Russian Predicts New Texas Republic

Lone Star State, Single Again?

Former KGB strategy analyst getting his Warhollian face time by declaring U.S. will fall apart by 2010. His redrawn map of the U.S. was published by the Wall Street Journal, which although making for good copy, seems fanciful.

However, if for nothing but idle speculation, take a look at the map and see if you agree with the professor's analysis.

As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S. - WSJ.com via kwout

First, it seems a bit fantastic that a Texas Republic would cover the entire South and Southeast. Ark-la-tex-ahoma seems more a plausible scenario, with bits and pieces of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas thrown in to the west and north.

Other issues that come to mind:

• Ignoring the huge differences in culture between West Coast cities separated by mountain ranges such as Seattle versus Spokane.
• Utah attempted to become its own country before, it's hard to imagine it not trying to again rather than throw in with the Pacific coastline states.
• Chicago is a super regional powerhouse whose influence stretches to Minnesota's western and northern borders, down to Missouri's southern borders and around to Indiana.
• Does Canada have influence to exert?

In sum, the professor would have done just as well to simply copy the scenario laid out in the excellent, but now cancelled show, Jericho. .:.

Squaring the Triangle

Also-ran no more, San Antonio set to become hotspot of its own

Austin has its software and hardware. Dallas has telecom and banking. Houston has oil and gas. But what of poor ol' San Anton? Tourism, a la the Alamo, Riverwalk, Sea World.

All well and good, but compared to its Texas Triangle neighbors, SA seemed a bit lacking. But San Antonio is doing just fine, thank you.

A recent post to tech blog site metafilter.com ("Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" 12/08/08) shows San Antonio catching up in a big way. Focused on neo military-industrial-complex conspiracies rather than economic development, from the blog post it's easy to see that San Antonio stands to benefit in the future:

• The National Security Agency is building a data center in San Antonio that’s the size of the Alamodome.
• Microsoft has opened an 11-acre data center a few miles away.
• It's no coincidence reports up in the old hotel, an appropriately cryptic-named blogger, citing a new book by NSA expert James Bamford: "The biggest U.S. spy agency wanted assurances that Microsoft would be in San Antonio before it moved ahead with the Texas Cryptology Center. Bamford notes that under current law, the NSA could legally tap into Microsoft’s data without a court order."
• The blog entry ends with this warning: "Whatever you do, don't take pictures of it [sic] the spy building unless you want to be taken in for questioning."
  

Also worth checking out are the cheeky comments related to an Alamodome metric system, Alamo rental cars, and other geeky morsels of mirth. .:.

Olympian Kickstart

Celebrity endorsement gives Austin venture big boost

The Wall Street Journal "How Phelps Became the Face of PureSport - WSJ.com" reports that 8-time gold medal winner Michael Phelps is a pitchman and equity stakeholder in Human Performance Labs LLC, an Austin-based startup with a protein energy drink. The company is led by Michael Humphrey, a former sales executive with Broadcast.com and CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster.

Because of Phelps, the company received $5 million from Terry Gilmore, an oil, gas and real estate investor, in January.

The Journal article describes what would be every startup's dream come true: "In Beijing, every time Mr. Phelps emerged from the pool at the Water Cube, a coach handed him a plastic bottle filled with PureSport's protein and carbohydrate-filled cocktail. 'About halfway through the meet, people started knocking on my door asking me what I was drinking and if they could have some,' Mr. Phelps said during a recent interview." .:.