Friday, November 16, 2012

Secession


We interrupt this program for a secession reality check.

As of last night, there are petitions in seven states urging secession from the United States.  The signature breakdown follows:

Texas                                    108,000 (.421% of state population)
Louisiana                             35,000 (.765% of state population)
Tennessee                          29,000 (.453% of state population)
Georgia                                30,000 (.306% of state population)
North Carolina                   28,000 (.290% of state population)
Florida                                 32,000 (.168% of state population)
Alabama                              28,000 (.583% of state population)
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Total                                      290,000 signatures 

Wow!  290,000 is a pretty hefty number.  That number of people would fill the huge Los Angeles Coliseum (former home of my beloved football Rams) almost three times!  Holy shit!  Dust off your quills and start drafting your constitutions!

 Oh.  Wait.

If I did my math right (and please remember, I suck at math!), 290,000 signatures is only NINETY-THREE ONE THOUSANDTHS of ONE percent of the total population of the United States.

I think the mathematical formula goes something like: 
290,000 x 100 / 311,591,917 = 0.093070450219669851063562730351571

Again – that’s NINETY-THREE ONE THOUSANDTHS of ONE percent of our citizenry.

In closing, I encourage secessionists, and wannabe secessionists to use the numbers to put these numbers, and everything else into perspective. 

Abraham Lincoln once urged us to remember that a "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

1 comment:

Tom Harper said...

There's also a recent survey showing that 25% of all Republicans want their state to secede. But I'm guessing most of that was just idle grumbling and griping. If they felt this strongly enough, they would have signed one of those secession petitions.

It's not gonna happen in any case. We're all gonna have to live together and make it work, whether we like it or not.