Posted on 11/17/2008 4:53:59 PM PST by JACKRUSSELL
To: The Citizens of the United States of America
From: Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
In light of your immediate failure to financially manage yourselves and also, in recent years, your tendency to elect incompetent Presidents of the United States and therefore your inability to govern yourselves, We hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately. (You should look up ‘revocation’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.)
Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except Kansas, which she does not fancy).
Your new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, will appoint a Governor for America without the need for further elections.
Congress will be disbanded. A questionnaire may be circulated sometime next year to determine whether you noticed.
To aid in the transition to a British Crown dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:
1. The letter ‘U’ will be reinstated in words such as ‘colour’, ‘favour’, ‘labour’, and ‘neighbour’. Likewise, you will learn to spell ‘doughnut’ without skipping half the letters, and the suffix ‘-ize’ will be replaced by the suffix ‘-ise’. Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels.
2. Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as ‘like’ and ‘you know’ is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. There is no such thing as U.S. English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take into account the reinstated letter ‘U’ and the elimination of ‘-ize’.
3. July 4th will no longer be a holiday.
4. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns, lawyers, or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that you are not quite ready to be independent. Guns should only be used for shooting grouse. If you can not sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist, then you are not ready to shoot grouse.
5. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable peeler, although a permit will be required if you do wish to carry one.
6. All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will start driving on the left side of the road, effective immediately. At the same time, you will also begin using the metric system immediately, no conversion tables will be allowed. Both roundabouts and the metric system will help you understand the British sense of humour.
7. The former U.S.A. will adopt the U.K. prices on petrol (which you have been calling gasoline) of roughly $10/U.S. gallon. Get used to it.
8. You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not real chips, and those things you insist on calling potato chips are properly called crisps. Real chips are thick cut, fried in animal fat, and dressed not with catsup but with malt vinegar.
9. The cold, tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually beer at all. Henceforth, only proper British Bitter will be referred to as beer, and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referred to as Lager. New Zealand beer is also acceptable, as New Zealand is pound for pound the greatest sporting nation on earth and this can only be due to the beer. They are also part of the British Commonwealth - see what it did for them. American brands will now be referred to as Near-Frozen Gnat’s Urine, so that all can be sold without risk of further confusion.
10. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as good guys. Hollywood will also be required to cast English actors to play English characters. Watching Andie MacDowell attempt English dialogue in Four Weddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to having one’s ears removed with a cheese grater.
11. You will cease playing American football. There are only two kinds of proper football; one that you call soccer, and rugby (dominated by the New Zealanders). Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which has some similarities to American football but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like a bunch of nancies).
12. Further, you will stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the World Series for a game which is not played outside of America. (Since only 2.1% of you are aware there is a world beyond your borders, your error is understandable.) You will learn cricket, and we will let you face the Australians first (a neighbouring country of New Zealand) to take the sting out of their deliveries.
13. You must tell us who killed JFK. It’s been driving us mad.
14. An internal revenue agent from Her Majesty’s Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all monies due (retroactive to 1776).
15. Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 p.m. with proper cups and saucers (never mugs), with high quality biscuits (cookies) and cakes, and with strawberries and cream when in season.
God Save the Queen.
In Heaven..
The British are the police,
The Germans are the engineers,
The French are the chefs,
The Italians are the lovers, and
The Swiss put it all together.
In Hell...
The German are the police,
The French are the engineers,
The British are the chefs,
The Swiss are the lovers, and
The Italians put it all together.
Except the first time you had the French, the Dutch and the Spanish backing you up, and the second time was a draw at best, or a loss when you consider that Britain’s principle aim during the war was to protect Canada from being annexed by the manifest destineers who pushed for the war in the first place.....
Your Heaven/Hell is good too.
JACKRUSSEL, Irefuse to call a traffic circle a “roundabout.”
Honestly, I think she’s bound to do better than Obama!
No I thought this designer dress was just ugly..someone on a thread on election night described it as a blood clot and I nearly had to buy a new keyboard!
Well the dress did resemble a black widow spider..red sort of indented belly...and considering who had it on..oh be nice now, CG...well nah go ahead we don’t like the witch and she won’t be our trendsetter!
. . . A question for Mr. Jack Russell — might thee be, Her Majesty’s lead dog?
I forgot to include in my remark that most winners wear something at least a little patriotic in color scheme..what is with the red and black? School colors or something?
It’s going to be an interesting four years. For sure.
Maybe we should all get black and red blind folds so we don’t have to see it.
Those are ‘power colors’ ;)
I think this is the effect they were going for. Don't you?
Sleep Shades
Annexing Canada was not a goal, but a strategy to hurt the British Empire. The casus belli was British impressment of American sailors, restricting our free trade with France, and the arming of Indians. It was thought that Canadians would view us as, uh... well, as liberators. So we only captured a small area of Canada near Detroit. No big deal; that wasn’t why we went to war.
Considering that by the time the Treaty of Ghent was signed, impressment had ended, free trade was restored, and Indians were no longer being supplied arms, the War of 1812 can be considered an American victory.
There was considerable support within the British Parliment for an offer to cede the territories of Upper and Lower Canada to the US in time period preceding the 1837 Rebellion. The motivation was that Britain was making significant profits in its trade with the US, but losing vast sums of money trying to maintain her Canadian territories. The discussions continued up to the beginning of the US Civil War at which time Britain broke off negotiations lest they be seen as taking sides in the conflict.
I’m afraid the idea that the war of 1812 was an American victory is nothing more than spin and propoganda. Britain didn’t want the war, they were rather busy with more pressing issues, as you probably know.
The issue of impressment was sorted before the war, but war had already been declared by the time the news reached the US. However, the war-mongers didn’t want to stop the ball once it had gotten rolling, and make no mistake, their aim was to conquer or rather ‘liberate’ British North America, which Jefferson cockily suggested was simply a ‘matter of marching’, but it turned out the Canadians didn’t want ‘liberating’, not just because they were full of British Empire Loyalists who had been driven from the 13 colonies after the War of Independence, but because they didn’t like invading armies rampaging around their homes any more than anyone else. After the Battle of Queenston Heights in October 1812, the American hopes for taking Canada were effectively dashed, and from then on, most of the fighting took place on American soil.
Considering that Britain didn’t want the war, and the Americans wanted to conquer Canada but failed to do so, the fact that the Treaty of Ghent merely maintained the status quo as Britain had wanted all along, I am of the opinion that it was in fact a British Victory, because British war aims were defensive, and American war aims were aggressive, and if you embark on an aggressive war with the intention of expanding your borders and throwing out a neighbouring power, fail in those aims, and end the war fighting defensively on your own territory to try and stop the invaded party taking too much revenge, I struggle to see how that can be interpreted as a victory. It’s like having a fight and claiming you won because you managed to cover your ass with your hands so it didn’t hurt so much when you got it kicked....
I think it depends on where you’re from when considering the case for war and what the outcome can be classified. What was taught in my school was the aforementioned impressment, free trade with France, and arming Indians.
From what I remember, and in conflict with what you have written, impressment did not stop until the end of the British-French Napoleonic war. The whole point was to punish America for trading with France when the British were at war with them. Hence impressment and restricting free trade.
Perhaps you are British or Canadian. You didn’t set up a about page. Ever stop and consider that your vantage of the War of 1812 could be spin and propaganda as well? You were taught/read on your own that the goal of America was to annex Canada, I was taught that annexing Canada was to hurt the British and not a goal.
So to you it looks like a British victory. Using my case for war, it was an American victory. Doesn’t matter to me. If we use your metrics, the Americans may have lost the War of 1812, but then that means we actually won the Korean War. Sounds good to me.
PS, here’s that link about the repealing of the orders in council, which didn’t go up properly in my previous post...
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