

When I read about Abbott’s idiocy, my first thought was to relocate the two dozen people or so that actually had any brains out of Texas, close the state borders and run everyone left south into Mexico, then recolonize the state with intelligent people. The corrupt electric utilities’ collective failure to keep the lights and heat on this winter tremendously bolstered this idea. This big cleansing will never happen, and the thought was blatantly unfair to Texans in general, but the rest of the country has seen nothing but corporate global warming lies coming out of the oil patch down there. (Well, there is Ted Cruz, so I need to include human sewage as well.)

I guess I have to leave this riddle’s solution to the Texans suffering from the problem. Not that you need more stuff on your plate, what with fixing the electric grid, where first you have to fix the lack-of-governance problem that let it get that way, which that means you have to have a real government in Austin to actually govern which brings us back to the original problem of your whack-job governor where we started.

Sigh. Best of luck.