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[Bouchart]

Eh, for the time being there's no serious talk of any state leaving the union.  I believe the governor of Texas made a flippant remark about secession a couple of years back but nothing other than that.

Now, if the municipal bond market melts down and the federal government decides to bail out individual states or if the Federal Reserve starts buying munis then talk might start up again.  I don't expect that to happen this year, though.

[Sowelu]

California is the last state in the Union that would ever want to secede.  They're up the river without a paddle, why screw themselves out of their only potential support network?

[Bouchart]

California is the last state in the Union that would ever want to secede.  They're up the river without a paddle, why screw themselves out of their only potential support network?

Yeah I agree with this.  But if they get bailed out, other states are gonna raise a huge fuss over it, or demand their own free cash.

By the way, Illinois is in even worse shape than California.

[Tellemurius]

i beg to differ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan

[Nadaka]

California is the last state in the Union that would ever want to secede.  They're up the river without a paddle, why screw themselves out of their only potential support network?

Yeah I agree with this.  But if they get bailed out, other states are gonna raise a huge fuss over it, or demand their own free cash.

By the way, Illinois is in even worse shape than California.

I would like to point out that California is one of the handful of states that gets less money reimbursed from the Federal Government than it pays in taxes. If they ceded, they would no longer have a budget shortfall (at least until they need to raise an army to fight off the inevitable Mexican reclamation).

[Ibid Straydrink]

Mexico will just be annexed, and the problem will be ignored.

[Taricus]

Looks like the egyptian government might be sending the police in.

EDIT: Now the US has to watch out for unionists as well as the MB, odds are they won't do anything now (Talking from an inexperienced viewpoint.)

[Aqizzar]

Hey guys, Egypt is still burning.  The government is still playing musical chairs with appointments.  The Suez Canal workers went on strike, along with labor unions throughout the city.  In Port Said, thousands of protesters filling the streets, and broke into government offices, looting their computer systems and burning them on the street.  Five people died in a clash with the police at a riot in a town down the Nile.  Alexandria completely ground to a halt under Cairo-styled protests.  Tahrir Square is still an autonomous city in its own right.  Meanwhile, gas, water, and power services are falling offline as large numbers of people, especially labor and service unions, are simply refusing to go back to work.

And now Mubarak and Omar Suleiman are warning about "the dark bats of the night" descending on dissidents if they don't go home and be quiet.  There's rumors of declaring martial law, but the military has reaffirmed its insistence that it will not use violence to enforce order.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm still in a sort of shock about all of this. A real and true outbreak of democratic revolt in our time, spanning several nations. This wikipedia article has a good map of the situation in general.

I mean, this whole thing is crazy! There were protests because of all of this in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia. You know, the 21st century kingdom that has some of the world's worst civil and human rights? They were small, quickly broken up, and not focused on a democratic overthrow of their monarch, but they still happened.

This is what happens when you oppress people for too long. They just snap, and this time they snapped all at once. However this turns out, I'm firmly convinced at this point that it will turn out better than before. Just how better remains to be seen.

[Sowelu]

Hell balls.  The news here has started losing interest, thank you for the update.

[Zorgn]

And now Mubarak and Omar Suleiman are warning about "the dark bats of the night" descending on dissidents if they don't go home and be quiet.

  The hell does that mean?

[Bouchart]

I'm still in a sort of shock about all of this. A real and true outbreak of democratic revolt in our time, spanning several nations.

A lot of people say this but I'm inclined to think that this will lead down the path of the Russian Revolution of 1917.  The czar was overthrown and a democratic interim government was installed, only to be overthrown by violent radicals.

These revolts are happening in areas of the world with rather small middle classes, and huge underclasses of desperate, uneducated, illiterate, sick, hungry people.  Those underclasses don't care for abstract political philosophy.  They need staple goods.  And they won't have the patience to sort through a messy transition to representative government.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

And now Mubarak and Omar Suleiman are warning about "the dark bats of the night" descending on dissidents if they don't go home and be quiet.

  The hell does that mean?

Either that Mubarak still thinks he has the power of using vague threats to scare people, or that he's fucking cracked and thinks he can summon giant bats to kill the protesters at a moment's notice.

I'm still in a sort of shock about all of this. A real and true outbreak of democratic revolt in our time, spanning several nations.

A lot of people say this but I'm inclined to think that this will lead down the path of the Russian Revolution of 1917.  The czar was overthrown and a democratic interim government was installed, only to be overthrown by violent radicals.

These revolts are happening in areas of the world with rather small middle classes, and huge underclasses of desperate, uneducated, illiterate, sick, hungry people.  Those underclasses don't care for abstract political philosophy.  They need staple goods.  And they won't have the patience to sort through a messy transition to representative government.

A lot of people say this but I'm inclined to think that this will lead down the path of the American Revolution of 1776. The British control of the Thirteen Colonies was overthrown and a democratic federal government installed, which to this day has not been overthrown by violent radicals and replaced with a totalitarian regime.

These revolts are happening in areas of the world with rather small middle classes that will prosper and grow under a modern democratic regime, and huge underclasses of desperate, uneducated, illiterate, sick, hungry people who know that their lot in life can and must change. These underclasses don't care for abstract political philosophy, but those that do can rally them through imparting hope for the future. They need staple goods that their authoritarian regime never supplied and never will, but that a democratic government might. And while some say that they won't have the patience for a messy transition to represenative government, this kind of thing has happened in the past and is happening at this very moment in Tunisia. History repeats, as they say, and thus I'm not too worried.

[Sowelu]

And now Mubarak and Omar Suleiman are warning about "the dark bats of the night" descending on dissidents if they don't go home and be quiet.

  The hell does that mean?

Either that Mubarak still thinks he has the power of using vague threats to scare people, or that he's fucking cracked and thinks he can summon giant bats to kill the protesters at a moment's notice.

Oh man, sigged.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

A lot of people say this but I'm inclined to think that this will lead down the path of the American Revolution of 1776. The British control of the Thirteen Colonies was overthrown and a democratic federal government installed, which to this day has not been overthrown by violent radicals and replaced with a totalitarian regime.

The American revolution took place in a geographically isolated, unimportant backwater, and was instigated and led by wealthy businessmen who already effectively controlled everything. We don't see anything like it happen anywhere else. France descended into bloody anarchy, then rose into an Imperial dictatorship, before collapsing and returning to a Monarchy, before collapsing and returning to an Imperial dictatorship under the same dictator, before collapsing and returning to the Monarchy again, before collapsing into a republic, and so on. England just slowly changed over time. Germany was overthrown by external powers and had a puppet regime put in place on both sides, though it's since grown out of it. We see, in some cases, long term stability after a revolution, but always in the hands of a particularly skilled dictator. Cuba is kind of the best case scenario we're looking at, and my bet's on it ending up much worse.

Egypt is a poor state in the middle of the biggest clusterfuck in the already clusterfuck ridden field of global geopolitics. It is surrounded on all sides by violent radicals who have a history of seizing power wherever there is a power vacuum. It's right next to Israel, who'll no doubt meddle to keep their neighbor weakened and off balance, and not much farther from Saudi Arabia, the source of most of the funding violent radical groups receive.