I deliberately picked a rather provocative example of the type.
Note that there was no follow-on by the kids - they didn't do anything BUT the drawing.
Note that even you agree that the kids should have been arrested for the drawing.
I consider this a disturbing picture (not the one the kids made, the one the adults drew). I also consider it unlikely that principals, in principle, approve of kids being "allowed to express unpopular views".
I continue to suspect that the principals, teachers, and students provided the answers they thought the testers wanted to hear.
Unfortunately, the students thought the testers wanted to hear what they had been taught (that unpopular ideas were forbidden), rather than what they SHOULD have been taught (that unpopular ideas are as protected as popular ones).
Your link led to the piece of legislation that proposed those Amendments.
From the text of the legislation, second paragraph:
RESOLVED, by the Senate, and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, Two Thirds of both Houses concurring, That the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States as Amendments to the Constitution of the United States: All, or any of, which Articles, when ratified by Three-Fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all Intents and Purposes as Part of the said Constitution, viz.
Compare that to Article V of the Constitution:
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
Note the references to 2/3 of both Houses of Congress, and to 3/4 of the States in both.
While there might be a Preamble "in a manner of speaking", there is none actually in the Constitution. Each of the proposed Amendments was treated separately ("All, or any of, which Articles, when ratified"), and, in fact, the first Article mentioned was not ratified, and the second Article was ratified in 1992.
Also, the first 10 articles of the Bill or Rights are NOT amendments, they are declatory articles as stated in the preamble of the Bill of Rights.
Umm, no.
They ARE Amendments.
There is NO "preamble" to the Bill of Rights.
Your quote sounds like something from a history book, but it is NOT part of the Constitution, though the reasons it gives for the Bill of Rights is substantially correct.
A more useful link is this
which contains an annotated copy of the Constitution.
When asked whether people should be allowed to express unpopular views, 97 percent of teachers and 99 percent of school principals said yes.
And yet, this is a country where one can get into trouble in school for advocating unpopular ideas - which suggests that the teachers and principals were not being entirely forthcoming in their own answers. An example:
Two boys were arrested for making pencil-and-crayon stick figure drawings depicting a 10-year-old classmate being stabbed and hung, police said. The children, charged with a felony, were taken from school in handcuffs.
If teachers and principals consider a drawing to be an arrestable offense (even if the drawing were in questionable taste), then it is not surprising that the First Amendment is little regarded in schools.
And if the adults are providing "the correct answer" (what they believed the questioners wanted to hear), then there is little reason to be surprised if the students did the same.
No, ALL Christians hold that Jesus is the Son Of God and that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the Divine Trinity, three entities, but one God.
Umm, no. Check Arian Heresy for historical precedent. They were an early Christian Sect that did NOT believe Jesus was divine, just divinely inspired.
I would not go so far as to say that ALL modern Christian Sects hold with Jesus' divinity (there are too many to know all the details of each), though it is certainly true that that particular Roman Catholic doctrine is nearly universal among Protestants as well.
Safe nuclear power is a myth. Greenpeace is campaigning to end nuclear power
Referring to Petra Kelly:
You couldn't say she was just a women's rights activist, peace activist, environmentalist, anti-nuclear activist, or a human rights activist. She was all of those things!
From an obituary of David Brower, two excerpts:
Note that the "Club" referred to was the Sierra Club.
As an uncompromising champion of the environment, David Brower has, in fact, become one of the most influential people in the modern history of the environmental movement.
A few years ago, he quit when the club refused to take a stronger antinuclear stand.
From a Reuter's news article, two excerpts:
Anti-nuclear protesters who dodged security forces to chain themselves to railtracks forced a train bearing atomic waste on Wednesday to retreat near the end of its journey to a dump in north Germany.
The action, carried out overnight by an environmentalist group called Robin Wood
From a website dedicated to the "GLOBAL VIGIL FOR PEACE":
A similar call had been initiated by Arjun Makhijani (Environmentalist and anti nuclear campaigner based in the US)
From a news report on the shutdown of the German nuclear plant at Stade:
The plant's closing sparked celebrations among the environmentalist Greens,
From the Washington Free Press:
The Socialist Party has nominated presidential hopeful Mary Cal Hollis, a former member of Colorado's Rural Electric Board, a member of the environmentalist Sheep Mountain Alliance, and a long time activist in trade union, anti-nuclear
That took a few minutes to find. It was by no means an exclusive list, just looking for some obvious people/organizations who were environmentalists and anti-nuclear.
Note that modern environmentalists seem to be split on the issue - some want to stop global warming enough to consider nuclear power, some consider nuclear power to be "teh debhil", and would rather do gas-fired plants than nuclear....
I take it you were either not alive or not watching the news in the 70's when this was happening?
The anti-nuke movement of that time was filled to overflowing with those who called themselves "Environmentalists". Note Greenpeace's continuing anti-nuclear stance, as an example.
Interesting. From The Chemical and Engineering News:
"In 2001, the average operating cost of the 103 U.S. nuclear power plants was 1.68 cents per kilowatt-hour, second only to hydroelectric power among baseload generation options."
Now, admittedly, the guy who said this was with the Argonne National Laboratory, in their Nuclear Power Division.
However, even Greenpeace only assigned a cost for nuclear power of 9 cents per KWh, and they're rather biased in the other direction. This was in 1990 dollars, for reference. It would be a bit more in 2004 dollars.
As to blaming the Environmentalists, The American Society of Mechanical Engineers had this to say in 2000:
In the late 1970s, the EPA and NRC regulatory requirements escalated sharply, resulting in costly permitting, construction delays, retrofits to construction in progress, and design changes. Mechanical engineers rose to the challenge, but were overwhelmed by these new changing regulatory requirements. Utilities canceled orders for about 100 nuclear generating units in the United States because of the difficulty in obtaining the necessary permits, and unpredictable capital costs or schedules to complete construction.
The regulatory laws passed by Congress enabled nuclear power opponents to intervene in court in licensing proceedings for construction permits and for operating licenses. These interventions were successful in delaying nearly all projects after 1975--thus increasing capital costs substantially.
It seems odd that the Engineering Journals and Greenpeace set a lower cost ot nuclear power than you remember from ten years ago. Perhaps you should let them know that they're completely out to lunch on this issue.
And here I'd always thought my DNA was a mixture of my mother's and my father's.
Note, as a qualifier to the above sarcasm, that mytochondrial DNA, which is contained within every cell, is exclusivly from your mother. Or from the source of the egg, in any case, if you happen to be cloned.
Personally, I'm looking forward to Chimeras - pretty soon we'll be able to make Underpeople to be our slaves. Won't that be nice?
As I said, it's not an engineering problem, it's an economic and political problem. Nuclear power is NOT cheap. The cost of handling the waste is horrendous, partially because the waste can be used to make weapons. Plus people are scared by the very prospect of nuclear power. Nobody likes it in their backyard. Give somebody a choice between coal and nuclear and people will choose coal. The nuclear boogeyman - helpfully enhanced by the idiotic cold war and the chickenhawk US govt - has ruined the potential for nuclear power.
Nuclear power is quite cheap. Comparable to coal for capital outlays, cheaper in terms of running costs.
Ahh, but we mustn't forget the legal costs - Nuclear power plants stopped being built in the USA long before TMI or Chernobyl, because they were sued out of existane. By the Environmetalists of the time.
As to waste disposal - if coal plants had to dispose of their radioactive wstes in the same way that the nuclear undustry does (yes, Coal produces radioactive wastes - quite a lot of it, but it's mixed in with non-radioactive wastes and quietly ignored), then coal costs would be orders of magnitude higher.
The only way my father was able to give up smoking was by coming down with pneumonia. It hurt him just to breathe. Smoking made him feel like he was dying. Combine that with peer pressure from our whole family, and he has been able to keep from smoking for over a year.
My parents quit smoking a couple decades back. I never heard that they had any difficulty doing so.
Same with my siblings, though they quit in the last five years.
Earth's escape velocity is actually 11.1 km/s. Not sure where that 9 km/s comes from.
Read carefully. That was deltaV required to go from LEO (Low Earth Orbit) to Solar escape speed.
It assumes a starting speed of ~8Km/s (Actually, the orbit I assumed had ~7650m/s orbital speed), and a single burn in the direction of both the orbit around the Earth and the Earth's orbit around the Sun. It further assumed Solar escape speed was 42.1Km/s, which is true for a couple points along Earth's orbit, but I'm not sure exactly where, so I won't tell you the dates required for the burn.
If you add 9Km/s to your speed under those conditions, then you will find yourself moving along smartly in the plane of the ecliptic at just over 5250m/s relative to the Sun at some point in the indefinite future, when you are some arbitrarily large distance from the Sun (on the order of two light-months out, give or take a couple light-weeks)
if you can move upwards at an inch a day, eventually you would leave gravitational pull, woudln't you?
Well, yes. Eventually you'd be far enough away that "escape speed" would be less than one inch per day. Let's, see, that would be about 10E27 years from now.
When departing a major body, there are advantages to a fast initial burn to put you over escape speed - it gets you some "free" speed. Given a fusion rocket or such that allows effectively unlimited deltaV for insystem work (it's not really unlimited, or even close to it, but it's large enough that you don't have to worry about running out of fuel when travelling between any two planets in our solar system), it's not really worth worrying about. But when you have to watch every teacup of fuel, it can save you a lot.
why is the 9km/s significant?
That number was NOT Earth escape speed. It was deltaV, starting from LEO, to achieve SOLAR escape speed.
But he was wrong here. If you're in a polar orbit to start with, you'll need a bit more deltaV than I described, since I assumed the ideal departure orbit (one where the burn was entirely in the direction of travel).
The big difficulty with going into a Solar polar orbit is that you have to cancel Earth's orbital speed as part of the orbital insertion burn. And Earth's orbital speed is ~30Km/s, more in northern-hemisphere winter, less in northern-hemisphere summer.
That ion drive that was tested this past year could, conceivably, be used to come up with the deltaV required for a Solar-polar orbit that was also a Solar-escape orbit. But no chemical rocket we can make can pull it off.
If you had any basic knowledge of European history you would know the Soviet Union did more to defeat Germany than the US and UK
No. The Soviet Army would likely have lost, and at best fought the Germans to a standstill without the deuce-and-a-halfs we sent them. The Soviets produced tanks and guns in adequate numbers, but without the trucks to transport supplies to the Army, the Army is toothless.
Note that even as it was (with us supplying huge numbers of trucks to the Soviets), they had so few compared to their Army size that their offensives were a week or two of push, followed by a month or two of resupply before the next push. Rather than the sustained, continuoous push that both the Americans and Brits preferred.
without a US and UK invasion of mainland Europe the Soviets would never have stopped at East Germany.
Without a US/UK bombing offensive against Germany, and the supplies we sent the Soviets, the SOviet Union wouldn't have reached East Germany. I don't want to downplay the role of the USSR - but they couldn't have done what they did alone.
While we could have done what we did alone. We even planned for fighting Germany if the UK fell (the B-29 was designed for bombing Germany if we couldn't use the UK as a base for our bombing offensive - and never used in that role, since the UK didn't fall). If we'd fought the Germans by ourselves, we'd have pounded them into the ground about August of '45, when we nuked Berlin. And Japan might have held out a few months longer. But the war would still have been won.
I can't say the same thing if we'd not been involved. Keep in mind that we were helping both the Brits and Soviets (in violation of international and Federal law, I might add) from 1940 onward.
Lend-Lease. You remember that? That's the one where we gave the Brits tanks, trucks, oil, airplanes, ships, guns, ammo, food...
And we gave the same sort of stuff to the Russians. And the French. And pretty much everyone else.
The USA supplied most of the tanks the Brits used, and most of the trucks everyone used. We gave away more ships than the rest of the world built.
And while doing that, we beat the Japanese into the ground using only the resources leftover from the German part of the effort. Which "leftovers" amounted to six new battleships, a couple dozen new aircraft carriers, a couple dozen new cruiser, and hundreds of new destroyers.
If anything it cost the Britishers their entire empire to bring down the Germany's world conquest campaign. They paid the highest price of all. As history records it, prior to pearl harbour, USA refused to enter the war claiming that it was not their problem and they will just supply weapons etc. at most(for a profit ofcourse).
Myself, I think the 50 million Soviets killed were a bigger price than the Brits paid.
THe USA refused to enter the War before Pearl Harbor because we didn't have the Army or Navy to do anything worthwhile then. One must remember that a large standing military in the USA was a post-WW2 phenomenon. Prior to WW2, while our Navy was as good as any in the world, our Army was even smaller than the British Army - and mostly using antiquated equipment - it's likely that the BEF (that got trounced by the Germans in 1940) could have fought the US Army to a standstill, if not beaten it, in 1940.
Invading a country and shooting people is -not- a good way to reduce terrorism. If your school system taught world history, you'd be able to see that example in Ireland and England. They're -still- fighting for independance. What in God's name makes you thing Iraq will be -any- different?
What makes me think that? How about Germany and Japan? We beat the crap out of them for four years, and occupied them for 40. Or do you believe that Germany and Japan are still hotbeds of terrorism?
Well, the French Foreign Legion is still out there. Does that count?
Seriously, though. No, no such programs exist, largely because the militery's standards are high enough that most "common criminals" wouldn't qualify. Someone mentioned convists studying for a GED. If you need a GED, you're not qualified to be in the US Army.
As to "assault machine guns" (whatever they are), one must keep in mind that the average soldier has very limited access to military weapons - they're stored in an Armory, and issued as needed. Soldiers don't get handed a gun when they're done training, and keep it through their service career.
Now obviously you would have certain convictions where this wouldnt be allowed, such as murder and other violent crimes,
I agree with your comment completely, but it is rather odd that you would suggest that violent people have no place in the military...after all, violence is what they do.
And just two days later while facing a mere fraction of the German army (the bulk of which was fighting in Poland) the British and French military masterminds launched the hugely successful Operation Sitzkrieg in an all out assault on Hilter's regime in an attempt to save Poland.
One must keep in mind that Britain only began mobilization for war the day after the invasion of Poland. Shifting from a peacetime stance to wartime mode is not done overnight - the British didn't even get conscription going for another month, much less have any ability to fight a war, in western Europe or anywhere else so quickly.
In fact, the French invaded western Germany only a week after the declaration of war, though, as far as I recall, they didn't push very hard, and were ultimately wasting their time - WW1 was still too much on everyone's mind at that point in the game.
It took a month and a half or two months for the BEF to even reach France, much less be in condition for offensive operations. Note also the existance of the Siegfried Line, and the refusal of Belgium to allow Anglo/French access to Germany through Belgium.
Note that by the time the BEF was in France, the German Army was back in Germany, Poland having surrendered.
Note further the German-Soviet Pact signed just the week before the invasion of Poland. Which leaves a great deal of room for doubt on the part of the Anglo-French General Staffs, since they now have to take into account the possibility (remote, but uncertain then and there) of Soviet intervention on behalf of the Germans.
I've never been terribly impressed with either British or French early actions in WW2, or in their decisions leading up to the War. But they didn't have a whole lot of options in late '39 and early '40.
It really wasn't until it became clear that they USA would violate its stated neutrality to aid the British that it became obvious that the British had the wherewithal to actually carry on a serious fight against the Germans. Note that pretty much all US support for Britain before 8 Dec 1941 was technically a violation of both international law and US law - being neutral means that you can't supply one combatant with warships, planes, tanks, guns, oil, steel, food, etc. Which we did almost from the beginning of the War in Europe.
Pakistan eh? How about imagine a US, with hurricanes pounding every corner, starts attacking Europe.
And why would we bother, in that case? If the Gulf Stream shuts down, Europe won't be a very pleasant place to live, so we wouldn't really be interested in the place.
And that's ignoring that nuking real-estate you want to capture isn't necessarily a bright move.
I suppose it's possible that Europe could fall under a dictatorship, run by the Agriculture and Fisheries Board, which we might feel honour-bound to destroy. But even that is less likely than you might think (that we'd want to destroy a new European dictatorship, I mean).
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Note that there was no follow-on by the kids - they didn't do anything BUT the drawing.
Note that even you agree that the kids should have been arrested for the drawing.
I consider this a disturbing picture (not the one the kids made, the one the adults drew). I also consider it unlikely that principals, in principle, approve of kids being "allowed to express unpopular views".
I continue to suspect that the principals, teachers, and students provided the answers they thought the testers wanted to hear.
Unfortunately, the students thought the testers wanted to hear what they had been taught (that unpopular ideas were forbidden), rather than what they SHOULD have been taught (that unpopular ideas are as protected as popular ones).
From the text of the legislation, second paragraph:
RESOLVED, by the Senate, and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, Two Thirds of both Houses concurring, That the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States as Amendments to the Constitution of the United States: All, or any of, which Articles, when ratified by Three-Fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all Intents and Purposes as Part of the said Constitution, viz.
Compare that to Article V of the Constitution:
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
Note the references to 2/3 of both Houses of Congress, and to 3/4 of the States in both.
While there might be a Preamble "in a manner of speaking", there is none actually in the Constitution. Each of the proposed Amendments was treated separately ("All, or any of, which Articles, when ratified"), and, in fact, the first Article mentioned was not ratified, and the second Article was ratified in 1992.
Umm, no.
They ARE Amendments.
There is NO "preamble" to the Bill of Rights.
Your quote sounds like something from a history book, but it is NOT part of the Constitution, though the reasons it gives for the Bill of Rights is substantially correct.
A more useful link is this which contains an annotated copy of the Constitution.
When asked whether people should be allowed to express unpopular views, 97 percent of teachers and 99 percent of school principals said yes.
And yet, this is a country where one can get into trouble in school for advocating unpopular ideas - which suggests that the teachers and principals were not being entirely forthcoming in their own answers. An example:
Two boys were arrested for making pencil-and-crayon stick figure drawings depicting a 10-year-old classmate being stabbed and hung, police said. The children, charged with a felony, were taken from school in handcuffs.
If teachers and principals consider a drawing to be an arrestable offense (even if the drawing were in questionable taste), then it is not surprising that the First Amendment is little regarded in schools.
And if the adults are providing "the correct answer" (what they believed the questioners wanted to hear), then there is little reason to be surprised if the students did the same.
Umm, no. Check Arian Heresy for historical precedent. They were an early Christian Sect that did NOT believe Jesus was divine, just divinely inspired.
I would not go so far as to say that ALL modern Christian Sects hold with Jesus' divinity (there are too many to know all the details of each), though it is certainly true that that particular Roman Catholic doctrine is nearly universal among Protestants as well.
It was NOT "Why have a rescue mission standing by?"
It WAS "Why have a rescue mission standing by for ONLY two flights?"
From Greenpeace's website:
Safe nuclear power is a myth. Greenpeace is campaigning to end nuclear power
Referring to Petra Kelly:
You couldn't say she was just a women's rights activist, peace activist, environmentalist, anti-nuclear activist, or a human rights activist. She was all of those things!
From an obituary of David Brower, two excerpts:
Note that the "Club" referred to was the Sierra Club.
As an uncompromising champion of the environment, David Brower has, in fact, become one of the most influential people in the modern history of the environmental movement.
A few years ago, he quit when the club refused to take a stronger antinuclear stand.
From a Reuter's news article, two excerpts:
Anti-nuclear protesters who dodged security forces to chain themselves to railtracks forced a train bearing atomic waste on Wednesday to retreat near the end of its journey to a dump in north Germany.
The action, carried out overnight by an environmentalist group called Robin Wood
From a website dedicated to the "GLOBAL VIGIL FOR PEACE":
A similar call had been initiated by Arjun Makhijani (Environmentalist and anti nuclear campaigner based in the US)
From a news report on the shutdown of the German nuclear plant at Stade:
The plant's closing sparked celebrations among the environmentalist Greens,
From the Washington Free Press:
The Socialist Party has nominated presidential hopeful Mary Cal Hollis, a former member of Colorado's Rural Electric Board, a member of the environmentalist Sheep Mountain Alliance, and a long time activist in trade union, anti-nuclear
That took a few minutes to find. It was by no means an exclusive list, just looking for some obvious people/organizations who were environmentalists and anti-nuclear.
Note that modern environmentalists seem to be split on the issue - some want to stop global warming enough to consider nuclear power, some consider nuclear power to be "teh debhil", and would rather do gas-fired plants than nuclear....
I take it you were either not alive or not watching the news in the 70's when this was happening?
The anti-nuke movement of that time was filled to overflowing with those who called themselves "Environmentalists". Note Greenpeace's continuing anti-nuclear stance, as an example.
"In 2001, the average operating cost of the 103 U.S. nuclear power plants was 1.68 cents per kilowatt-hour, second only to hydroelectric power among baseload generation options."
Now, admittedly, the guy who said this was with the Argonne National Laboratory, in their Nuclear Power Division.
However, even Greenpeace only assigned a cost for nuclear power of 9 cents per KWh, and they're rather biased in the other direction. This was in 1990 dollars, for reference. It would be a bit more in 2004 dollars.
As to blaming the Environmentalists, The American Society of Mechanical Engineers had this to say in 2000:
In the late 1970s, the EPA and NRC regulatory requirements escalated sharply, resulting in costly permitting, construction delays, retrofits to construction in progress, and design changes. Mechanical engineers rose to the challenge, but were overwhelmed by these new changing regulatory requirements. Utilities canceled orders for about 100 nuclear generating units in the United States because of the difficulty in obtaining the necessary permits, and unpredictable capital costs or schedules to complete construction.
The regulatory laws passed by Congress enabled nuclear power opponents to intervene in court in licensing proceedings for construction permits and for operating licenses. These interventions were successful in delaying nearly all projects after 1975--thus increasing capital costs substantially.
It seems odd that the Engineering Journals and Greenpeace set a lower cost ot nuclear power than you remember from ten years ago. Perhaps you should let them know that they're completely out to lunch on this issue.
And here I'd always thought my DNA was a mixture of my mother's and my father's.
Note, as a qualifier to the above sarcasm, that mytochondrial DNA, which is contained within every cell, is exclusivly from your mother. Or from the source of the egg, in any case, if you happen to be cloned.
Personally, I'm looking forward to Chimeras - pretty soon we'll be able to make Underpeople to be our slaves. Won't that be nice?
Nuclear power is quite cheap. Comparable to coal for capital outlays, cheaper in terms of running costs.
Ahh, but we mustn't forget the legal costs - Nuclear power plants stopped being built in the USA long before TMI or Chernobyl, because they were sued out of existane. By the Environmetalists of the time.
As to waste disposal - if coal plants had to dispose of their radioactive wstes in the same way that the nuclear undustry does (yes, Coal produces radioactive wastes - quite a lot of it, but it's mixed in with non-radioactive wastes and quietly ignored), then coal costs would be orders of magnitude higher.
My parents quit smoking a couple decades back. I never heard that they had any difficulty doing so.
Same with my siblings, though they quit in the last five years.
Read carefully. That was deltaV required to go from LEO (Low Earth Orbit) to Solar escape speed.
It assumes a starting speed of ~8Km/s (Actually, the orbit I assumed had ~7650m/s orbital speed), and a single burn in the direction of both the orbit around the Earth and the Earth's orbit around the Sun. It further assumed Solar escape speed was 42.1Km/s, which is true for a couple points along Earth's orbit, but I'm not sure exactly where, so I won't tell you the dates required for the burn.
If you add 9Km/s to your speed under those conditions, then you will find yourself moving along smartly in the plane of the ecliptic at just over 5250m/s relative to the Sun at some point in the indefinite future, when you are some arbitrarily large distance from the Sun (on the order of two light-months out, give or take a couple light-weeks)
Well, yes. Eventually you'd be far enough away that "escape speed" would be less than one inch per day. Let's, see, that would be about 10E27 years from now.
When departing a major body, there are advantages to a fast initial burn to put you over escape speed - it gets you some "free" speed. Given a fusion rocket or such that allows effectively unlimited deltaV for insystem work (it's not really unlimited, or even close to it, but it's large enough that you don't have to worry about running out of fuel when travelling between any two planets in our solar system), it's not really worth worrying about. But when you have to watch every teacup of fuel, it can save you a lot.
why is the 9km/s significant?
That number was NOT Earth escape speed. It was deltaV, starting from LEO, to achieve SOLAR escape speed.
But he was wrong here. If you're in a polar orbit to start with, you'll need a bit more deltaV than I described, since I assumed the ideal departure orbit (one where the burn was entirely in the direction of travel).
The big difficulty with going into a Solar polar orbit is that you have to cancel Earth's orbital speed as part of the orbital insertion burn. And Earth's orbital speed is ~30Km/s, more in northern-hemisphere winter, less in northern-hemisphere summer.
That ion drive that was tested this past year could, conceivably, be used to come up with the deltaV required for a Solar-polar orbit that was also a Solar-escape orbit. But no chemical rocket we can make can pull it off.
DeltaV required to head out perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic is quite a bit higher than to go out along the ecliptic.
Achieving Solar escape speed from LEO in the plane of the ecliptic is ~9Km/s.
Perpendicular to the ecliptic, deltaV required is ~26Km/s.
And it's tough to use planetary slingshots when you're going out perpendicular to the ecliptic.
Note also that in 1946, the Germans were a bit more fractious than now. It took a while for all of them to get over the War....
No. The Soviet Army would likely have lost, and at best fought the Germans to a standstill without the deuce-and-a-halfs we sent them. The Soviets produced tanks and guns in adequate numbers, but without the trucks to transport supplies to the Army, the Army is toothless.
Note that even as it was (with us supplying huge numbers of trucks to the Soviets), they had so few compared to their Army size that their offensives were a week or two of push, followed by a month or two of resupply before the next push. Rather than the sustained, continuoous push that both the Americans and Brits preferred.
without a US and UK invasion of mainland Europe the Soviets would never have stopped at East Germany.
Without a US/UK bombing offensive against Germany, and the supplies we sent the Soviets, the SOviet Union wouldn't have reached East Germany. I don't want to downplay the role of the USSR - but they couldn't have done what they did alone.
While we could have done what we did alone. We even planned for fighting Germany if the UK fell (the B-29 was designed for bombing Germany if we couldn't use the UK as a base for our bombing offensive - and never used in that role, since the UK didn't fall). If we'd fought the Germans by ourselves, we'd have pounded them into the ground about August of '45, when we nuked Berlin. And Japan might have held out a few months longer. But the war would still have been won.
I can't say the same thing if we'd not been involved. Keep in mind that we were helping both the Brits and Soviets (in violation of international and Federal law, I might add) from 1940 onward.
And we gave the same sort of stuff to the Russians. And the French. And pretty much everyone else.
The USA supplied most of the tanks the Brits used, and most of the trucks everyone used. We gave away more ships than the rest of the world built.
And while doing that, we beat the Japanese into the ground using only the resources leftover from the German part of the effort. Which "leftovers" amounted to six new battleships, a couple dozen new aircraft carriers, a couple dozen new cruiser, and hundreds of new destroyers.
If anything it cost the Britishers their entire empire to bring down the Germany's world conquest campaign. They paid the highest price of all. As history records it, prior to pearl harbour, USA refused to enter the war claiming that it was not their problem and they will just supply weapons etc. at most(for a profit ofcourse).
Myself, I think the 50 million Soviets killed were a bigger price than the Brits paid.
THe USA refused to enter the War before Pearl Harbor because we didn't have the Army or Navy to do anything worthwhile then. One must remember that a large standing military in the USA was a post-WW2 phenomenon. Prior to WW2, while our Navy was as good as any in the world, our Army was even smaller than the British Army - and mostly using antiquated equipment - it's likely that the BEF (that got trounced by the Germans in 1940) could have fought the US Army to a standstill, if not beaten it, in 1940.
What makes me think that? How about Germany and Japan? We beat the crap out of them for four years, and occupied them for 40. Or do you believe that Germany and Japan are still hotbeds of terrorism?
Seriously, though. No, no such programs exist, largely because the militery's standards are high enough that most "common criminals" wouldn't qualify. Someone mentioned convists studying for a GED. If you need a GED, you're not qualified to be in the US Army.
As to "assault machine guns" (whatever they are), one must keep in mind that the average soldier has very limited access to military weapons - they're stored in an Armory, and issued as needed. Soldiers don't get handed a gun when they're done training, and keep it through their service career.
I agree with your comment completely, but it is rather odd that you would suggest that violent people have no place in the military...after all, violence is what they do.
One must keep in mind that Britain only began mobilization for war the day after the invasion of Poland. Shifting from a peacetime stance to wartime mode is not done overnight - the British didn't even get conscription going for another month, much less have any ability to fight a war, in western Europe or anywhere else so quickly.
In fact, the French invaded western Germany only a week after the declaration of war, though, as far as I recall, they didn't push very hard, and were ultimately wasting their time - WW1 was still too much on everyone's mind at that point in the game.
It took a month and a half or two months for the BEF to even reach France, much less be in condition for offensive operations. Note also the existance of the Siegfried Line, and the refusal of Belgium to allow Anglo/French access to Germany through Belgium.
Note that by the time the BEF was in France, the German Army was back in Germany, Poland having surrendered.
Note further the German-Soviet Pact signed just the week before the invasion of Poland. Which leaves a great deal of room for doubt on the part of the Anglo-French General Staffs, since they now have to take into account the possibility (remote, but uncertain then and there) of Soviet intervention on behalf of the Germans.
I've never been terribly impressed with either British or French early actions in WW2, or in their decisions leading up to the War. But they didn't have a whole lot of options in late '39 and early '40.
It really wasn't until it became clear that they USA would violate its stated neutrality to aid the British that it became obvious that the British had the wherewithal to actually carry on a serious fight against the Germans. Note that pretty much all US support for Britain before 8 Dec 1941 was technically a violation of both international law and US law - being neutral means that you can't supply one combatant with warships, planes, tanks, guns, oil, steel, food, etc. Which we did almost from the beginning of the War in Europe.
And why would we bother, in that case? If the Gulf Stream shuts down, Europe won't be a very pleasant place to live, so we wouldn't really be interested in the place.
And that's ignoring that nuking real-estate you want to capture isn't necessarily a bright move.
I suppose it's possible that Europe could fall under a dictatorship, run by the Agriculture and Fisheries Board, which we might feel honour-bound to destroy. But even that is less likely than you might think (that we'd want to destroy a new European dictatorship, I mean).
On the other hand, Clinton thought that 49% of the votes, and 17% of the country was a "mandate", after his second election.
And after his first, he thought that 43% of the votes, and 17% of the country was a "mandate".
Incidently, Bush got 62,000,000+ votes, which is a lot closer to 22% of the country than to 16%.