Assault weapon bans. Effectively making illegal the most common rifle in the country (ar15) - even though it's statistically tiny in terms of gun killings.
(~450 people killed per year with all forms of rifle. Only some of that is ar15. That's the ~same amount of people as what die yearly from falling out of bed.)

Suppressor bans. Illegalizing an item that has been statistically as good as nonexistent in firearm crimes.

Banning DIY non-commercial firearms. Illegalizing firearms that have been statistically as good as nonexistent in firearm crimes.

Banning Private Sales (aka gunshow loophole). Effectively banning transfers between family and friends. Even though nearly all illegal arms are acquired by straw purchase at conventional stores by girlfriends.
And commercial sellers at gun shows have to do background checks anyways - this is much ado about old geezers trading collectible wild west / ww2 / antique shit.

Nearly all people are killed by pistols. Nobody is calling for a pistol ban. It makes things like an AWB look like a disingenuous effort - because you can pass all sorts of non-pistol-banning gun control laws and there will be no effect on gun death stats. Meaning you can just make more and more stuff illegal forever so long as you save what really matters (pistols) for last.

Between city, county, state, federal, existing gun laws are fat like an encyclopedia. Most people, unless they are 'gun folk', don't even realize the ways you can go to jail. Put a vertical grip in a pistol and posted it to instagram? Enjoy your time with the ATF. 10 years and $100k, assuming you're lax enough to not hire a lawyer to knock it down a bit. Literally volumes of ways to go to jail for shit you wouldn't even imagine would matter.

Many things people complain about aren't even a thing. Like complaining about buying guns online (you can't, not without an FFL involved), or crazy people buying guns (they can't, unless they've yet to be caught doing crazy shit).

Too many laws as it is. Erase a bunch first.

-scheherazade

Interesting ramblings having nothing to do with my post about Q and news coverage, and mostly dead wrong.

Let me fix those....
Lost a boatload of jobs leaving us with highest unemployment rates since the great depression and the largest number of businesses closing.

Lowering taxes but raising spending, giving us the highest debt and largest deficit ever.
Include emergency spending and this year added well over $7 TRILLION to the debt. Each man woman and child owed $88000 before this year's insane over budget spending in the neighborhood of $7 Trillion that's been reported (which means it could be trillions more in hidden spending). He is running America like a business, and he likes to strip businesses of all cash and assets, putting them in his own pockets, bankrupt them, then walking away leaving his partners ruined. America is nearing bankruptcy, is in massively more debt despite his promise to not only end deficit but end the debt term one. Instead he tried to double it and pocketed hundreds upon hundreds of millions in illegal business he directed the government to do with Trump companies, something no president has ever attempted but Trump's term has been non stop hatch act violations from day one, so he illegally stole hundreds of millions from hard working Americans, again.
Largest GDP drop ever in history, meaning the worst economy ever, not the best.
The deficit this year will be the largest since WW2, more than double the huge Obama 09 deficit that stopped the Republican recession of 08, 18% of GDP.
https://www.thebalance.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306
The debt is 136% of gdp...up 32% under Trump in just 3 years, the Deficit is up 15%. The country reaches a tipping point if the ratio is more than 77%...it's 136%. 77% is when lenders begin to worry whether it's safe to buy the country's bonds. They think the government may not be able to pay back its debt. Under Trump they're fairly certain we won't even try.

Put another way, if Trump paid for his 2020 spending instead of raising the debt exponentially, every man, woman, and child would have a tax bill for $20000 just this year alone, with zero reduction in debt.

Caving in to China after praising them for their Covid response, he's not fighting back over anything. He can't even get a trade deal done after tossing out one we had, this has cost hundreds of Billions in pure wasted money for his ego. China is expanding as we contract in ability, economic strength, and even territory.
He's pro Russia, he's destroyed American manufacturing, education, mail, infrastructure, international standing, trade, and debt. He talks pro American, he doesn't lead or govern that way. He's pro Trump, and has no other loyalties.

The military didn't need a whit of rebuilding, it was quite well funded before, and he inherited the best prepared, best funded, best armed (with the most ammunition despite his lies), largest (measured by equipment, not soldiers), and most inclusive military. He's screwed them repeatedly, by repeated last minute redeployment, cutting benefits, ignoring Russia's bounties on American soldiers and the deaths those payments caused, tossing out decorated soldiers while pardoning and reinstating murderous anti American sadists (stripping them of honor), and now he's screwed up their medical system by screwing up the USPS, delaying their medicine, and killing some veterans in the process, way more than Benghazzi.

Yeah, you are bat shit crazy, ignoring facts constantly to praise Trump over his destruction of our national status on every front.
Just nuts, Bob. You must pretend 2020 didn't happen to believe even one of those lies.

No, Donald John Trump is responsible for the content of this advertisement, and the injuries and deaths it mentions despite his refusal to take responsibility for anything.

4% of the population - 25% of cases AND 25% of deaths. This is how perfect his response has been, our infection and our death rate is >6 times the average and rising.

More functional testing might have shown higher infection rates than places that don't test at all, but testing rates have zero bearing on deaths, and our death rate correlates with our positive testing rates despite the near worthless tests Americans have been offered that can give up to 90% false negatives or 90% false positives depending on which test is available.

*promote remembering one more massive failure to lead that's cost more American lives than every war since WW2 and all terrorist attacks combined and climbing and more money than the entire Obama recovery from the Republican economic crash of 08.

Christ, what a fucking petulant child.

Someone on 4chan posted this:

"You're the nation that won WW2. You put a man on the moon and invented the Internet. Now you have to be told not to drink bleach. What the hell happened to you people?"

The answer that came back: "Republicans".

? Are you implying that famine and/or water shortages somehow preclude war and disease? I think they're major causes.

No, that's a myth. We have resources enough to do some amazing things if we properly apply them, not anything, and without the will to apply them, almost nothing. Having everything you need for success besides direction is a guarantee of failure.

Depends, if you remove the human factor and look only at total resources vs global need, there are still major logistic hurdles to just feeding everyone, not to mention resource problems if we want the biosphere to be healthy and not homogenized down to humans and our farm animals.

Odd, international law has been enforced since ww2 with only few exceptions with no WW3, only sanctions, bribes, and relatively minor skirmishes. I don't know where you get the idea that only a gun to the head might be coercive when a gun to the economy has worked so well for so long.

You should be hysterical. If you aren't shitting your pants over the state of the world, you aren't paying attention or you're absolutely delusional. Civilization and the habitatability of the planet are both on a clear path to collapse and people are busying themselves with arguments over will it be 50 years out or 100, or maybe 150 instead of making substantive changes to mitigate what's now unavoidable....or even prepare.
A hysterical voice is the only one I think indicates an understanding of the problem and total lack of a working solution.

We can still steer between the different possible future realities.
Like that large scale famine or water shortage is preferable to nuclear war or global deadly disease outbreak. Which will it be, food or water? Reality will get more unpleasant before it has a chance to improve. Can we outrun the population and ecosystem gun with science? Possibly. Problem is society and morals cant keep up.

We have resources to do ANYTHING. Send people to Mars. Make water out of thin air and grow tomatoes in the desert. The only thing in the way are nation states and their institutions, and human instincts. The only thing that keeps those in check is culture and morals. There is no such thing as international law unless you are willing to go to all out war to enforce it (not possible since WW2).

And the "leader of the free world" is busy building a wall around his office.

So we probably need to be deceived or else we would all be hysterical without antidepressants.

Still a hysterical voice is not the voice of reality for me.

How do you easily solve something thats going apeshit in another country, big or small? There is next to nothing the west can do to help other than alleviate the symptoms. Remember the cold war? What could the west do to help the people beyond the dividing line in countries that used to be democracies before WW2? Next to nothing.

Hong-Kong is currently part of the largest... just kidding.

What is her impact in China? Russia? India? Brazil? Indonesia? On people who make decisions? This is a real question.

I dont doubt her content, she seems well prepared and I have nothing to point out as obvious propaganda. Her delivery is off-putting. unpleasant, distracting and weird. Petulant child. Also she is pointing out the obvious without thinking of implementation. Normal millenial, just wants something.

The Republican party has been a good marketing tool for the fossil fuel industry so far, yes.

Adults tools in her hands? Seriously? I havent considered that and it frightens me.

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I did not know WW2 era shells sounded like Transformers. Neat.

Enough with the slow motion! I like tanks, I like ww2 movies I even like Russian war movies but this looks like trash.

Your video, Britain's Most Daring WW2 Raid, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I would love it if we all paid a proportionate amount of tax regardless of wealth. I would also love it if they would remove all of the various loopholes that let people like our President scam their way out of paying hardly any taxes.

One of the things people always forget about the 50's is that one of the reasons why 'everyone' (white people for the most part, ethnicities need not apply) had good jobs, etc. is because a good chunk of people died in WW2/Korea. We lost over half a million people during the years from 1942 to 1953. Additionally there was a dramatic shift in female employment, meaning that for the first time many households were not wholly dependent on one salary.

A big part of the Zero's reputation came from racking up kills in China against a lot of second-rate planes with poorly-trained pilots. After all, there was a reason that the Republic of China hired the American Volunteer Group to help out during the Second Sino-Japanese War – Chinese pilots had a hard time cutting it.

The Wildcat was deficient in many ways versus the Zero, but it still had superior firepower via ammo loadout. The Zero carried very few 20mm rounds, most of it's ammo was 7.7mm. There are records of Japanese pilots unloading all their 7.7mm ammo on a Wildcat and it was still flyable. On the flip side, the Wildcat had an ample supply of .50 cal.

Stanley "Swede" Vejtasa was able to score seven kills against Japanese planes in one day with a Wildcat.

Yes, the discovery of the Akutan Zero helped the United States beat this plane. But MilitaryFactory.com notes that the Hellcat's first flight was on June 26, 1942 – three weeks after the raid on Dutch Harbor that lead to the fateful crash-landing of the Mitsubishi A6M flown by Tadayoshi Koga.

Marine Captain Kenneth Walsh described how he knew to roll to the right at high speed to lose a Zero on his tail. Walsh would end World War II with 17 kills. The Zero also had trouble in dives, thanks to a bad carburetor.

We were behind in technology for many reasons, but once the Hellcat started replacing the Wildcat, the Japanese Air Superiority was over. Even if they had maintained a lead in technology, as Russia showed in WW2, quantity has a quality all of it's own. We were always going to be able to field more pilots and planes than Japan would be able to.

As far as Soviet rockets, once we were stunned by the launch of Sputnik, we kicked into high gear. You can say what you will of reliability, consistency, and dependability, but exactly how many manned Soviet missions landed on the moon and returned? Other than Buran, which was almost a copy of our Space Shuttle, how many shuttles did the USSR field?

The Soviets did build some things that were very sophisticated and were, for a while, better than what we could field. The Mig-31 is a great example. We briefly lagged behind but have a much superior air capability now. The only advantages the Mig and Sukhoi have is speed, they can fire all their missiles and flee. If they are engaged however, they will lose if pilots are equally skilled.

As @newtboy has said, I am sure that Russia and China are working on military advancements, but the technology simply doesn't exist to make a Hypersonic missile possible at this point.

China is fielding a man portable rifle that can inflict pain, not kill, and there is no hard evidence that it works.

There is no proof that the Chinese have figured out the technology for an operational rail gun on land, let alone the sea. We also have created successful railguns, the problem is POWERING them repeatedly, especially onboard a ship. If they figured out a power source that will pull it off, then it is possible, but there is no concrete proof other than a photo of a weapon attached to a ship. Our experts are guessing they might have it functional by 2025, might...

China has shown that long range QEEC is possible. It has been around but they created the first one capable of doing it from space. The problem is, they had to jury rig it. Photons, or light, can only go through about 100 kilometers of optic fiber before getting too dim to reliably carry data. As a result, the signal needs to be relayed by a node, which decrypts and re-encrypts the data before passing it on. This process makes the nodes susceptible to hacking. There are 32 of these nodes for the Beijing-Shanghai quantum link alone.

The main issue with warfare today is that it really doesn't matter unless the battle is between one of the big 3. Which means that ANY action could provoke Nuclear conflict. Is Russia going to hypersonic missile one of our carriers without Nukes become an option on the table as a retaliation? Is China going to railgun a ship and risk nuclear war?

Hell no, no more than we would expect to blow up some major Russian or Chinese piece of military hardware without severe escalation! Which means we can create all the technological terrors we like, because we WON'T use them unless they somehow provide us a defense against nuclear annihilation.

So just like China and Russia steal stuff from us to build military hardware to counter ours, if they create something that is significantly better, we will began trying to duplicate it. The only thing which would screw this system to hell is if one of us actually did begin developing a successful counter measure to nukes. If that happens, both of the other nations are quite likely to threaten IMMEDIATE thermonuclear war to prevent that country from developing enough of the counter measures to break the tie.

When you have neither speed nor maneuverability, it's your own durability that is in question, not the opponents durability.

It took the capture of the Akutan zero, its repair, and U.S. flight testing, to work out countermeasures to the zero.

The countermeasures were basically :
- One surprise diving attack and run away with momentum, or just don't fight them.
- Else bait your pursuer into a head-on pass with an ally (Thatch weave) (which, is still a bad position, only it's bad for everyone.)

Zero had 20mm cannons. The F4F had .50's. The F4F did not out gun the zero. 20mms only need a couple rounds to down a plane.

Durability became a factor later in the war, after the U.S. brought in better planes, like the F4U, F6F, Mustang, etc... while the zero stagnated in near-original form, and Japan could not make planes like the N1K in meaningful quanitties, or even provide quality fuel for planes like the Ki84 to use full power.

History is history. We screwed up at the start of WW2. Hubris/pride/confidence made us dismiss technologies that came around to bite us in the ass hard, and cost a lot of lives.




Best rockets since the 1960's? Because it had the biggest rocket?
What about reliability, consistency, dependability.
If I had to put my own life on the line and go to space, and I had a choice, I would pick a Russian rocket.

-scheherazade