On Monday, October 13, 2014 9:07:18 AM UTC-5, Michel Boucher wrote:
> wrote in
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> > Happy Thanksgiving Dave, Michel and all the others
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> I have no family in town this weekend. My wife resturns from her
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> umpteenth jaunt to Gullyvornia Thursday morning at 00h15. So I
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> made plans with an old friend to go to an afghan restaurant for
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> lunch today. Thanksgiving korma, rice, naan. I'm all for it :-)
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> Some might be interested to know that the first Thanksgiving in
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> North America was performed not by the pilgrims in 1622 but
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> rather by Martin Frobisher in 1578, fourty-four years earlier
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> while anchored in what became known as Frobisher Bay (now
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> Nunavut).
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> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksg...ada%29#History
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> The US-style Thanksgiving was imported to what became Canada by
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> Loyalists escaping the iniquities of brutal rebellion against the
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> legitimate monarch.
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George III was barely the legitimate monarch of Britain. He was German,
crazy, and unconcerned with the best interests of the American colonists.
If he had strongly supported suffrage for the American colonists
(representation in the British Parliament), who knows? The USA might have
stayed British, and ended up like Canada, Australia, New Zealand...with a
British monarch on our coinage.

There still might have been an American Civil War, but with the British
fully in alliance with the northern territories over the slavery issue,
the South would have been easily defeated, and the British colonies in N.
America might not include a border between the USA and Canada.

I resent that border. The one time that I crossed it, I didn't need a
passport, but now I would, and while I see Canadians as citizens of a
separate political nation, I do not see us as having any more than an
artificial difference culturally, as the northern tier of U.S. states are
much like Canada, just as the U.S. southwest is greatly influenced by
Hispanic culture, and the American South still has major cultural
distinctions. The idea that someone from New Brunswick can't casually
cross the artificial border into Maine is crazy.

As a resident of a Midwestern U.S. city, I have more in common with
residents of Ontario than with those who reside in Jackson, Mississippi.

I opposed the NAFTA, but would have wholeheartedly supported an economic
alliance with Canada, not because of any prejudice against Hispanics, but
because the USA and Canada are intrinsically bound anyway. Mexico? Not so
much, because Mexico has had a bad record for democracy and workers' rights.
I am, like you, a moderate Socialist, but I call myself a Hennist. I believe
in The Little Red Hen--full employment with reasonable equity, class struggle
with compromise, and appreciation for the contributions of insightful
investors, workers, artists and artisans, inventors and intellectuals.

--Bryan
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> Socialism never took root in America because the
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> poor there see themselves not as an exploited
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> proletariat but as temporarily embarassed
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> millionaires. - John Steinbeck