You also have a (largely) farming population, who have work from the spring into the early Autumn. Then months on end of not much to do. Be drunk, eat into food reserves, stay warm and somehow stay strong enough to be useful farmers next spring. You have a bored population of young, drunk, possibly abusive, probably male.

If you want some semblance of control over that population, you create religion, you tax the religion, you convince people that their gods want them to move that stone. The stone gets moved by those people. The taxes feed and intoxicates them, the work keeps them warm. At different times in history you send them to join the army, build a pyramid, go on a crusade.

Dunno, I could be completely wrong. But it doesn’t feel entirely wrong to me that we have a common problem that’s been solved in a variety of ways in history and this could fit that pattern.

From outside (I live in the UK) and only knowing Texas through media. At some point you have to run on what supports your state/district/town. You can’t run a state with a lot of jobs tied in oil and gas by destroying all of those jobs, without causing massive harm.

Separately, Texas as a state had a lot of sunlight and land, and a lot of that energy production could be (should be?) transferred to solar.

While great for the planet, the job loses and associated lack of grassroots income would take a massive change in society.

I agree … ish

I think sex identification is useful for medical stuff, until it isn’t. If I was born with testicles, and I have a motorcycle accident that removes them. I don’t have testicular cancer. The bit here isn’t that I am “male” so I might have testicular cancer, the importance is “do I have testicles”.

Sex is an overall term that may align with certain likelyhoods, chances or diagnosis. But even then, it’s not a guarantee.