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Hagen Units

Bruce Hagen, the Mayor of Superior, Wisconsin, thinks President Obama is a Muslim.

First, President Obama is not a Muslim.  He says he isn't.  There is no reason to think the President is lying.  If someone were to ask me--and no one has ever done so--whether I am a Sikh, I would say no.  There is no reason to think I am.

But what if President Obama were a Muslim, and what if I were a Sikh?  Would that be the end of the world?  I suspect the Foundations of the Universe would shift and groan a bit--not as much as real Muslims and Sikhs would--but, you know, even the universe must, now and then, have to express painful curiosity.

 Absurd nonsense!  I know how people like Bruce Hagen became Mayor of a city.  He was elected by people who are not entirely unlike Mr. Hagan.  I do not think Mr. Hagen could be re-elected, but even Superior Wisconsin, which is not necessarily superior to its harbor mate, Duluth, Minnesota, has its fair share of political lunatics.  If it should happen that they have more hagens than I believe is their fair share, perhaps they should change the name of the city to Inferior, Wisconsin.

But now I am being silly.  No one measures absurdity in hagen units.  "One hagen unit:  OK.  Two hagen units:  uhhhh.  Three:  On our way to serious problems!"  But ***erior, Wisconsin has a hagen unit as a Mayor!

We all know hagen units**.  We all know people who think the pyramids were built to store corn cobs in.  People from outer space with stone-cutting laser beams and anti-gravity hover craft, cut huge stones from far away and piled them up like pyramids, enclosing teeny-tiny chambers for corn cob storage because no one wants corn cobs, anyway.  And aren't those pyramids perfectly aligned with celestial things completely unknown to ancient Egyptians, and even beyond the ken of science today, thereby proving that they could not have done the job themselves:  they had to have had illegal alien aliens in to do the job.

And that is why hagen units are are the measure for getting into politics, or a local bar with a low threshold, and offer opinions about pyramids and corn cobs and ancient alien visitors with laser beams and anti-gravity machines and nothing better to do.

Right out loud!  Just as if any of it made sense!

**Technical Note:  A hagen unit is measured in parts per one-hundred.  E.g., 3 hagen units means that of 100 people, three are hagen units.  It is not statistically reliable simply to poll the people you have invited to dinner, for instance, and conclude that since half of your guests are hagen units that the entire population probably has fifty hagen units because, as Jesus said, "Birds of a feather flock together".  Your dinner party may not be a statistically valid sample.  They hardly ever are.  As a side note, it is such assumptions that explain why there are so many candidates who think they can be President of the United States:  they eat dinner with the wrong people, i.e, with people just like themselves.  

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