Maggie's Farm

Yes there is. Downgrade a State to a territory, and sell the territory to another country. Or sell it to the present inhabitants. Could be done.

The reason for the territory downgrade is to provide sufficient time to unwind the assets. The Union takes back the movable property it is unwilling to abandon or sell, and the two sides negotiate on the value and terms of the remaining properties.

At the risk of starting a flame war, wasn't the whole Ft. Sumter thing a dispute about who would retain it, and who would pay. Learn from your mistakes. If they are determined to go, then negotiate in good faith to let them go. Is a shooting war worth it?

C'mon California, remember Venezuela, a great country with tremendous assets tangible and intangible. If you leave now with the slavers in charge, you'll end up just like all the other slave states. And everybody who values their liberty will flee. You'll end up with a slave state of peons and oligarchs.

Or, remember the lessons of the original Bear Revolt.

The California Republic is now a failed State. The U.S. Constitution charges the Federal Government to ensure that each State has a republican government. CA is now a one party state: you can vote for the incumbent, the heir, or the spare, all from a single party. It is no longer a republic.

California should be removed from the roll of States, and reorganized as a Territory under Federal mandate to reorganize itself so that all of its legal inhabitants have an equal opportunity say in its governance.

The masthead says "... politically centrist ... Yankee ...". I took that to mean "New York/Connecticut" version, which is most definitely farther to the left than the heartland. It was my conclusion upon reading your pithy asides that you were just fine and unconcerned with the consequences of a Clinton win. Which is weird, as Trump is an archetypal New Yorker. I guess it's a class thing.

Yankee centrism can be described as: slow-roll the Democrat agenda. The Democrats are on the right side of history, but we should be prudent. Republicans are untouchable evil dirt people, but very useful. Ignore them mostly; but keep them around for cleanup duty (e.g. Giuliani) when your own messes become intolerable.

Nations rise and fall, political organizing principles evolve slowly on long historical time scales, with infrequent bursts of innovation; but there will always be peons and lords. Nations that are nice to their slaves are longer-lived and more stable. Nations dedicated to bringing the blessings of Liberty to itself and its posterity, historically are an unproven and fragile thing.

I work in West Coast tech, but not in SiVa. More of a traditional very high-tech. Once upon a time, Howard Hughes founded a high-tech West Coast empire. We are all his heirs, through all the reorgs and buyouts and closings and contractions and expansions and engineers that spun out of the Hughes nursery to found their own organizations that today still exist with other names and far-distant corporate masters.

Even today, it's very high tech. And it's tangible product-based and engineer-driven. Engineers whose livelihood and co-workers and families and happiness and neighbors and communities are dependent on products that work and customers that are satisfied: we are all very conservative, skeptical, don't give us no crap and show us your numbers and what are the risks and how much margin do you have in your design, and where's your proof that it's going to work as claimed, and how are we going to prove it to our customers and keep them happy and coming back for more.

It's very apolitical. It's not single-political SJW-infested like it is in SiVa and points northward. We are all very interested in and driven to produce products that work and can be sold. Politics is just not discussed. It's not appropriate, and a sign that you are not a serious person committed to business success. We can't allow politics to pollute our ability to work together cooperatively as colleagues. Our success is dependent on our need to place great trust and confidence in each of us to produce and work together and communicate.

But still, a word here, a casual statement there, and you eventually learn what your coworkers think. It's ok, because you like and trust them for reasons far more important than the fickle nature of political leanings. Did I mention that engineers are naturally skeptical and conservative and family-oriented? There is a correlation to political choices. Ethnicity does not correlate. Culture correlates.

Jeez, I don't know why they want to secede. They already own it all. My coworkers and I, we really are the 21Cen serfs. We are completely disenfranchised. The ballots now have only choices from one party, local and statewide, and the initiatives are either bond issues or social strictures, and always approved. There are far more of them than us. Every election the straitening bonds are tightened. We bring in the wealth, and yet have no say in how the community, the county, the State is run. We engineers recognize that as we have exceeded the bounds of natural stability, and it's a runaway condition. All self-correcting mechanisms have been deliberately disabled. The hordes of endlessly needy people with their infinite needs demand ever more (duh! normal foolish human nature, just keep sucking on that teat), the sociopath mediocrities that infest our governments rush to provide it while taking their vig, and that demand will not stop until the system breaks.

The golden goose is on the chopping block. The fools that talk secession, useful idiots all, clamor for the gutting. Secession will accelerate the collapse. Our far distant corporate masters will pull us all out, or close us down. Any of us that can will flee. Caliregonton can't act fast enough to prevent the out-migration of its serfs and their meager saved wealth. And Caliregonton will fall into perdition and ruin. And that's ok for the sociopaths: far better to be a temporary Lord of your own Hell, than a subservient angel in Paradise.