“I keep pressing the space bar on my keyboard, but I’m still on Earth”*…
Anyone can start their own micronation. The hard part is getting the snobbish macronations to accept you into their club. Wikipedia has a list of about 90 micronations from the past and present…
The founder of the Nation of Celestial Space (aka Celestia) wanted nothing more than to have the United Nations recognize his micronation. James Thomas Mangan, a 52-year-old Chicago publicist, self-help author, and industrial designer founded the Nation of Celestial Space in 1948, claiming the entirety of outer space, ‘‘specifically exempting from claim every celestial body, whether star, planet, satellite, or comet, and every fragment.” In other words, Celestia owned no matter — just the empty space the matter occupied. (Celestia’s charter made an exception for the Moon, Venus, and Mars and its two moons as “Proclaimed Protectorates.”)…
Mangan registered Celestia with the Cook County, Illinois Recorder and mailed letters to the secretaries of state from 74 countries and the United Nations asking them to formally recognize the Nation of Celestial Space. They ignored him. “Only my wife, my son, and my partner see the depth of it,” he told a reporter in the May 1949 issue of Science Illustrated. “This is a new, bold, immodest idea.” In 1958 Mangan took it upon himself to travel to the UN building in New York City and run the Celestia flag up a pole alongside the other national flags flying there. UN security personnel quickly removed the flag and told Mangan not to try it again…
From the remarkable Mark Frauenfelder (@Frauenfelder), the tale of the man who declared the entire universe to be a country under his protection: “Dictator of the Vacuum of Space“– a feature in Mark’s newsletter, The Magnet, eminently worthy of subscription.
* anonymous
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As we celebrate sovereignty, we might rejoice in the naively noble: it was on this date in 1605 that El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha ( or The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha— aka Don Quixote), the masterwork of Miguel de Cervantes (and of the Spanish Golden Age) and a founding work of Western literature, was first published. Widely considered the first modern novel published in the Western world, it is also considered by many (still) to be the best; it is in any case the second most translated work in the world (after the Bible).
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