Open Thread time
I’m of the opinion that we should always have an Open Thread in the list of 10 Recent Posts….
"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
The decline of the Pound was around when the US was still nominally on the gold standard (pre 1972), wasn’t it?
The 30-year people say that in practice, the decline began around 1915 because of the enormous debt the crown had to take on for WWI, and was effectively finished by 1945 at the end of WWII. By then, the financiers wanted dollars, not pounds. The 50-year people extend that out. My own opinion is that 1945 is the right date; the US had the only undamaged large industrial capacity in a world that suddenly wanted to rebuild.
Government bonds aren’t the only store of value. At that time, GM shares/bonds denominated in dollars were almost as good.
cleek – 1861 had something to say about states trying to leave the union. and that was decided with foot soldiers.
no state is going to stand a chance against a few B52s.
The question is, though, how much enforcement and control can a federal government project onto dissident states? The North won the American Civil War, but white supremacy remained the order of the day in the South for 100 years, and is now back with a vengeance.
There are only so many sorts of policy that can be moved forward with state violence. Gold Statue is finding that out right now where Iran is concerned, as W found out with Afghanistan… as Putin is learning with Ukraine.
Given the difficulty of forcing compliance, I don’t know that there remains enough common cause to try to hold on if states decided not to comply with federal mandates.
I’m more worried about Palantir than I am about B52s. The future of war in the US will be dispersed violence, not mass violence, and a surveillance apparatus would be more dangerous to dissidents than a state military.
The lobbiests, for sure. Although given the prominence of lobbyists at the state level,** I’m not sure the lobbying companies, as opposed to individual lobbyists, would lose that much.
I’d expect that the administrative state would split along with the geography. Unless the parts decide, ala the EU, that it makes sense to do some things together, they’d each need to have a lot of the pieces. Not equal pieces — the West would likely want something like BLM (Bureau of Land Management), while New England or the reborn Confederacy would not. But mostly we’d see an enormous amount of shuffling, and later horse trading for bits of particular agencies.
As for Wall Street, I’d expect New England would keep it going. Maybe even getting business from elsewhere, just as London does. There would be stock exchanges in other regions (last I looked, San Francisco still had their stock exchange building), just smaller than Wall Street. The biggest impact would be programmed trading would be less prominent.
I’m wondering how Western America (sans TX/OK) divides up the political baby between the purple Front Range and NM, the mostly red patch from the Western Slope to the western side of the Cascades/Sierra Nevada.
That’s an excellent point — today. 20 years of climate change on, with states looking at partitions, the question to ask those areas is, “Do you think Indiana and North Carolina and Florida care about your fire and water and energy problems? More than your neighboring states do?”
How many Americans in 1832-33 during the Nullification Crisis, thought there would be a shooting war in less than 30 years? Not, as I’ve said, that I think a shooting war is a likely result. As someone else pointed out, this is not 1861, states don’t raise militias, and there’s a very large standing military.
A shooting war, with opposing armies? No, I’d agree that’s very unlikely. (Although I do note that every state has a National Guard. Not quite like the old state militias. But not totally different.)
But extensive guerrilla warefare and terrorism, especially within the new areas? Much more likely. Especially with support from other fragments. I could especially see some efforts directed at the perceived oppression of their co-religionists.
But extensive guerrilla warefare and terrorism, especially within the new areas? Much more likely. Especially with support from other fragments. I could especially see some efforts directed at the perceived oppression of their co-religionists.
I’ve started about a dozen responses to this. I’ll leave it at this: describe a plot you could sell to a publisher where the Southern Baptists from Kentucky and Alabama drive 1500 miles to support the Church of Latter Day Saints in Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. Who are they going to attack? California and Phoenix and Front Range Colorado? Where the Mormons are generally well-regarded? IIRC, as recently as 2006 the official SB position was that the LDS were cultists, not Christians.
Michael Cain – I’ll leave it at this: describe a plot you could sell to a publisher where the Southern Baptists from Kentucky and Alabama drive 1500 miles to support the Church of Latter Day Saints in Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. Who are they going to attack? California and Phoenix and Front Range Colorado?
The evangelical religious right has no strong central authorities. It doesn’t matte what the official doctrinal statement of the denomination is, there will be people in their pews who are subscribed to social media accounts that are putting out Seven Mountains content and agitating for Christian Nationalism.
I don’t think anyone showing up to a Patriot Prayer rally is going to be chased away for being LDS or ELS or whatever.
And what they will attack is any sort of gathering in Seattle, or Portland, or Eugene, or Denver that they perceive as being the work of Woke Ativists. They will attack civic infrastructure (as they have already done) to strike a blow against tyranny.
Just wait until they get drones.
These cells are not vanguard organizations, but that won’t stop them from forming flash mobs when they see an opportunity for it.
Chased away? Perhaps not. But I’m not seeing any chance of an Evangelical effort to support the Mormons. Who are both not even Christians and heretics. (Mutually exclusive as those logically are.)
On the other hand, it doesn’t seem a stretch to imagine them making a big effort in support of fundamentalists (even if not quite Evangelicals) in, say, Idaho or Wyoming. Utah and the LDS are very much a special case. .
I’m telling you all right now…RW evangelicals will support LDS before they support any Democrat, and the RW paramilitary groups can stay as klannish as they want, but they will all show up under separate leadership to take on a target that codes Democrat in their worldview.
The doctrinal purity and infighting will happen if they gain power, but until then we are the forces of satan, and they will contort however they need to in order to take us down.
I am afraid what nous says rings horribly true. I believe it.
In the late Weimar Republic nazis and communists on occasion joined forces to beat up social democrats. Co-authoritarians against moderate democrats – their one and true enemy.
Not to forget the good relationship of the current Israeli government with the right-wing governments* of Poland and Hungary despite their barely veiled antisemitism. Not to speak of the US millenarist Kristians(TM) who see Bibi&Accomplices as the useful idiots to trigger Armageddon (where Christ will kill the Jews first) while BIbi&Co see them as the same (not believing in that apocalyptic claptrap).
*for the moment ex- but with good chances to return to power in the not too distant future
Interesting, to say the least, to see the discussion of partition evolve (devolve?) into a discussion of a alliance between evangelicals and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. And a dose of “the LDS aren’t Christians” thrown in for good measure. I’m tempted to simply say “pass the popcorn and carry on,” but I’m curious where all of this comes from. Seriously. Are these actual beliefs, or is this just a thought experiment and people are being facetious?
On a different subject entirely, my car recently started “missing” occasionally when I was stopped with it in gear (eg, at a red traffic light). No lights on the dashboard, but the tachometer twitched every time. I was thinking about it last night and decided it started shortly after I got my last tank of gas. This morning I went to a different station and topped the tank with premium, then drove ten miles and back on the Interstate. The problem appears to be fixed.
I suppose with gas prices being what they are, it’s unsurprising if some marginal fuel is getting delivered. I may be more susceptible to such problems because I only fill up every 4-6 weeks. Also, it’s an older car — it’ll turn 18 this summer.
The question is, though, how much enforcement and control can a federal government project onto dissident states?
quite a lot, i’d wager. most states already have military bases in them. and it would be no problem at all to fly literally anywhere in the US to deliver some missiles to “Patriot” HQ should one declare itself.
local militias with their well-polished ARs will have literally no defense at all against bombs from 20,000ft or cruise missiles launched from two states over. a rebel state (assuming the whole state would unite in such a suicidal undertaking) would find themselves unable to import anything, and its utilities would be targeted. hope you’ve stocked up on jerky and beans! and TP.
the only real hope for sedition and secession is that the federal govt simply doesn’t care enough to bother stomping it out. but i can’t think of a state so unloved that the rest of the country would shrug at the idea of it leaving.
Texas?
Various other states aren’t particularly loved. But Texas is the one that works the hardest by far at being actively obnoxious to the rest of us.
Texas?
A Colorado governor once told a story about a Texan who had died in Colorado. They couldn’t ship him home because they couldn’t find a coffin big enough for him. Then, someone gave the corpse an enema, and they shipped him home in a matchbox.
“People outside Texas often perceive Texans as obnoxious primarily due to stereotypes around excessive state pride, loud/boastful personalities, a ‘go big’ or flashy demeanor, defensiveness toward criticism, and sometimes inconsiderate behavior as tourists or transplants.”
Perceptions of Texas and Texans
…but i can’t think of a state so unloved that the rest of the country would shrug at the idea of it leaving.
Conservatives hate California as a matter of faith. Lots of them might not just shrug, but be happy to see it go. Most western states are nominally unhappy with California, but that’s primarily a matter of the California Diaspora helping drive up real estate prices. (The first time I heard the term “California Diaspora” was in 1988, from a history prof at the U of Colorado in Boulder.)
Similarly for NY/NJ, but that’s largely New York City hate. Illinois has now passed NJ as the state with the highest percentage of residents unhappy with their own state. My own personal beef with NJ, despite (or because of) living there for ten years can be illustrated by an early interaction I had with a native at a party, who remarked, upon learning I had done my undergraduate time at Nebraska, “Nebraska? That’s out there by Ohio and Nevada and those states, isn’t it?”
Texans visiting other places seem to be uniformly disliked. My perception is that’s because Texans do their version of the Ugly American routine so well it even annoys other Americans. (“Drawl even slower and louder, maybe I’ll understand it that way.”) I lived there for two years and there were a lot of people who were just mean-spirited; eg, “Freeze a Yankee in the Dark” bumper stickers as a way to advocate pro-Texas energy policies.
In various polls/study groups, only Hawaii beats Colorado on least-disliked list. Who doesn’t like laid-back stoned hikers, or surfers?
A revealed-preference version of the question is where do people move? Some years back I wanted to learn more about cluster analysis. The test problem I chose to play with was grouping states based on immigration between them, using IRS data that was available at that time. One of the maps I generated was based on dividing the contiguous states into seven clustered groups. (Why seven is too detailed to go into, even in a comment that has already reached this length.) Some of the groupings were the result of individual metro areas: NM was attached to Texas because El Paso, but not otherwise; OH was connected to KY because Cincinnati. Looking more closely at the western group revealed three interesting patterns. (1) All of the states’ rural populations were slowly shrinking back to the major metro areas. (2) There was a modest amount of migration back and forth between the West and the rest of the country. (3) There was significant migration in both directions between all of the major metro areas. Texas likes to make a big deal about Californians moving to Texas. In fact, Californians who leave are much more likely to go to Phoenix, or Denver, or Portland, or Seattle than to Texas. And people move from those cities to California.
“conservatives” might not like CA, and liberals might not like TX, but neither group controls the government and nobody really wants states to leave, they just want people to stop being dumb (YMMV).
and i doubt either group would be happy to let their partisan enemies get a win by letting them secede without a fight. admittedly, given their size and resources, those two states would be able to put up a better fight than most. but just imagine the glee on Fox News if it could show a Republican admin bombing CA rebels into submission! “Eat lead, stupid libz! President Carlson is going to impose reality on the filthy hippies!”
(we’ve already seen them cheering ICE raids as punishment for Dems, the fascist fucks)
and most people understand that both states provide huge benefits to the country as a whole. i can’t think of a state that doesn’t provide something we’d all rather have a domestic supply of than have to import – food, oil, lumber, even culture and scenery are nice to have in-house.
OT: when i see a map like that, i immediately think “This should be the map used for staggered regional primaries. One every two weeks, alternating order.”
…and most people understand that both states provide huge benefits to the country as a whole. i can’t think of a state that doesn’t provide something we’d all rather have a domestic supply of than have to import – food, oil, lumber, even culture and scenery are nice to have in-house.
There are lots of models. There’s the EU model, with a common currency, no trade barriers, free movement of labor and capital, but defense left to the members. That addresses most of your list, excepting where culture and policy overlap. There’s the UK model, with devolution of lots of civilian authority but none on defense, and tax receipt transfers between the members. However, what happens if Reform wins control of Parliament on the basis of English votes and attempts to impose its “revive North Sea fossil fuels” policy on a Scotland controlled by the SNP/Greens who oppose?
The last is particularly interesting to me because the Western Interconnect has multiple reasons to decide on an energy policy that is “Electrify everything, and get rid of thermal power plants.” Trump, and hence the Republicans, are solidly opposed to even allowing that, yet alone supporting it. The conflict is already happening: Trump ordering that coal-fired plants stay open even if most of regional population doesn’t want to buy coal-fired electricity. My own local power authority, faced with a requirement to join an ISO/RTO by 2030, has done so early. ISO/RTO’s implement the FERC model for electric markets, designed for the eastern US. Only a month in, and the RTO is dispatching our peaking gas-fired generators at a rate that will require them to go offline for maintenance in the summer, when they’re really needed for reliability. One of my questions is how should the West react to an oncoming decade of “Run your electric grid as if you were eastern states, with many generators, a dense demand network, and lots of water.”
cleek – I understand where you are coming from with your thoughts about military force, and I think those beliefs are widespread and common. My own perspective on this comes out of the readings that I did during preparation for my dissertation work during the Gulf War, reading texts about insurgencies. In particular I’m thinking about what John Nagl was arguing in his book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (a reference to a TE Lawrence quote about military leaders trying to understand insurgency).
Nagl is comparing British strategies for dealing with the Malay Insurgency and American strategies for dealing with Vietnam. Your discussion of how the US military would deal with rebels is similar to US military doctrine from Vietnam – what Nagl would call “sending a bullet, not a man.” He argues that this strategy is what led the US to win every military engagement, but lose the war.
It’s a well regarded text among military strategists – especially those who served in the Gulf. It’s well worth a read if this subject interests anyone here.
Israel has been pursuing this strategy with Hamas for a while now, with great cost to civilian populations and infrastructure. I don’t see them being able to pursue that same strategy in Israel proper against liberal Israelis with a military force made up in part of Israelis from the areas under attack.
Likewise, the US federal government could take over the capitals of the Confederate States and install their own regimes in those capitals, but they could not bring military force to bear against the KKK during their first reign of terror. Military force is a tool ill suited to solving a political problem if the other side is not under arms in the field.
For that, you have to send a man, not a bullet.
This is probably already more than the subject is worth in the current conversation here, but it’s where I’m coming from in my thoughts about where I think things are headed.
My response as a Westerner would be: “We’re all in. As long as you arrange for the ‘lots of water’ part to be the first step in the implementation. The sooner the better!”
I really think folks from east of the Mississippi just can’t wrap their heads around “dry” — that’s dry as in zero rain (or snow or sleet or hail) for 6-8 months out of the year. They can see the deserts, but the reality of living here, and what it means beyond the plant life, seems to be beyond them.
Of course, we obviously have plenty of water. Enough to support cooling an AI data center bigger than Manhattan. No explanation why they didn’t put it in West Virginia, which would probably love the (purported) jobs, and certainly has way more water.
“Data centers generate substantial heat from servers, GPUs, and other IT equipment, with cooling systems historically accounting for 30–55% of total energy consumption (averaging around 40%). As AI and high-performance computing (HPC) drive rack densities from traditional levels (~10–20 kW/rack) to 50–150+ kW/rack or higher, efficient heat removal is critical for reliability, energy costs, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE; ideally approaching 1.0–1.2), and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE).
Common methods include variations of air cooling, evaporative/free cooling, direct-to-chip (D2C) liquid cooling, and immersion cooling (single- or two-phase). Hybrids combining these are increasingly common, and choices depend heavily on location (climate, water availability), scale, workload density, and priorities (cost vs. sustainability). Numbers vary by implementation, but recent analyses (2025–2026) provide benchmarks.”
Data Center Cooling Methods
“Water usage in AI data centers is significant, growing rapidly, highly localized in impact, and often more intensive than for traditional computing due to high power densities from GPUs and accelerators. It involves both direct consumption (primarily evaporative cooling to dissipate server heat) and much larger indirect consumption (water used in electricity generation, often 60–80%+ of the total footprint).”
AI Data Center Water
The data center thing is so plainly boneheaded that it’s hard to believe, even in our national environment of corporate fealty, that it’s gotten this far. Even putting the water issue (which is huge by itself) aside, according to the Guardian article, it’s going to use more power than the whole state of Utah now does. It’s dumbfounding.
The sooner the AI bubble bursts, the better. Especially if it happens before these huge data centers start construction.
I’d pretty much decided not to reply to bc’s comment a day ago, since it seemed clear that s/he didn’t really understand the underlying point being made by nous and wj about possible cooperation between Evangelicals, Southern Baptists and the LDS. The point is that whatever doctrinal differences they might have, organisations with a strong moralistic conservative mindset have already proven that they can support someone who actually displays the opposite qualities, as long as they attack Democrats and liberals. This has already been demonstrated by the Evangelicals, and of course by strongly moralistic, law-and order rightwing Republicans, in their support for Donald Trump. And this phenomenon is connected to a growing discussion about partition in the US. Tangentially, but I think really significantly in the last couple of days, we see this even in the wake of things like this:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/12/trump-late-night-social-media-posts
Funnily enough, after posting that, I read this in today’s NYT. I knew about Pressler and the SBC, but this bigger picture demonstrates why so many of the hated liberals can no longer stomach the hypocrisy so that partition is becoming a hot issue, even more than when Michael first started talking to us about it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/opinion/southern-baptist-convention-paul-pressler.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ilA.Up_P.Q5MFggBPR151&smid=url-share
The modern history of political evangelicalism is riddled with the same kind of story: A powerful man gains a following by casting himself as the heroic warrior against the heretical and the godless. When he uses his power and fame to indulge his basest desires, he treats exposure as an attack and justice as persecution.
And because he’s built a following, he has an army of people ready to leap to his defense. After all, if they stay silent, then the liberals will win, and no one can let the liberals win. Ever.
Against this backdrop, President Trump wasn’t an aberration; he was an inevitability.
Except that those preachers all felt compelled to at least give lip service to religion and to moral behavior. That’s where Trump is an aberation — he got a cult following without ever making a pretense of believing in their faith or in morality generally. (Although I suppose it could be argued that he embodies the ultimate end of the Prosperity Gospel nonsense.)
To me, the argument for something like partition is basically pragmatic. People in this country have wildly different understandings of what civic governance is supposed to do, and no single point of view holds a commanding majority.
So nothing gets done. Or, not exactly nothing, but we can’t seem to settle on a single coherent solution to some pretty basic civic problems.
We flail.
I’m not sure if partition is an achievable solution. How would you actually do it? I don’t think most folks would sign up for or even tolerate a shooting war. Something like the partition of Czechoslovakia might work, but it’s hard to say where you’d draw the lines. Michael’s map is pretty good, but it would get complicated pretty fast.
Maybe we need some kind of regional entity, smaller than the whole country, but larger than a single state, and then devolve a lot of what are currently federal responsibilities to those. It would be a hell of a lot easier to get a workable consensus about a lot of stuff in, for example, New England or the upper Midwest or the mountain west, than it is when the whole country is involved.
What we’re doing now is not working well.