Either way, I have a hard time believing the LA is in the saddest category....everyone here seems to generally be upbeat, happy, and glad we live in (at least in the NOLA area) a place with no open container laws, and you can get a drink 'to go' from a bar...and there's always a festival going on year round.

And mustn't forget the Drive-Thru Daiquiri Shops...

I think the secret to their analysis is that they didn't consider the possibility that some people are too busy partying to tweet. They're only accounting for the people who are happy, but not TOO happy....

The Roman expansion seemed to have stopped whenever they ran into cavalry-heavy enemies.

The Romans conquered the Persians at one point. Couldn't make it stick for more than a generation, but they managed.

They also conquered Spain and France. Against those barbarians that you think beat them.

The Romans did NOT successfully defeat the Germans, of course. Teutoberger Wald wasn't actually a case of "asymmetric warfare", since it involved a large Roman Army and a larger German Army (and a stupid Roman General, which was the real cause of the Roman defeat).

Of course the Romans never made a serious effort to conquer Germany. Why bother? The place was a worthless hellhole. Even Big Julie (who led punitive expeditions into Germany a couple of times) didn't think it was worth conquering. And the later Roman generals who led punitive expeditions into Germany whenever the Germans bothered the Romans living in France at the time didn't think Germany was worth bothering to conquer.

Not that they ventured often into those territories, but if I recall correctly, whenever they did, it was without significant success.

You don't recall correctly.

As an aside, the killing of enemy soldiers during an active war is not usually referred to as murder.

Six million Jews.

More than half the Soviet casualties were civilians.

A large fraction of German and Japanese casualties were civilian (don't have the numbers to hand, don't want to look them up, but it's in the millions each).

A civilized person doesn't want to beat the living crap out of another person

Whatever gave you that idea?

I've never known a "civilized person" who didn't want to beat the living crap out of another" at one time or another.

The real marker of a civilized person isn't that he doesn't want to beat the crap out of another, but that he overcomes the urge to do so....

With the advent of modern weaponry, overwhelming numbers of troops being a tactical advantage became a thing of the past.

Sun Tzu - "numbers alone confer no advantage in war".

"Battle of Watling Street" - 10K Romans vs. 150-250K Britons. I'lll give you a hint if you're not sure - the winner wasn't the Britons.

No, it's not "modern weaponry" that made numbers "not a tactical advantage"....

Unless, of course, you define "overwhelming numbers" as "enough guys to win, no matter what". In which case, "overwhelming numbers" is still a tactical advantage, since no matter the weaponry, you can come up with a sufficiently large number as to be "overwhelming"....

but we underestimated them once before and it didn't go well. In fact it REALLY didn't go well - for 15 years.

Which 15 years are you talking about?

1950-1953, perhaps? During the Korean War (note that we annihilated the NK Army in the first year of that war, then spent the rest of the war fighting the PLA)?

In any case, that's only four years. Where are the other eleven?

I think we've pretty clearly established throughout the history of the U.S. technology alone don't win wars.

Actually, we've established that US technology alone NEVER wins wars.

What we've established that wins wars is US production - we didn't win WW2 with superior technology, we won it because we could do things like build a military up from "small" to "fricking huge" while still having enough production surplus to provide weapons/supplies/whatever to everyone else in the world.

Note that one of the most interesting bits of trivia about WW2 is that the USA, during the war, built more aircraft carriers than existed in the entire world before the war.

And, more importantly, we built more transports (Liberty ships, anyone) than existed in the entire world before the war.

In the mid '30s, a German general, doing an analysis of mechanized warfare concepts noted that the USA had ~75% of the world's production capability in internal combustion engines. And quite properly concluded that that meant that going to war with America would be suicidal for Germany.

Too bad (for Hitler) that Hitler didn't read that sort of report.

The Soviet T-34 was vastly inferior to the German panzers as well.

Umm, no.

The T34/76 was considerably superior to any panzer then extant in 1941, when they were first encountered.

It wasn't until 1944 that the Germans reached the point that the overwhelming majority of Panzers were better than the T34/76.

And at that point, the Russians were building the T34/85, which was rather better than the latest version of Pzkw-4 (which was about half the German panzer inventory), though somewhat inferior to Pzkw-5 (the other half).

The only real weakness the T34 series of tanks had was lack of proper communications equipment (only the company commander's tank had a radio, for instance, until late in the war).

Plus that gawdawful commander's hatch on the earliest T34s....

If you feel that technology assures victory where is the Roman empire today?

If you think that the Roman Empire dominated the Classical World due to superior technology, you know even less of history than your comments about T34 suggest.

Hint: the Legions' doctrine was far more important than the Legions' technology (which was basically the same as everyone else's (iron swords, spear, torso armor and helmet) and considerably inferior to that used by the Persian cavalry at the time (yes, I've always been rather fond of the Persian composite bows as weapons of war - it's really too bad the Romans worked out a counter to it).

How can that stand up to the DPRK's 40 Chengdu F-7s?! And defending Pyongyang they have 40 Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-29s! 40 + 40 = 70 and 70 > 63!!!

Traditionally, we've always thought that 40+40 = 80.

Or were you using NK math?

Do you get to visit your critically injured loved one in the hospital, and be there to advise on important medical decisions? Not when the hospital staff has a legally defined policy of "family only."

Note that this case didn't exist much before Federal Law decided that you needed more privacy, and made it illegal to give out your medical information to any but family members (to include spouses). When I was young, going to a hospital to see a friend meant telling the nurse you were there to see whomever, nurse checking to see if whomever wanted to see you, then proceeding with the visit (assuming that whomever DID want to see you). Now, we have cases where unmarried partners CANNOT get permission to see their partner in hospital.

So, we fix a bad law by passing a new law. Rather than by fixing the bad parts of the previous law.

Equating "high powered weapons" with "assault weapons" (which latter are military look-alikes) shows a limited knowledge of firearms, at best.

Note, for the record, that an AR-15 fires a 55 grain bullet at around 3000 ft/sec. A .30-06 fires a 150+ grain bullet at 2700+ ft/sec (depending on the specific load). Which makes my .30-06 single shot a much more powerful weapon than my mini-14.

Note further that your AK-47 clones shoot a round with ballistics rather close to a .30-30. Which is a useful round, but frankly, by hunting rifle standards, pretty anemic.

For that matter, your basic 12 gauge (which you claim to use for boar hunting) is FAR more powerful than any "assault weapon".....

No, the left is using actual massacres and gun death statistics to oppose what actually is. It's not some fear of what might be.

Which is why, following a massacre, the Left is calling for a ban on a type of weapon that is used in ~1% of gun crimes per year - because banning "assault weapons" will have such a HUGE impact on gun crime that it's absolutely mandatory that we pass legislation RIGHT NOW!!

Note that the last "assault weapon" ban included a requirement to do a scientific analysis of the benefits of the ban.

Oddly enough, said analysis indicated that the ban had no meaningful effect on gun crime of any kind.

And so, of course, we're going to try that route again - because it worked well last time (even its proponents think its effect was trivial)...

If you want to do something about gun crime (and who really cares about "gun crime"? how about just doing something about "crime"?), might want to look at the underlying causes that drive people to do mass shootings....

What gun owners are afraid of is other gun owners.

Nope. I don't even know which, if any, of my neighbors own guns, and could care less. Of the people who I DO know own guns (mostly relatives), I've never been afraid of even an accidental discharge, much less a deliberate attempt by one of them to harm me or mine....

If we were saying "We should disarm the african americans" or "we should disarm the hispanics" or even "we should disarm the muslims" then you'd have a point, but that's not the case.

Oddly enough, the Sullivan Law (New York's first gun control law) was put in place to disarm the Italians (and African-Americans).

And most gun control laws in the latter half of the 19th century in the Old South were aimed at disarming the African-Americans.

since from what myself and others have read most of the weapons used in illegal crimes are coming from legal dealers that are selling without the checks or they come from gun shows where the checks are not required.

If the former can be proved (a legal dealer sold a gun without a background check), then the "legal dealer" can be arrested and imprisoned for violating federal law.

Note that it's generally not hard to prove, because shipping guns from manufacturer to dealer (or dealer to dealer) requires the kind of paperwork that makes it a slam-dunk (serial numbers, that sort of thing, and not all the records are under control of the crooked dealer).

Note also that it is a myth that background checks are not required at a gun show. A licensed dealer has to have a background check run whether he is selling from his shop, his home, or at a gun show.

Where the mythical gun-show loophole comes from is that a private citizen (NOT a licensed dealer) is allowed (and has ALWAYS been allowed) to sell his property, including firearms, without asking the Federal government for permission. Whether at a gun show or not.

Note that, absent a new record-keeping requirement (there are no records of background checks kept at federal, state, local, or personal level), requiring private citizens to run background checks "at gun shows" (or at any other time) would be meaningless, since there's no way to trace a firearm past the dealer who originally sold it (since he's required to keep records of gun sales).

Another thing that I've thought might cause it is that the air density [wikipedia.org] at 32 F is only about 93% of air at 70 F (~20 C).

You state here that hit air is denser than cold air. And provide a link to wikipedia.

The wikipedia link contradicts you. Which is good, since you are, in fact, wrong. Cold air is denser than hot air, not vice versa.