Almost a Blizzard

People tend to call any bad snowstorm a blizzard, but meteorologists have specific criteria for what it takes to be a true blizzard. One of them is wind speed, a blizzard has sustained wind speeds in excess of 30 MPH for three hours or more. I didn't stay up all night monitoring it but, at one point, we had sustained winds of 28 MPH, with gusts up to 47 MPH. Another criteria is visibility less that a quarter mile. As far as I know, our visibility never got less than 0.3 of a mile. I don't think total snow accumulation is one of the  criteria, but we got 9.6 inches by official count. That's not unusual for us, but our snow is usually dry and fluffy while this snow was dry and dense, probably because it was wind driven. It would have been worse if it had been wet and clingy, that's what pulls down tree limbs and power lines. As far as I know, the nearest power outages were only for a few hours in Presque Isle County, our neighbor to the east, so we dodged that bullet this time.

Europe was pretty contentious long before the Reformation. Before there were national wars there were tribal wars. The Romans settled things down for awhile but, after Rome went down, it was back to business as usual. It's true that the Mideast never evolved to the level of nation states, but they did have city states that took turns conquering each other and establishing empires. The Turks probably ruled the roost for as long as anybody, but even they went down in World War I, after which the British and the French took their turn at the wheel.

I think it's a good idea you have about carving the Mideast up along ethnic or religious lines, but I don't think any of the factions want that. They each want it all, and they don't want the other factions to have anything. Maybe we should invite the Turks to take over again. It seems like they were pretty good at knocking everybody's heads together and making them play nice. Then again, they might not want it back, any more than the British or the French do. Anybody who has ruled in the region knows from experience that it's more trouble than it's worth. Even the Russians probably don't want to take over, they just want to stir up trouble and aggravate the U.S., although you'd think they would have learned their lesson from the Cold War.

If only a few people have guns, then they have the advantage but, when everybody else has guns too, the only way to gain the advantage is to have more gun toting soldiers at your command. You need competent leadership too, or your army will quickly degenerate into a mob, or several competing mobs. For awhile it looked like the answer was to have bigger guns than the opposition, but then they get bigger guns too, which leads to an arms race that culminates with the atomic bomb, a gun so big that everybody who has one is afraid to use it. Some people thought that the atomic bomb would lead to peace by making warfare so terrible that nobody would want to do it anymore. I understand that people said the same thing about the crossbow when it first came out. It turned out that the crossbow didn't even slow warfare down, and the atomic bombs sit in storage while warfare continues with less devastating weapons. You never know, though. Maybe some apocalyptic death cult like ISIS will get their hands on one of those atomic bombs. They wouldn't be afraid to use it because they all want to die anyway, and take everybody else with them when they go. It probably would be better for everybody if they would just stick with their AK47s.