Does Austin Texas - (is that where you are?) have a reasonable urban political system or are crack-smoking mayors the norm? Anyway up here in dope-smoking, abortion-having, capital-punishmentless, gay-marrying Canada, we want our politicians to be intelligent, efficient, and hopefully ethical. Leading the pack of candidates in the upcoming mayoral election is a fellow who is so blue blood that his name is actually Tory, John Tory. Running against him is a Chinese woman, Olivia Chow whose husband, Jack Layton, turned around the Socialist party of Canada (New Democratic Party) federally, making them Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, and tragically died shortly after. I'm still in mourning. Tory will win, the Ford brothers will soon fade into oblivion (we hope), and Toronto will continue to squabble about our biggest problem: transit. Subway vs LRT vs whatever. We will continue to cycle into the snowy winter.
Ours is insanely interesting but very polarizing and complex. City council is quite powerful and does a lot of things that make them targets of assassination (by...overdose?) from the Weird Hippy Ultraleft that's still a holdover from the Dazed and Confused era. However if you take a step back you actually realize we're about as lucky as you can get. Someday I will come to Toronto for the Shakespeare festival and I will appreciate my deep knowledge of Toronto political history! For context. Also this, which is so confusingly named that they probably don't even put it in the textbooks.
The War of 1812 is hugely misunderstood by most including me. Some see it as an American victory. At the end of the day, all land was returned and the native people realized that they couldn't trust all these nice folk who said they'd be friends. The Shakespeare Festival is in Stratford Ontario, an hour and a half more or less from Toronto. I heard they were about to make DVDs of their best productions, like the set made by the BBC.
That is definitely a war I have no real knowledge of. I should fix that. I think that's true for so many wars though. For example the Vietnam War (or the American War, from their perspective) is widely considered to be a Vietnamese victory, even though Nike makes shoes there and has for a long time. Not only that, but in my experience Viet Nam is more capitalist than the U.S. For example, there are no state provided services. Like, at all. People pay to send kids to school, for healthcare and a whole bunch of other stuff. In fact, there isn't even food in the hospitals, which require family members to provide food for patients. If that is not a possibility, there are many food carts and stands outside hospitals, none of which will typically have access to utilities. This is one reason why antibiotic-resistant TB is on the rise. Additionally, no one can actually own land. Instead, people lease it from the government for 100 years (I think) with the caveat that the state can reclaim the land at any time, though they must give fair compensation for the property and the things on it. This is one reason why so many people have shops that do little to no business. Anyway, using war to accomplish things doesn't seem to work very well, or at least the goals as outlined by the parties involved rarely seem to be what is actually gained.