Supporters of a plan for California to secede from the union took their first formal step Monday morning, submitting a proposed ballot measure to the state attorney general's office in the hopes of a statewide vote as soon as 2018.
Marcus Ruiz Evans, the vice president and co-founder of Yes California, said his group had been planning to wait for a later election, but the presidential election of Donald Trump sped up the timeline.
"We're doing it now because of all of the overwhelming attention," Evans said.
The Yes California group has been around for more than two years, Evans said. It is based around California taxpayers paying more money to the federal government than the state receives in spending, that Californians are culturally different from the rest of the country, and that national media and organizations routinely criticize Californians for being out of step with the rest of the U.S.
Could California go it alone?
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday November 23 2016, @07:05PM
For years I have held the position that any secession movement that didn't have a plan to have fully weaponized WMD sufficient to implement MAD on day one was on a suicide mission.
Agree. The only other alternative I see is distributing livefeeds of the land so that any invasion is a PR nightmare not worth the territory, but that is its own gamble and for a piece of land as big and valuable as California I don't think it has a serious chance of working. For a small and practically worthless chunk of land, I could see it.
CA has more of the resources for such an effort, but you still have to imagine a bunch of incompetent lefty morons building a nuke and keeping it secret from the NSA all the way to weapons mounted on missiles. Good luck with that guys.
Weaponising them should be the easy part; SpaceX headquarters are in Cali. I don't doubt that Silicone Valley could figure out an atom bomb given time to organize. I doubt they would get that organized before the shit hit the fan, if they tried to secede and were then promptly invaded.
(Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Wednesday November 23 2016, @07:42PM
[...] LLNL designed the following warheads: W27 (Regulus cruise missile; 1955; joint with Los Alamos), W38 (Atlas/Titan ICBM; 1959), B41 (B52 bomb; 1957), W45 (Little John/Terrier missiles; 1956), W47 (Polaris SLBM; 1957), W48 (155-mm howitzer; 1957), W55 (submarine rocket; 1959), W56 (Minuteman ICBM; 1960), W58 (Polaris SLBM; 1960), W62 (Minuteman ICBM; 1964), W68 (Poseidon SLBM; 1966), W70 (Lance missile; 1969), W71 (Spartan missile; 1968), W79 (8-in. artillery gun; 1975), W82 (155-mm howitzer; 1978), B83 (modern strategic bomb; 1979), and W87 (Peacekeeper/MX ICBM; 1982).
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Livermore_National_Laboratory#Nuclear_weapons_projects [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @09:46PM
I think you underestimate how entertaining to many non-Californians it would be to have livefeeds of zealous federal troops shock-and-aweing an insurrection of Californian hippies. You could monetize that and make a killing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @09:55PM
LOL!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @02:35AM
> an insurrection of Californian yuppies.
There are no more California hippies, ftfy. There might be a few old surfer dudes...
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday November 23 2016, @10:17PM
"The only other alternative I see is distributing livefeeds of the land so that any invasion is a PR nightmare not worth the territory,"
How's that working for the Native Americans?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday November 24 2016, @03:47AM
Amend the Constitution to allow Unilateral Secession. Skip the WMDs.