World Geography in 5-40 Years

I'm enjoying the Secession movement as it is meant to be taken: a protest. Its funny that the Libs, having won their election, object to the opposition protesting the outcome much as they'd have protested had the Democrats lost. This is more or less how they behaved when W won a second term. Remember Alec Baldwin whining he was going to leave America on national TV? Nobody seems to hold him to that. The liberals always get amnesia when it comes to their own hypocrisies.

Secession is just another protest. Its not going to amount to actual legal separation of any state from the Union. It doesn't matter if its legal or not. Its impractical. While my own state gets a small fraction of its tax dollars back, a considerable portion of the population eats on Federal benefits like Welfare. I can tell you they're truly despised by the working population too. However much you may dislike the Hostess employees for going on strike over seeing their wages lowered to Minimum, at least they worked for a living. If it bothers you that much, buy twinkies and put them in the cellar for the apocalypse or till the rats eat them and die.

Even if the nation divided, legally, and started up proper border patrols and the Federal Govt left behind to service the communist liberal Eastern states alone, and try to fund all their projects without enough people actually working to pay for them, I would welcome the separation. I am living in the 8th largest economy in the world, the state that gave us the internet and the way to use it, personal computers. California, should it become rational, would be okay.

Even if Secession divides the nation, trucks are still going to cross borders. It will take longer, with the inspections and the taxes from state to state, but that just drives more local competition to make it here. That's hardly a downside unless you like eating salad in the wintertime. Switch to coleslaw! Its hilarious how the Libs just can't accept that they are disliked by normal people. They have to vilify and demonize people with different opinions, which is exactly what they accuse their opposition of doing. We're used to that sort of behavior from the Libs, but that they aren't looking at themselves in the mirror and being ashamed? How pathetic is that?

Now expand the concept of a fragmented Union of Socialist Americans into neighbors. What has mainland Mexico ever done for Baja Mexico? What has Eastern Canada ever done for British Columbia? What has Toronto ever done for Quebec? Will Newfoundland split off from Quebec? Will they join a North Atlantic States Trade Bloc with Iceland and Ireland and Norway and Bermuda? Maybe Maine and Vermont will split off from the Yankees and join that Bloc too? They like to go their own way. The cost of repairing the hurricane damage and the ongoing delays and blackouts, those have to be making people think about permanently leaving the disaster zone the same way people abandoned Louisiana. Pack what you can save and go. Why stay and suffer? This is what is driving a lot of the contempt behind the protest.

I consider myself a Californian FIRST, an American second, despite my ancestors founding this country, literally, and fighting to create its national sovereignty. National Sovereignty is a concept regarded contemptuously by the leadership of the current ruling party, in public, on internationally broadcast interviews. THAT more than anything drives the Secession protests. Easterners keep taking my money to fund programs for Easterners. I never see a dime of it. Why on Earth would I support them?


National borders change. The Baby Boomers should remember this, since many changed in the 1960's. Nations invade and take from other nations. Cities can be destroyed. Places can be settled or developed. Populations swell or contract as resources surge or wane. The map is not static. It is fluid. Things change. Not always by war. Sometimes by technology or investment. Look at how China has drawn so much of its population out of the countryside and into the cities where you can survive on only 10 hours per day of labor compared to the 18 hours a day on the farm. There's time for a hobby, or even sleeping. And hey, China is going to end the One Child Per Family rule in 2015 so mothers won't be forced to abort any fetus unfortunate enough to be a girl. Considering that all that seems to be keeping Africa populated are those anti-AIDS pills, they may be looking at settling that continent in a couple decades.

If Africa were largely Chinese, and fully developed over the next couple centuries, complete with irrigation and roads and houses and mines and factories, Africa would be a real powerhouse of industry. They have lots of iron. Lots of rare earths in Africa as well. It really is a good place for mining and industry, and with all the sunlight, a good place for agriculture and solar energy. It probably won't be done by the native Africans, who can't see a percentage in bothering. They are accused of being lazy because no developer offers real financial motivation. One Laptop Per Child, if it is ever implemented, will probably give us some really amazing mechanical engineers, provided the teens learning engineering don't get AIDS like everyone else. If that happens, the Chinese Pioneers will have to get along with their African neighbors rather than simply storm in and grind the bones for fertilizer.

Here are some things that I think we'll see happen in our lifetimes.

• Panama Canal access limited/banned for USA flag or bound ships. Possibly controlled by Chinese Navy. Maybe assigned by the UN as a Peacekeeper force.
• End of drug smuggling from Mexico to USA due to poor USA economy and weak dollar. Foreigners are already demanding hundreds instead of twenties. That's inflation. 
• Oil primarily shipped under contract rather than open market, mostly to China. Probably under guard of Chinese Navy and Air Force.
• Cars mostly running electric, alcohol, and natural gas. Brazil is the world provider of alcohol fuel from sugar cane. Fuel will be so expensive that nobody will be able to afford to drive to the job they want, so either bike or scooter to the job they can reach without exhaustion.
• Africa touted as the new frontier for development. Massive EU and Asian efforts will flood that place. Roads, hospitals, water treatment plants, actual fences and patrols to keep down the Leopards (don't laugh, there are 150,000 of them and they still eat plenty of people), and some kind of responsible govts so an education isn't just another way to pay higher bribes. 
• Brazil doing some very public development efforts so all those sugar cane plantations have some reason to keep working instead of seeing all the money go to the Brazillionaires and their henchmen with guns. 
• Baja California turned into rich people mansions using installed desalination to provide all irrigation. Repeat on any desert islands (most of Cuba, Easter Island). Various coastlines with water shortages are ideal for this treatment. Peru, Western Sahara and southern Morocco, Namibia, any stretch of North Africa not wet enough for agriculture (Libya, western coastal Egypt, Arabian peninsula coastlines), Somalia, Natal in South Africa. These are places that Irrigation will transform. This same tech would irrigate LA and San Diego too, without touching the Colorado River water or needing the Owens River any longer. The Lake could come back. So could the farming in Long Valley.
• Big irrigation canal projects. This means a canal off of the Columbia River through Eastern Oregon to Nevada. All those dry high desert valleys are prime territory for real estate development. Capture and redirect rainfall supplying the Eel river through a tunnel into the Western Sacramento Valley, from Red Bluff South along I-5. And diversions from the Frasier River via canals and pumps to the upper Great Plains, then into the Ogalalla Aquifer and refill what has been drained out of it in the last 150 years. That would restore farming for several million people and double or triple our grain output. If we had a rational govt instead of one that partied like its 1999, they'd be working on that now.

All of these are either changed national lines or ignore the lines completely. When you're talking about possession being 9/10ths of the law, and that being backed up by Predator drones and AAA/SAM batteries run by expert veterans, you can see how a city-state mentality will build up and become the New Normal. I can easily see a certain leeway granted to families operating lands that would be useless nothing without them providing the desalination facilities and the manpower to keep it all running. Organization and a certain ruthlessness, no doubt.