Re: Break-even point for home electric generator powered by natural gas? What about NG-powered AC compressor? - Page 3

 

And it was still a colony then.  Great Britain's colony.

On Tue, 06 Dec 2005 19:38:54 -0500, mike wilcox


Science seeks to make theories that        
are so beautiful, elegant, and logical    
that Nature is flattered and acquiesces    

 

mike wilcox wrote:

Hell, in 1995 Michael Moore invaded Canada.

--
        If John McCain gets the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination,
           my vote for President will be a write-in for Jiang Zemin.

 

Chris Lewis wrote:

Not a word in there about England recognizing the USA.  England did not
treat US as a sovereign nation until after the War of 1812.  It
recognized the individual states as sovereign *states*.

The page you reference does not say England stopped boarding ships, nor
did it issue orders to stop doing so, it says they (Britain) had
announced that it *would* revoke its orders.  No telling when they'd
get around to doing that.  Probably sometime after they would get
around abiding by the terms of the Treaty of Paris and withdraw their
troops from the agreed upon land.


collapsed

So you agree the US didn't lose it.


us?

Apply the same standards the other way.  By this point, the English
Navy has been commiting acts of war for years.  Was the United States
supposed to "sit around twiddling our thumbs"?

 


But so did those states!  Texas still does! ;-)

[That's not as sarcastic as it sounds.  The US states considered themselves
far more autonomous then than they do now.  The US couldn't raise an army -
legally they could, but, in reality, it was by the states.]
 

Well, it was only 2 days - that was hardly enough time for anyone
to do anything about it.  Nobody on this side of the pond knew
anything about that for a few weeks.
 

Canada collapsed

They didn't lose any territory out of it - a draw on that basis.

But, let's step back and look at it strictly and simply from the perspective
of goals:

- The US started the war to redress certain wrongs, and invade/conquer Canada.
- Canada "reacted" to that threat, with the goal being to repell the invasion.

Then achievements:

- The "wrongs" were mostly moot, and the invasion failed.
- Canada repelled the invasion.

Depending on how you define things, that's either a win for us (we achieved
our goals), or a draw (we didn't make you lose territory).

In reality, it was a remarkably dumb war.  If the timing had been better,
there'd have been no war.  The war was a remarkable series of blunders,
sheer luck (freakish occurances during the naval battles), and several strokes
of absolute brilliance - ie: the taking of Detroit[*], the defence of Niagara,
and the most important one of all: the US capturing a draw at the treaty
of Ghent[+].  Without that, you'd have been screwed.


on us?
 

So you invade _us_.  Makes sense, maybe.

[+]Ghent happened simply because Britain had just finished the war
with France, and were faced with the unpopularity of more years of heavy
taxation sending large numbers of just-released battle hardened troops to
North America.

Throughout the war, there were at most 3,000 British regulars
in Canada[=].  If Ghent hadn't happened, there would have
been 30,000 more on the way within months.  But Britain was only
interested in finishing it - and didn't even know that we were
winning ground (again, that dang trans-atlantic communications lag).
Heck, nobody knew til weeks later that the war was over - the
Battle of New Orleans took place 2 weeks after the war was over.
[Which is just as well, because we screwed the pooch on that one.]

[*] An early implementation of psychological warfare.  Ridiculously
small force gets their even smaller number of indians irregulars to
march back and forth making lots of noise just out of sight.  The
American commander, remembering full well how pissed off the Indians
were about getting massacred during the American push west, figured
their only salvation was to surrender to the Brits and plead that
they be protected from the Indians.  So he surrendered.  Boy was he
embarrassed to find out that he had been surrendered to a mere handful
of troops/irregulars who were laughing themselves silly.

[=] During the first two years, the fighting on our side was
carried out almost exclusively by the British regulars and the Indians
they had helping them.  It wasn't until the burning of towns in Niagara
that fighting the war became popular, and the British, French, and UEL
colonists pitched in too.
--
Chris Lewis, Una confibula non set est
It's not just anyone who gets a Starship Cruiser class named after them.

 

Chris Lewis wrote:

[snippage, to try to reduce the size of the post.  My last post on this
very off-topic subject]


I agree with you.  The War of 1812 changed that.


I disagree that the wrongs were moot.  The USA took on a superpower
that still had thoughts of re-capturing it and backed it down.  Sure,
Britian could have spent more money and sent more troops.  They could
have done that back in 1783, too.


on us?

Well, who is "us"?  At that point.. now, I've been saying England
because Mother England ruled everything, but it would be proper to say
Great Britain and that includes her colonies.  It would have difficult
for the US troops to invade the English homeland.  (Although I believe
American pirate ships did raid the British Isles and one was captured
in Wales)

So, Canada was the convenient place to strike at Britain.

So, if you include yourself as part of Britain, sure, it does make
sense.  And British troops from Canada did invade the USA.

But anyway, the first aggression was Britain attacking on US soil.


And the USA could have continued the war in Vietnam but we were faced
with the unpopularity...


Or one of those remarkable blunders.


The atrocities at the River Raisin started motivating the US side as
well.