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Just a pipe dream of a reactionary minority. A coup d'etat is way more likely in Greece, IMO

It is talk like that that makes thirty round magazines taped together in pairs very popular among the doomer set in the US. Whereas in Britain we can have a row and know there is no chance of getting killed. If they ever meet they're more likely to buy each other a pint than shoot each other. So th...

I recommend "Blackadder Goes Forth", if you can get it in the States. When you've finished laughing I'd recommend 'The War the Infantry Knew' as compiled by Cptn Dunn. It is a compilation of memories of the officers and men of the Royal Welch Fusiliers for 1914-1919. None of your heroes o...

That's probably why there were more conchies in WWI than in WWII... Wikipedia puts the Great-Britain figure at about 16 000 in WW1, and 60 000 in WW2. Kitchener managed to raise an entirely volunteer army of half a million men, even following the carnage of 1914-1915. There was no such patriotic en...

UndercoverElephant wrote:The last place on this planet there will be civil unrest is Japan. Most Japanese would sooner commit suicide than riot.

I wouldn't bank on it, they invented the suicide bomb after all. Perhaps they would commit suicide *and* riot.

Mr Draghi can see another option... http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-05/ecb-plan-said-to-pledge-unlimited-sterilized-bond-buying.html To sterilize the bond purchases, the ECB will remove from the system elsewhere the same amount of money it spends , ensuring the program has a neutral impact on...

Early '70s Open University maths lecture on BBC2. I saw it I guess in the early 80s and initially I was simply amused by the lecturer, who looked a complete hippie. IIRC he was appplying some equations (Hubbert linearisation?) to coal extraction in Great Britain, but mentioned that all geological re...

Ludwig wrote:

PhilSage wrote:

Ludwig wrote: Ancient civilisations knew about oil but never used it in any advanced way. They could also have easily built the mechanical clock and other machines but never did. I've often wondered why.

I don't disagree with your post, but I didn't write that, it was Snail!!

Sorry!

Ancient civilisations knew about oil but never used it in any advanced way. They could also have easily built the mechanical clock and other machines but never did. I've often wondered why. Common misconception that the ancients were primitive in their use of mechanics. The Greeks were anything but...

I've read a little about Tesla before (about Tunguska), and I've just looked him up on Wikipedia for more details. It's clear he was a genius who was decades before his time.. Actually, he was very much a man of his time; we tend to forget those inventions of his which have become so commonplace th...

I think someone got the "who said what" a bit mixed up there, but if infrastructure is going to collapse anywhere in the US, the SW is a likely candidate. And as vtsnowden implied, some sort of armed civil revolt is almost inevitable if the US rich-poor divide and civil repression continue...

I think the whole idea of America is so tied to the American dream of consumption, and the whole political system is so corrupt and the people can see its corrupt, and this is going to get worse the disillusionment in the entire system will get worse and very quickly. And at some point people will ...

The wild card in the US is the armed civillian, resisting a perceived tyranical government. A scenario could be envisaged where a large number of dissafected take exception to being pepper sprayed, and come out with AR15s to open fire on anything looking like law enforcement or Federal authority. A ...

looks a bit like the post-war West German army shovel:

http://www.zib-militaria.de/German-Army-folding-shovel

Very solid, and really useful pick built in too.

It is mathmatically impossible for the current financial fiat based system to survive much longer. What's the difference between "mathmatically" impossible and just regular impossible? A simple 'impossible' could mean: - mathematically impossible - politically impossible Or perhaps neithe...