Don't Implausibly Mess With Texas

You've probably heard about what's come out of Texas lately. If you haven't, well, you're in for a hell of a trip to the other side of the looking glass. In recent television and radio interviews, Lubbock County Judge Tom Head--who, despite his title, is in fact the county's chief executive--attempted to justify the tax increase his government is trying to levy by saying that it's necessary to properly equip Lubbock County's law enforcement personnel so they can resist a United Nations invasion.

Let that one just sink in for a minute.

Fear of the United Nations has a long provenance in certain parts of the United States. I really have difficulty understanding why. If the United States had, say, turned over its nuclear weapons to the organization in 1946 to give it the necessary teeth to enforce world peace, as people such as Robert Heinlein advocated at the time, it would make sense--after all, I mean, when words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS they're not quite as easy to ignore. But words are all the United Nations is about. It's the biggest debating society on the planet. So, instead, it seems that much of the anti-UN fear has coalesced around the concept of the UN leading a "one world government" charge in line with some Biblical prophecy of the End Times or another.

Fear because if President Obama gets re-elected, he's going to surrender American sovereignty to the United Nations and become a dictator, even though I always thought that in order to be a dictator of something you had to retain sovereignty over it. Maybe he means that Obama would instead become the dictatorial viceroy, like the Vice President in Metal Wolf Chaos. Sure, that would trigger civil war, and so Obama would call in the UN troops. Yes, the 124,000 UN peacekeeping troops, significant chunks of which are provided by such cutting-edge military powerhouses as Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Senegal. I can certainly see such a force making progress in a country where there's a rifle behind every blade of grass.

But he's serious. Judge Head wants to keep the UN invaders out of Lubbock County, and so his brilliant plan to defend American liberty is to "[stand] in front of their personnel carriers and say, 'You're not coming in here.'"

Yeah, I think the gas pedal over here has something to say about that.

There's a certain amount of doublethink that's necessary for people who think like this. First off, there's the simple fact that the United States is a juggernaut, commanding the single most powerful military force that has ever existed. Yet, nevertheless, it must also be vulnerable. How? Well, that's the crux of it, isn't it? The new Red Dawn had to give its North Korean invaders a way to turn off technology, and even then it's still ridiculous.

To put it simply, people who believe that this sort of thing is possible, that this sort of thing is a legitimate threat, do not live in the same world as the rest of us. I mean, where are all those UN troops going to come from? How are they going to be brought to the United States? How are they going to be supplied in the United States? Why not just nuke a few American cities to demonstrate that they mean business?

The killer part of it is, Head's plans don't even make sense in the context of his fears. If he was seriously worried about an invasion, he should be organizing things like hidden ammo dumps and supply caches out in the countryside, known to the local defenders but not officially marked, so that they could have equipment reserves to fall back on once the invaders arrive in force. He should be arranging things so that a county police force has the equipment it needs to fight a military. Most importantly of all, he shouldn't be bloody well telling people about it! The United States government is intelligent enough to hide its black ops budgets underneath $30,000 wrenches. I mean, do you think the activities of Area 51 are going to show up as individual line items in a publicly-available budget?

The other possibility is that Head knows this is all bull, but is using it as a necessary smokescreen to get the voters to approve a tax increase. If that's the case, well... if that's the case maybe Texas would be better off invaded by the UN.