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Showing posts with label map. Show all posts
Showing posts with label map. Show all posts

The United States of America was a grand experiment, but it is coming to an end. That’s OK. No empire lasts forever. Nearly two hundred and fifty years is a pretty good run. But over those 250 years the landmass and population have grown to be unmanageable. Let’s face it, the kids are all grown up, we’ve developed different interests, and we just don’t love each other anymore. We have irreconcilable differences. It’s time for an amicable divorce. There is no shame in that.

We tried secession once before. Ending slavery in the South was a laudable goal. Keeping the union together? Maybe not. So, before things get completely out of hand as they did in the 1860’s, let’s be adult about this and agree to go our separate ways.


The lines of the six new countries are pretty obvious:
  • Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland become New America.
  • The Confederate States of Dixie comprise Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.
  • Then we have Centeram – Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas.
  • Heading westward we get to the states of Westeram: New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas.
  • Pacifica simply contains California, Oregon, and Washington. Easy.
  • Last, but not least, is, of course, Texas.
I suggest that Alaska and Hawaii, as well as Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and the other assorted territories, each have their own referendums as to which of the above six new countries they would like to join. Or they may want to be independent nations. Alternatively, they could choose to form their own union, or join other existing countries – for example, it would certainly make sense for Alaska to become part of Canada, and all the south pacific island nations might unite - together with the former US islands - to create a single country that will sink into the sea together. And lets not kid ourselves, Hawaiians hate “mainlanders”, so if they want to go, let ‘em go.

In the 2016 election season, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s slogan was, “Stronger Together.” With all due respect, I don’t think that’s true. We hate each other. Our language is full of derogatory terms for the "others" that aren't "us" – hicks, city slickers, northern intellectual elites, carpet baggers, hoi polloi, and so on… We are not one great nation standing together – and we never have been. The US constitution reflects the lack of trust between the original 13 colonies. As America has grown, this has become ever worse – distrust has become disgust.

Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign showed quite clearly that racial, religious, ethnic, and regional hatred never went away – it was just considered inappropriate to show it in public. We are, in fact, weaker together; frustrated, angered, and slowed down by fear and resentment of “other” Americans. There are some fights that are worth fighting, and others that just grind the participants down. This one is the latter.

Fortunately, we’ve already sorted ourselves into discrete regions. Let’s just go ahead and recognize that on the map. Granted, there will be some cost, inconvenience, and confusion involved. Maps will need to be reprinted, along with signs, documents, and so on. Each new country will need a capital, currency, a postal service, army, police, and a judicial system. Each will also need to write its own constitution, or use the obsolete US constitution. Each will need to decide what political system to adopt – a President and Congress, a parliamentary system, or something else – and what portion of the laws of the old USA they want to retain. Treaties will need to be renegotiated, and the UN will need to add more seats.

There will be some interesting questions to consider, such as, is a person a citizen of the region/country where they were born, or of the region/country where they resided at the time of the division. There will need to be agreements in place to allow people to remain where they are, even if they are no longer citizens of that nation. Finally, the new countries will have to allow free trade and open borders for at least the first decade or so.

But these are all details. The USSR broke up into more than a dozen countries. It was painful, no doubt, but they were weaker together. So too with what was once Yugoslavia. While the death toll doesn’t begin to compare to the civil war there, Americans are killing each other over our differences. Let’s learn from those that came before us and break up into the set of nations that will make us happy.

I look forward to being a proud citizen of the nation of Pacifica.


I recently stumbled across a blog post discussing the idea that a lot of people think that there are 52 states in the United States of America. Apparently, the purpose of the blog, “The Mandela Effect”, is to consider why it is that different people remember the same event or historical fact differently. The blog’s author has a theory that people may have different memories because they slide back and forth between alternate realities (or something like that.) I think that the author is serious about this idea - but to be honest, I’m not entirely sure.

In the post in question, she wonders if people might think the US has 52 states because they mistakenly believe that Puerto Rico and Washington D. C. are states. She asks “is this simple confusion or a glimpse into alternate geography in another timestream?” [sic] To stimulate the conversation, she provides illuminating anecdotes from a number of readers.

I would have just left this alone, but, after a brief internet search I found that the question of 50 vs. 52 states has come up repeatedly. You can find it on Ask.com, Yahoo Answers, and even a site entitled “Debunking the Mandala Effect”. Even though I am not a cartographer, sociologist, or psychologist, I couldn’t resist throwing my ring into the hat.

As on The Mandala Effect blog, in the attempts to answer the question, “why do people think that there are 52 states”, one of the most common themes is that some people believe that Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. are states. [FYI – they aren't. At least not yet... in this time-stream. ] I find it highly unlikely that misunderstandings about Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia is the right answer. Here’s why: the intersection between the set of people that believe there are 52 states, those that know that Puerto Rico is related to the USA in some way, and those that know that Washington D. C. isn’t just a city, is vanishingly small. Here is a Venn Diagram to illustrate:


The intersection isn't zero, but it's pretty close.

Granted that my only qualification for answering this question is that I possess a functioning frontal lobe, I believe that this has more to do with two other factors. The first is visual. Here is a fairly ordinary map of the USA – the kind that people run across all the time:



If you have heard that there are 50 states, but you don’t really know much about the geography of the US, you see this big blob cut up into pieces. It is unlikely that you are going to count them. It is easy to assume that there are 50. Then there are two other sets of blobs. I doubt that many viewers think about this consciously, but, somewhere in the back of the mind, over time, it is easy to turn a blob assumed to be made of 50 pieces, plus two other blobs, into 52 states.

The second factor is the way peoples' memories work. Our brains are bombarded with vast amounts of information, some important and some not. It is normal for humans to remember approximations, unless, for some reason, they really need to know a fact with precision. If you don’t have a compelling reason to know how many states make up the United States of America, your brain is likely to store it as a fuzzy "50-ish". This would be true for a great many non-Americans, and a terrifying number of American citizens as well.

So why 52, and not 51, or 53, or 766? First and foremost, there are 52 weeks in a year. We learn this early in life, around the time that we learn all about calendars. Furthermore, in "western” nations we have the number “52” trained into us, because there are 52 playing cards in a standard deck. This exact number is stored because you learned it while playing cards - especially if your father ever taught you “52 pickup.” (Aside: why do I say "your father" and not "a parent"? Because I don't think many mothers are that cruel, and besides, they know that they might be the one that has to "pick up.")


If someone asks you how many states there are, you may recall that it is about 50, but, of course, you want to give a precise number. Your brain’s memory systems start looking for the number. Along the way they bump into the big, bold, shiny number "52". You don’t want to appear “slow”, so as soon as you come up with a number that seems right, you use it. Fifty-two is about 50-ish, so that is the answer you give. If questioned about your answer, self-justification circuits kick in which solidify it in your mind. Also, you just heard someone say that there are 52 states. Even though that someone is you, brains sometimes don’t realize that, and furthermore, as far as your brain is concerned, you are an authoritative source. If you said something, you can believe it.

Voila. A pair of really solid  reasons why a person that doesn’t need to know how many states make up the USA could easily think there are 52, and feel quite convinced that they are correct. No need to slip into a different timestream, the answer is right here.