F-14 being destroyed instead of...

wrote:
This would make Winnipeg a bit warmer, among other improvements.
Large-scale mutations wouldn't get noticed here either.


Tell me about it; I've seen photos of Jane Siberry and k.d. lang. :-)

It's likely that only *part* of Quebec would have left. Simply put,
if Canada is divisible, then so is Quebec. Several townships declared
before the last referendum that they would stay if Quebec seperated.
The entire northern half of the province would likely have stayed.
Same with the western part, and the area north of Ottawa where all the
federal civil servents live. We'd put a fence and cameras around the
rest and watch with amusement.


Oh-oh, I can see it now...constant squabbles over "The Buckingham Corridor".
Then Quebec's anschluss of New Brunswick, the French puppet government
in Nova Scotia, the amphibious invasion of Newfoundland (Operation Swift
Escargot) and all-out war with Great Britain.


We already have two perfect excuses for invasion - to save the baby harp
seals from being clubbed to death, and bring democracy to the Inuit at
gunpoint, as was done in our "liberation" of Iraq.


Thanks heavens! We were worried you'd return Celine Dion.


She's down in Gitmo torturing prisoners with severe and repeated
applications of her ego.
This is known as "Celineboring", and it may be illegal under the Geneva
Conventions.
Her singing definitely is.


There are far too may oil and gas resources in Canada for its own good,
and those need "liberating" also.


G.W. Bush: "Surrender pronto, of we'll level Toronto!"


That's way too articulate for him to say. Two of those words have three
syllables

Isn't that how Putin just claimed the north pole?


I just had this horrible image of a little boy waking up on Christmas
morning to find Putin kissing his stomach, and giving him a
polonium-laced candy cane.

He already arranged the theft of the north magnetic pole - after
residing in northern Canada since it was discovered, it recently
motored out of Canadian territory heading for Siberia.


Giant Russki Tesla Coils:
http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007...allations.html
'nuff said.
"All your magnetic poles are belong to us!"
But HAARP is now finished and should pull it back.


God knows this; so should Canada.


He hasn't been calling us to staff meetings since the same-sex
marriage thing.


Funny, and you'd think with that little David-Jonathan thing in the Old
Testament...
Go figure.


Many Canadians shall be scalped once they enter The Tepee Of Chance! ;-)


It won't work. We know this; it was a failed game show on the CBC
back in the 1970's.


Time to play Beer Hunter, eh?
You get the Molson, I'll get the toques.

Pat

It's already Canadian policy that a province can leave after a simple
referendum. Make the offer, and I'm sure someone will get the
referendum rolling.


IIRC, Quebec had such a referendum about 15 years ago, and it almost
passed. There was some speculation that large portions of the English
speaking Canada to the west might decide to then merge with the USA, or
maybe it was that that would be an outcome to be feared... But if that
did happen, we'd lose the distinction of the USA being one of a very few
countries with a discontinuity of its territory on the same landmass
(Alaska and CONUS, aka the lower 48).

sort of like
a sandwich with decent white bread on the top and bottom, but full of
wriggling slimy eels.

There's probably a big market in Japan for sandwiches like that! :-)

You don't have a Second Amendment to ignore, do you?


No, we don't. But then, we aren't under the illusion that militias count
for much in modern warfare. In fact, despite the romantic illusions, they
didn't count for much in late-18th-century warfare either, which is one
reason why the US lost so many battles in the War of Independence -- too
much faith in militias and not enough effort to raise and train a sizable
professional army. Their importance has diminished even further since.
(And yes, this applies just as strongly to resisting home-grown government
oppression as to fighting off foreign rule.) Weapons are not enough;
effective fighting requires training, organization, and discipline too,
and militias just don't do that well.

I had heard that out in rural areas, individuals with firearms were
acting like snipers and guerillas to harass the British Army. One guy
hides behind trees and brush and picks of a few officers. Seems the
snipers were pretty good at deer hunting, so picking off enemy soldiers
wouldn't be much of a stretch in marksmanship. A little like Vietnam
or Iraq. And supposedly eventually England decided that we weren't
worth the trouble anymore, that there was no gold or silver or anything
else of value here anyway...

And having a 2nd Amendment would be a way to tell the rest of the world
that, if you try to invade us, sure, you'd get in, but the above snipers
would be a real PITA...

robert casey wrote:

IIRC, Quebec had such a referendum about 15 years ago, and it almost
passed. There was some speculation that large portions of the English
speaking Canada to the west might decide to then merge with the USA

Of course, there was also speculation after the last presidential
election that large portions of the US might decide to merge with
Canada, e.g.,

http://www.the-tribulation-network.com/images/map06.JPG

--
Dave Michelson

"Henry Spencer" wrote in message
...
But keeping it in flying condition is spectacularly expensive, and gives
you nothing in performance or glamor that you couldn't get from much
cheaper aircraft.

Henry, you are spectacularly wrong here. *Particularly* for an aircraft that
saw combat. There are some folks out there that *would* buy an F-14
specifically because it saw combat in a war that still rests in common
memory.

Personally, I don't see anyone who actually flew one in combat buying one,
on account of it being monumentally stupid, for the reasons you mentioned
above, and folks smart enough to drive one wouldn't be that stupid...

"robert casey" wrote in message
nk.net...


It's already Canadian policy that a province can leave after a simple
referendum. Make the offer, and I'm sure someone will get the
referendum rolling.


IIRC, Quebec had such a referendum about 15 years ago, and it almost
passed. There was some speculation that large portions of the English
speaking Canada to the west might decide to then merge with the USA, or
maybe it was that that would be an outcome to be feared... But if that
did happen, we'd lose the distinction of the USA being one of a very few
countries with a discontinuity of its territory on the same landmass
(Alaska and CONUS, aka the lower 48).

I think we could live with that. :-)

Interesting trivia, the US has now gone the longest period ever between
adding states to the Union.

We're losing momentum here.

In article ,
OM wrote:
It wasn't then a clear-cut issue, because the North
was not yet officially *against* slavery: the Northern position then was
that the war was about national unity, not slavery.

...Most kids in school are taught that from the first shot, the War
of Northern Agression was about one thing and one thing only: freeing
the slaves. It clearly wasn't. Slavery wasn't the cause from the git-go...

Careful here. Those are two slightly different issues.

Correct in that ending slavery was never the North's major official goal,
and was officially an irrelevant side issue until the Emancipation
Proclamation brought it in as a weapon (both to encourage unrest in the
South, and to keep the European powers out of the war).

(And on the flip side, while the Deep South seceded to maintain slavery,
the mid-latitude states -- especially, and significantly, Virginia --
seceded mainly over "States' Rights" issues, in response to Lincoln's
decision to reunite the country by force. Neither the South nor the North
was a single monolithic bloc with uniform priorities and motivations.)

However, I think it is nevertheless incorrect to say that slavery wasn't
the *cause*. Because for pretty well all the obvious causes, if you look
into what caused *them*, slavery was at the bottom of it. Yeah, a large
part of the South seceded over States' Rights, but the States' Rights
issues were things that could have been sorted out by negotiation and
compromise... with one fundamentally-unresolvable exception, slavery,
which kept wrecking attempts at peaceful solutions. Yes, the federal
government was growing in power at the expense of the states... partly
because anti-slavery forces were building it up as a weapon against the
slave states, which were so totally controlled by pro-slavery forces that
reform from within was impossible. (E.g., there was no point in mailing
anything advocating an anti-slavery position to a Southern address,
because no Southern postmaster would deliver it.) The North and South
disagreed on various things, but slavery was invariably either the root
cause of the clash, or the reason why it couldn't be resolved quietly.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:
In The Federalist Papers, the primary driving force for the Second
Amendment was to insure that the states had independent militias to
defend themselves against a president and federal government who might
raise an army and use it to inflict their will upon them...like Lincoln
did, for instance.

And as Jefferson Davis increasingly found himself doing, driven by the
exigencies of war, to the dismay of Confederate governors who thought a
strong federal government was something they'd left behind when they
seceded.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

On Mon, 16 Jul 2007 10:09:18 -0500, Pat Flannery
wrote:

In The Federalist Papers, the primary driving force for the Second
Amendment was to insure that the states had independent militias to
defend themselves against a president and federal government who might
raise an army and use it to inflict their will upon them...like Lincoln
did, for instance.

....The problem with the FP and its leading to the 2A is that there
wasn't any provision in either that called for the states to *train*
their militias. They basically left it up to the militiamen to
scrounge up their own training, and even that was sparse in those
days. That's why the militias during the Revolution weren't anywhere
near as effective as they should have been. It's one thing to know how
to shoot game, but when the game can shoot back *and* has pretty damn
good aim, then that tends to break up a forward advance by those
who've got no real understanding of what war is about and what it
entails.

....On the other hand, you can argue that maybe it was a good thing
that a "2.5th Amendment" wasn't incorporated that would have called
for state militas to be permanent and well-trained. Nixon, Carter and
Clinton would have been hanging from the nearest oak tree!

OM
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