Why America Should Become a Part of Canada

A few months ago there was an item posted of several of the political humor and satire sites calling for the United States to revoke the Declaration of Independence, pass a Congressional Resolution in which the United States would apologize to Great Britain over that “little misunderstanding” some 200 years ago, and humbly ask to become a member of the United Kingdom.

Although the item was written with tongue firmly implanted in cheek I think that, basically, it’s not such a bad idea.  In fact, the only thing that I would change is that the United States would petition to become a part of Canada rather than the United Kingdom.  Such a merger would, at the least, be a marriage made in Heaven for both nations.  Among the many virtues of such a union:

1. The goals of the American political left would be met in that the US would finally have socialized medicine, stricter gun control laws, and more taxation extracted from its citizens. The political right would benefit by laughing themselves into a coma when the liberals, now having no agenda to pursue, would be unable to control a single seat in the Canadian New Parliament.

Those that have long pointed to Canada as an example of “compassionate” government-controlled health care would finally get their wish.  Now all Americans would have access to health care. The only drawback to this triumph of compassion over money would be that the citizens live long enough to get an appointment in a system that would combine Canadian inefficiency with good old fashioned American bureaucracy to create a system that would stress death as a cost-containment strategy.  As a side benefit, the economies of Cuba and Mexico would gain billions of foreign exchange dollars as both countries would become “health care Meccas” for those willing to fork over hard cash to avoid becoming a mortality statistic.

Most Americans would have no problem adjusting to Canadian gun control laws since the current American laws are practically identical to those in Canada. A potential roadblock to full acceptance of Canadian laws would be the requirement that, in order to possess a firearm in Canada, one must be either a Canadian citizen or a registered immigrant.  The Canadian judicial system has traditionally been quite intolerant of those who violate the nation’s gun laws.

That portion of the American electorate believing that the answer to any real or imagined “problem” is more taxation would find themselves enveloped multi-orgasmic joy when confronted with the Canadian taxation system.  Or at least they would until it could be pointed out that, under the Canadian system, everyone pays taxes.

Canada, of course, would benefit from gaining the American tax base.  They would also benefit by having some 300 million new citizens to torment with social policies that have already reduced its citizens to mindless automatons that go along with the game just to get their government to shut up.

2.  The American right wing would finally have an effective immigration policy.

In addition to closing the so-called border checkpoints along the current US-Canadian border, the US would immediately benefit from the much stricter Canadian immigration policies.  In summary, these policies state that 1) you don’t get into Canada unless you have a job  waiting on you and 2) if you are in the country illegally and find that you have attracted the attention of the Mounties, you go to jail until you can be deported to whatever third-world cesspool that you came from.  In fact, the only difference between American and Canadian immigration laws is that the Canadians enforce theirs.

And what about all those displaced immigration and customs agents from both sides of the current border?  They would be transferred to the current US-Mexican border to enforce the new Canadian-American immigration policy.  Any agents that are left over would become the staff at the new detention facility dedicated to immigration law violators.  Since no one wants a prison “in their back yards,” this facility would be constructed some 300 miles (~ 500 km) north of Calgary.

Having an effective immigration policy would also deprive the political right of its only platform and would eliminate it from the political theater.  The left would then laugh itself into a coma and thus be unable to control a single seat in the New Parliament.

3. The American public would finally get a real royal family to laugh at and would no longer have to depend on the lower-quality domestic brands.

This would undoubtedly be bad news to the Hiltons, Kennedys, Romneys, Clintons, and other American royalty wanna-be clans but, as citizens of the New Canada, all would be expected to “do their parts” to make the transition from America to New Canada as smooth as possible.

4.  The American “energy crisis” would become a thing of the past.

Once we’ve sucked all the oil out of the Alaskan North Slope oil fields we could then draw from the untapped resources of Canada. And, should those appear to be coming close to depletion, Canada has plenty of uranium that’s just lying there doing nothing.

As a side benefit to such policies, America would be finally rid itself of those tireless; noisy; and generally obnoxious guardians of “animal rights” and of weeds on “public grasslands” collectively known as the “environmentalist lobby.”  In Canada if you ride your bicycle out to the forest to protest old-growth logging, one of two things has been known to happen: you will either be decapitated by a chain saw or be run over by a logging truck.

There are, of course, many other potential benefits to Canadian-American unification and just as many potential shortcomings.  However, this writer is of the opinion that the gains accrued in such a merger would far outweigh any negative aspects.

Note to citizens of California and/or members of the Green Party: Does the word “satire” ring a bell?

First August Candidates for “Stupidest Thing of the Year” Announced

I’ve spent a lot of time complaining about the fact that there isn’t some type of weekly, monthly, or even yearly award to recognize stupidity.  Therefore, I’ve decided that I will start documenting some of the more noteworthy acts of stupidity each month, with the monthly winner becoming a finalist for recognition as “The Stupidest Thing from a Year Full of Stupidity.”

The first entries for the month of August are:

1. NASA’s ‘teacher in space,” Barbara Morgan, completed the first of three scheduled classroom lessons that were broadcast back to Earth from the space shuttle Endeavor this week.  Whether the lessons will have a significant impact on schoolchildren remains to be seen since NASA scheduled the broadcast of these lessons to happen when the vast majority of America’s school-age children are still on summer vacation.

2. The Atlanta Falcons football team will start the season without the services of multi-million dollar star quarterback Michael Vick, who is currently under federal indictment in Virginia on gambling and dog-fighting charges.  Since Vick violated the terms of his contract when he was busted by the cops, his inactivity is costing him about $1 million bucks per month. 

Since their previous seasons’ records prove that the Falcons couldn’t beat their own mothers without Vick at quarterback, the Falcons appear poised to become the first team in the history of the National Football League to post a 0-16 record before the start of the regular season.

3. New Mexico Governor and Democratic Party Presidential hopeful wanna-be Bill Richardson has been touring the state of Iowa touting his plans to end childhood poverty.  This seems inappropriate since he is currently the governor of a state that ranks just above Rwanda in the percentage of children living beneath the poverty level.

Use the “Comment” box below to vote for your choice.  As they used to say in Mayor Richard J. Daly’s Chicago: “Vote early and vote often!”

The Laws of Stupidity

I think that the best way to introduce a blog dedicated to the study of stupidity is to briefly summarize the current state of knowledge regarding this complex subject. 

In the immortal words of W. C. Fields, let us “take the bull by the tail and face the situation.”

Carlo Cippola’s Five Basic Laws of Stupidity

I. We always under-estimate the number of stupid people.

II. The probability of a person being stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

III. A stupid person is one who causes damage to another person, or group of people, without any advantage accruing to himself (or herself) – or even with some resultant self-damage.

IV. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid people.  They constantly forget that at any moment, and in any circumstance, associating with stupid people constitutes an expensive mistake.

V. A stupid person is the most dangerous person in existence.

Giancarlo Livraghi’s Three Additions to Cippola’s Laws of Stupidity

I. Within each human being, including ourselves, there is a quantity of stupidity which is invariably greater than we suppose.

II. When the innate stupidity of one person is combined with the innate stupidity of others, the product of that combined grows geometrically–by multiplication, rather than the addition of the individual stupidity factors.

III. Since the impact of combined intelligence can only grow arithmetically while stupidity grows geometrically; stupidity will, in the long term, always prevail.

H. L. Mencken’s Axioms of Political Stupidity

If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y.

A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

McDonald’s Internet Corollary

The Internet is the act of running the circus from the clown tent.

McDonald’s Five Classes of Stupidity

Class I is the mildest (or certainly the least pathologic) form of stupidity and is usually indistinguishable from the routine actions of daily living.

Class II stupidity is an act of personal stupidity whose impact is felt no further than five kilometers distant, and quite often no further than fifty meters, from where the incident occurs.  This type of stupidity is dangerous in that, if the act itself does not prove fatal, it induces a form of amnesia that removes all memory of the act itself and the ensuing consequences, leading to repetition of the act of stupidity for an indefinite and unpredictable number of times.

Class III stupidity is an act of stupidity that is due to stubbornness, religious fanaticism, patriotism, nationalism, or partisan political deal-making that in turn results in a witch hunt, religious persecution, a revolution, and/or an international or a civil war.

Class IV stupidity is an act of stupidity that leads to 1) a direct confrontation with an overwhelmingly superior foe, 2) a situation that can only be resolved by a temporary suspension of the laws of nature, or 3) a frontal assault on the will of God.

Class V stupidity is any act of stupidity that is of sufficient magnitude and posing such immediate, dire, and potentially catastrophic consequences that only the direct intervention of God Himself can avert the impending disaster.

McDonald’s Disease Theory of Stupidity

Stupidity is the only disease that is simultaneously endemic, epidemic, incurable, and practically always fatal.  Furthermore, a non-fatal attack of stupidity does not confer immunity against subsequent attacks.

The Laws of Classic (Newtonian) Stupidity

I. Any stupid object at rest or moving in a straight line will remain a stupid object at rest, or moving in a straight line, until it is acted upon by some external force that may or may not be as stupid as the original object.

II. Any stupidity emanating from, and acting on, another object will cause that object to exert an equally stupid force on the original object.

III. Every object in the universe that has mass (and hence stupidity) will exert a gravitational attraction on very other object in the universe that also has mass (and stupidity).  In the case of gravity, the magnitude of this attraction will vary inversely with the square of the distance separating the objects.  However, the effect of stupidity involving both masses does not decrease over distance and, in certain instances, may actually increase.

The First Law of Thermodynamic Stupidity

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form of energy into another.  Stupidity, however, can only be created and cannot be destroyed.

The Second Law of Thermodynamic Stupidity

You can never take more energy out of a system that was originally used in the creation of that system.  You can always remove some, but not all, stupidity from a system because the supply of stupidity will invariably exceed the demand.

The Third Law of Thermodynamic Stupidity

Entropy, the spontaneous disorganization of matter, is universal and always proceeds from organization to disorganization.  Stupidity will invariably progress from a disorganized state to larger and larger disorganized units that will eventually consume the entire universe.

The Heisenberg Unpredictability of Stupidity Principle

An observer may measure either the location of stupidity or the amount of stupidity present but may not measure both simultaneously because the mere act of measuring one component will alter the value of the other component.

McDonald’s Four Laws of Military Stupidity

I. The warring side that is the first to come up with the “unbeatable” or “perfect” strategy will inevitably lose the war.

II. The officer who is responsible for executing this brilliant plan will inevitably be court-martialed when it fails.

III. The one factor that no one considered when devising the perfect strategy will always arise at the worst possible moment.

IV. The government responsible for transgressions involving either/or Laws I & II will either be unelected (without prejudice), overthrown (with prejudice), or shot (with extreme prejudice).

The Principle of Co-Stupidity

An act of stupidity is rarely an isolated event and, in fact, any act of stupidity can be expected to produce an equally stupid reaction.  This reaction may be of a Class of Stupidity that is greater than, less than, or equal to that of the initial act of stupidity.

The Expansion Principle of Stupidity

In any open or closed system stupidity will increase until it reaches, or exceeds, the level of stupidity that originally existed within that system, in accordance with Livraghi’s Second and Third Additions to Cippola’s Laws.

The Temporal Displacement of the Consequences of Stupidity Principle

The effects of a given act of stupidity do not decrease over time but may first become known at any point in the future.  The individual acts of stupidity bear no relationship to their eventual consequences, but these consequences will almost certainly be of more extensive impact than one might expect if the original acts of stupidity had been identified and dealt with promptly.