I'm Going to Really Enjoy Being a European

I was just complaining the other day about how Europeans put a splash of cheap red wine in sippy cups for fussy toddlers; apparently, that's taboo here in the States. Fortunately, by the time Thea turns three I'll be able to give her wine, cigarettes and cheap, plastic sandals. At least of you believe former KGB analyst Igor Panarin. From BLDGBlog:

In what sounds to be very obviously an act of wishful projection, a former KGB intelligence analyst turned public intellectual named Igor Panarin has explained to the Wall Street Journal
that the United States only has about 18 months left to live. In the summer of 2010, it will "disintegrate" into six politically separate realms...

And from the Wall Street Journal piece itself:

[Panarin] predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.

In addition to the fact that Canada and Mexico suddenly develop dramatic political and social influence over populations twice their own, I just really appreciate the notion that as a resident of Atlantic America my cash (which will be Euros, thank you) will be worth six times that of the Chinese-led California Republic. The map pretty much tells the story:

There's something to be said about good, clean mapping. It really takes the messiness out of political restructuring.