mistermack

I take your comments, yes of course, I'm just giving a different slant on it that's usually skimmed over, rather than attempting an objective comprehensive summary. But I think that some of the factors that you quote are more the things used to motivate people to fight, rather than real underlying political motivations. That's a common feature of most wars. For example, the weak Irish independence movement got a huge boost when the British executed the Easter Rising captives. One was pulled from a hospital bed and tied to a chair to receive the bullets. Before that, there was little appetite in Ireland for independence. After it, support just grew and grew. And the heavy handed tactics of the British just made it inevitable, in the end. But none of that was involved in the initial independence movement.

There's waving, and then there's . . . Uggghhh !

Stopped using it in what? The bombs or the reactors? In the reactors, they will be using a lithium blanket to breed tritium. In the boosted bombs page in wiki it says this : Solid lithium deuteride-tritide has also been used in some cases, but gas allows more flexibility (and can be stored externally) and can be injected into a hollow cavity at the center of the sphere of fission fuel, or into a gap between an outer layer and a "levitated" inner core, sometime before implosion.

The point is that the official version of history is tainted by what people would rather believe, and be told. I'm assuming that Americans know enough of their own history to recognise the point I'm making even if they don't agree with it. I saw a documentary a few days ago, which included analysis of Paul Revere's famous ride, shouting "The British Are Coming". They were abosolutely catagoric in that it never happened, and would never have happened. For a start, he was riding through towns and villages of people who considered themselves British at the time, and he would not have been shouting for fear of apprehension, and he could never have made the ride, in the time, and warned people at the same time. He rode a horse, and delivered a message, and that was it. And it's rather typical of the whole story of the independence process. Fiction being written over facts. The point about the intention of the colonials to expand west should really be common knowledge to Americans, but this quote from wiki illustrates it : Preventing conflict between settlers and Indian tribes west of the Appalachian Mountains also avoided the cost of an expensive military occupation.[44] The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was designed to achieve these aims by refocusing colonial expansion north into Nova Scotia and south into Florida, with the Mississippi River as the dividing line between British and Spanish possessions in America. Settlement was tightly restricted beyond the 1763 limits, and claims west of this line, including by Virginia and Massachusetts, were rescinded despite the fact that each colony argued that their boundaries extended from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.[44] The real truth is that the only people who had political power in the colonies were rich landowners, and they were the very people who stood to make a fortune from westward expansion into indian homelands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War

That's what it boils down to. People are gullible, in every nation. They are fed a version of history that those in power think will solidify and stabilise the national unit and maintain the social order. And it works so well that people absolutely believe the untrue versions of history (and the present day) that they are fed. It's not just North Korea and Japan that practice history-bending indoctrination, it's virtually every country on the planet. Having said that, it's the winners that generally get to write the history, the losers have to just suck it up.

It's far more than that though. Laws can be constantly modified. And anyway, if you choose your own "facts" you abandon reason. Like Donald Trumps claim to have won the last election. If facts don't matter, then he's perfectly right.

They care very much, or they wouldn't keep quoting the constitution like it's some sort of Bible.

Really? To me, it's the same ocean. It's the land that's moved around. The oceans that we know are just names we give to various bits of the ocean.

Don't Americans make far too much of all that "Birth of a Nation" bullshit? Canada and Australia did just fine without a war of independence, and anyway, the true motives for the war are being airbrushed out of existence. From my reading, the British government had put huge money into establishing the colony, and protecting the colonials, but the colonials didn't want to pay any share of it. And the other bone of contention was that the British wanted to expand westwards into the Indian lands more peacefully, by treaty etc, whereas the colonials wanted to drive the Indian nations off their lands by force and try to exterminate them. As they subsequently did. Also, the winning of the war itself was down to the intervention of the French, rather than a glorious struggle by the colonials. History in the US is about as twisted as what's taught in Japan. Why can't people just accept historical facts as they happened?

I doubt if there would be an ice cover without the continent. It's the altitude that maintains the ice, as in Greenland. Without that, it woud probably be like the Arctic, with seasonal variation in partial floating sea-ice cover.

I don't know anything about boosted fission bombs, but from a quick read, it occurred to me that if Tritium is an essential component, then the often repeated claim that fusion doesn't contribute towards production of weapons of war isn't really true. There is a world shortage of Tritium, which they are hoping will be met by producion from fusion plants, once they become operational. So more abundant Tritium will mean smaller, cheaper and more powerful nuclear weapons.

I've been nearly killed twice by electrocution. The first time was in 1953, when I was 3, my brother was six, and my mother told him to get the one-bar electric fire and plug it in to warm the dining room for tea-time. I had a tantrum, I wanted to do it, but my brother wouldn't let me, and I had hold of the bar, through the grill, and he just plugged it in. If you haven't experienced the full 240 volts, you will have no idea of the incredible power that goes through. The electric current caused my muscles to contract in my hand, so I couldn't let go. All I could do was scream, and bounce around the room. And instead of pulling the plug out, my brother went to my mother and told her I was screaming. By the time she pulled the plug out, the fire had heated up, and my hand was fused to it. Pure horror. That's what a lot of people don't realise. If you get a shock through your hand holding something, you won't be able to let go, and chances are you're going to die. It's still my earliest memory, a miracle I didn't die.

What I do is write the post, hilight the bit you want to hide, and then click the eye, and it will just hide the bit you highlighted.

Isn't it a fact that nothing is really "touching" when solid objects push against each other?

That's it ! You should hide your answer, and let others have a go.

That doesn't solve the problem. It's one of those that looks ridiculously easy, but is impossible in reality.

Garbage bag, plastic shopping bag etc etc. It sounds like it should be possible, but it turns out it can't be done.

It reminds me of a puzzle my Irish Uncle once set, when he claimed that it's impossible to break an ordinary normal glass bottle inside an ordinary empty polythene bag. It looks at first sight that it's obviously possible, but it turned out he was right.

My weird mental arithmatic went like this :

I don't see why it should be surprising that a higher minimum wage creates jobs. People on minimum wage tend to spend all of what they earn. People on higher incomes save and invest more of their money. So more money in circulation at the lower end tends to create jobs, whereas money at the higher end tends to inflate capital asset values.