Apologies for any paywalled links, I’ve tried to double-up sources where that occurs.

Local law enforcement teamed up with the FBI to raid a meeting of The Republic of Texas, a group that believes they never legally joined the union. More here.  And a RT documentary on the group from last year:

A group of Southern Tier towns in New York are threatening secession due to their state’s fracking ban.  The Economist picked up the story in its last issue:

The Southern Tier used to be called the “Valley of Opportunity”, with companies like IBM employing thousands. But the area’s big employers left or downsized long ago. The economy is stagnant, with houses for sale everywhere. Windsor cannot afford a police department. Even its funeral homes are long gone. Meanwhile, just yards away in Pennsylvania, Great Bend is thriving. The neighbours have new cars, freshly painted houses and jobs, and all from shale.

In Oregon, a petition to split off East Portland was shot down and “would need to be rewritten.”

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Independence movements are alive and well across Europe, according to Peter Geoghegan at The Irish Times:

European borders have shifted only a handful of times over the last two decades: the dissolution of Serbia and Montenegro; Kosovan independence in 2008; Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year. But the boundaries are unlikely to remain so static.

In Belgium, the divide between French-speaking Wallonia and Dutch-speaking Flanders has long stymied attempts to foster national unity. The largest party in the whole of Belgium is the nationalist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA). The N-VA has previously called for the more prosperous Flanders to leave the Francophone south. With the European Commission in Brussels, the break-up would have EU-wide ramifications.

Independence movements are riding high elsewhere on the continent. At nationalist gatherings from Edinburgh to Barcelona over the last 18 months, I have met gaggles of people carrying the Venetian flag. Last year, 89 per cent of Venetians voted for independence in an online petition.

Spain’s highest court ruled that the Catalan vote in November was unconstitutional, not surprisingly.

Elsewhere in Spain, in a negative development for Podemos, the Catalan Ciudadanos party is rising rapidly. The anti-independence party has already polled at over 18% by some tallies.

As the chances of Grexit recede, will Brexit be the new focus for the EU?

Lithuanians are worried Putin will turn his annexing eye to the Baltics next.  A very interesting Foreign Affairs article explains. The government has diversified energy dependency away from Russia and is attempting to bring back conscription.  Here’s a more in-depth take.

Is autonomous Somaliland making any progress towards formal independence?  Officials are looking to capitalize on its relative stability by attracting tourists.

China is staying busy in the South China Sea.

Rand Paul boldly calls for a Kurdish state.

Secessionist support is enough to get you arrested in Malaysia.

Honduran ZEDEs, debated.

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Patri Friedman likens progressivism to the second law of thermodynamics, which is not a complement:

One of the things life has taught me this decade is the importance of exclusion and boundaries, which are highly relevant to this metaphor. A thermodynamic system with poor borders (less insulation), will have greater thermal conductivity. It may do more work initially, but it will also move at maximum speed towards that final resting state where all energy is evenly distributed. Such a state is peaceful in precisely the same way as death; for without flows of energy, there can be no life (in vivo or in silico – as no computation is possible). I suppose those who think human extinction is fair or just will consider this the state of ultimate fairness. I don’t particularly care for that final solution.

So if you even care about life existing – let alone the infinite diversity possible therein – then (contra Caplan), boundaries (such as national borders) are an absolute necessity. No differences, no energy flow, no (thermodynamic) work, no life. As in the stars, so on the earth: romance flows from polarity; trade from comparative advantage; thermodynamic work from heat differences; evolution from variation; economic competition from competing alternatives. All progress is driven by differences; so to erase differences is (counter-eponymously) to end progress.

Can devolving more power to major cities save fragile states?  The case of Nigeria.

Will Venezuela be the next Ukraine?

Tyler Cowen on where to head if you’d like to vote with your feet.

Status quo bias as the main barrier to border flexibility.

(Image source)

Happy 152nd anniversary of the Battle of Fredericksburg! Here’s a picture I took on the way to the reenactment two years ago:

Sorry it’s been a while since the last one of these, been busy with other things.

Watch this great interview with Keli’i Akina of the free-market Grassroot Institute, which is surprisingly favorable to a restoration:

Student activists pulled down the U.S. flag at UH-Hilo and raised the Kingdom’s flag

Dampier on Puerto Rican exit

Michael Tomasky says dump the South. (Please oh please Br’er Fox, don’t throw us into the briar patch!) Chris Bray responds at TheDC.

Confederate flag comes down in Pensacola, along with all others the city has been under except the federal one.

Citadel’s Confederate flag places bowl game in peril

Related: the real winner of 2014 — the Klan.

Meanwhile, SPLC writer murdered by thugs

Congressional Black Caucus holds up Pamunkey tribal recognition because of a probably-inoperative part of their tribal law forbidding miscegenation with black people. (A big part of the story of why it’s taken so long is the Pamunkey initially negotiated its treaties with the Crown.)

Of nanobreweries and free staters

National anarchists are for Long Island secession

Defense bill takes away tribal lands

Political art upsets Iowa SJWs

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Starting to dig into the books that someone has very kindly bought me off my Amazon wish list. I’m a couple of chapters into Felix Morley’s only novel, Gumption Island, which is modeled — the map on the inside of the cover is almost identical to — Gibson Island in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, where he lived and wrote. It’s very charming for an allegorical book; I’ll probably post an excerpt here at some point. Also, I’m a few chapters into Eugene McCarraher’s Christian Critics, about which more will be said here, but I first wanted to take note of something he mentions right in the beginning, that Ralph Adams Cram, the architect, was an early proponent of the Benedict Option — as in, 1909:

The manifold evils that canker the civilization of our own time are explicitly those that monasticism is best fitted to cure, and as a matter of fact, has cured again and again in the past Within this era are no powers of regeneration: atheism, secularism, materialism, intellectual pride and defiance of law are ill tools for building anew the ramparts of the City of God. The impulse must come from without, from God, not from the world; even as it came in such varying degrees and different ways through Benedictines, Cluniacs and Jesuits. When the abandoned insolence of man, mad in his pride of life, has dashed itself to the stars and, falling again, crumbles away in [35/36] impotent deliquescence, then perhaps will come the new prophet, son of S. Benedict (though perhaps in a new habit and with an amended rule), who as in 500 and 1000 and 1500, will release the souls of men from their captivity, and strive again to make all things new in Christ.

There have been a number of smart dissents on the Benedict Option recently, from Jonathan Rauch and Samuel Goldman that are worth reading.

Speaking of cultural disengagement, here’s First Things’ new marriage pledge:

To continue with church practices that intertwine government marriage with Christian marriage will implicate the Church in a false definition of marriage.

Therefore, in our roles as Christian ministers, we, the undersigned, commit ourselves to disengaging civil and Christian marriage in the performance of our pastoral duties. We will no longer serve as agents of the state in marriage. We will no longer sign government-provided marriage certificates. We will ask couples to seek civil marriage separately from their church-related vows and blessings.

ACNA’s new archbishop has advised against signing it. He cites Doug Wilson’s commentary. Ephraim Radner responds to some objections here. Schmitz, Reno have more.

Canadian Anglicans discover the medicine wheel. USCCB endorses beatification of Fr. Paul Wattson

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Almost funny Alaskan secession satire

Montana’s Confederate history

Food prices and Hawaiian independence

The Office of Hawaiian Affairs broke an open-meetings law. This is getting interesting.

Sherman as counterinsurgent

The new solid south

Texas secessionists say Obama’s immigration executive order should prompt a secession vote

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Catalonia’s unofficial referendum has 81 percent voting for independence according to preliminary reports, though many pro-Madrid groups boycotted it. The government also moved in a significant amount of military assets prior to the vote. How Madrid is making things worse.

California + Oregon + Washington = Cascadia. Secede & instantly become Scandinavia of North America: prosperous, sustainable, liberal.

— David Roberts (@drgrist) November 5, 2014

Go read that whole thread, it’s a nice overview of progressives’ ambiguous feelings about secession.

Don Gonyea:

Well, for the Republicans, they are in their best position in the states in a century. For Democrats, they’re in their worst position since something called the Civil War.

The North-South divide is deepening

Marriage and union membership

Why the GOP should embrace Rand Paul’s “conservative realist” foreign policy

Hawaiian restoration activists are continuing to hold the bootlicking Office of Hawaiian Affairs accountable

Independent joins the Arlington County Board

Secessionist joins the Anne Arundel County Board

Left-wing secessionist calls for Portland to leave Maine

Interesting New York partition thread

Ed Sebesta gets quoted in this story on UDC renting a Richmond church

Matthew McConaughey signs on for a movie about the Free State of Jones

Malibu wants its own school district

Rod Dreher: “No bishop will die for religious liberty”

Patrick Deneen in Cato Unbound:

Those Christians and other religious believers who resist the spirit of the age will be persecuted – not by being thrown to lions in the Coliseum, but by judicial, administrative, and legal marginalization.  They will lose many of the institutions that they built to help the poor, the marginalized, the weak, and the disinherited.  But finding themselves in the new imperium will call out new forms of living the Christian witness.  They will live in the favelas, providing care for body and soul that cannot not be provided by either the state or the market.  Like the early Church, they will live in a distinct way from the way of the empire, and their way of life will draw those who perhaps didn’t realize that this was what Christianity was, all along.  When the liberal ideology collapses – as it will – the Church will remain, the gates of Hell not prevailing against it.

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Journalists don’t really know how to talk about secession:

For example, look at how The Root is describing the proposed incorporation of St. George in East Baton Rouge Parish:

The rich, white folk who live in Baton Rouge, La., want to secede and form their own town called St. George.

Or at least that’s how their critics are articulating the initiative, the BBC reports. The secession, of sorts, is being sold as a well-intentioned plan that will allow St. George’s hypothetical residents to gain more control over how their tax dollars are being spent to improve public education and other services. But because St. George’s racial makeup would be 70 percent white, skeptics are seeing the initiative as nothing more than a new-age attempt at white flight or a gerrymandering of sorts.

The problem is, St. George isn’t part of Baton Rouge city, it’s part of East Baton Rouge Parish, and they just want to form a new city within it.

Two treaties, between Hawaii and Spain, and Hawaii and Denmark, which Hawaiian independence advocates claim are still in force.

You know why I love Examiner.com? Because their “Honolulu Political Buzz Examiner” is Michael Salla, who also runs an institute on political relations with extra-terrestrials. Anyway, for what it’s worth he and others are claiming that the feds are going ahead with their plan to recognize the native ancestry roll as a federal tribe. Virtually no Hawaiian independence advocates support the effort.

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