Imagine Jon Stewart if he gave a damn. He's like Howard Zinn after 12 beers.

The United States is a rogue state violating international law in many, many ways that California wouldn't have to if it seceded and became a nation.

I'm not convinced that the people of Arizona as a nation couldn't do better to protect equal rights for all than the people of Arizona as part of the United States, which is actually not helping them much.

I think the election of Donald Trump, if you want to call it an election, was unimaginable to most people, which is part of how it happened.

California, like anywhere else on Earth, should have the right to secede whether the United States likes it or not. The preferences of the other 49 states and Washington DC is not relevant. That was the position of the United States government on Yugoslavia and other places around the world but not on Ukraine. However, morality and the law as I understand it are that any people should have the right to leave, just as explained in the initial words of the US Declaration of Independence.

If we think that we can somehow gain control of the US government, bring it under popular, enlightened progressive control, preserve a habitable climate, and rein in the dangers of nuclear and other warfare, then we should. However, if we think it's more likely that California can achieve those goals by secession, then we should go down that path. There's no question. It's an absolute moral imperative.

I can't say with certainty that slavery would have ended more quickly and more completely if the South had been allowed to leave and escaped former slaves had been allowed to remain free, and the North and the rest of the world had been a positive influence on the South. However, it's certainly a possibility that it would have ended sooner if the southern slave owners had agreed to a system of compensated emancipation and freed the slaves without a war and without secession, as most nations that ended slavery did. That absolutely would have been preferable to the Civil War as it happened.