ND resident here: We don't get a lot of shiny spotlight moments, but we do have a lot of based common sense!

And we have farming and ranching, and lots of energy just waiting to be pulled out of the ground. We had plenty of missles too until they were decommissioned. (I always thought it would be pretty amazing in a scary sort of way to be driving along rural ND and see those silos open up to shoot the missles into the sky.) We'd make a pretty decent little independent country.