As an aside, it’s noteable that any country which has fought to gain independance from the UK has never asked to be allowed back in.
Heh heh – it used to be the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish who had chips on their shoulders…

Had my fair share of Triumphs, BSAs, and big Hondas in my youth, but am happy to have owned and settled down to several Harleys Big twins since 1978. This one is for keeps – my hand-shift foot-clutch 1974 FLH 1200 Electra Glide. She’s a movie star!
http://imcdb.org/vehicle_38233-Harley-Davidson-FLH-Electra-Glide-1974.html

Nice shade of blue, though….

whatever your view on The Colonel etc, military using their weapons on the crowds is obscene, you have to wonder how many “students” from Trafalger Square last year would come out from behind their Che Guevara posters and Manic Street Preacher CD’s to face REAL oppression….

To put things into perspective, it would be naive to think that if an armed faction in the UK tried to overthrow the Westminster government, lethal force would not be used to quell them.
What is the difference?

Alloy casting has been going through my mind recently too, mainly to make motorcycle parts, and have been amazed at how the temperatures in an ordinary domestic fireplace can melt some alloys.
Bearing in mind how touchy the authorities have become over guns in the UK, I thought I would destroy a replica Walther P38 pistol which had been knocking around the house for decades. This is what I found in the grate the next day…

These days we take technology for granted, and think that mankind can overcome any obstacle or problem, but Mother Nature keeps proving us totally insignificant and inadequate.
In the Sci-Fi movies, the asteroid or comet is seen a long way out, the geeky scientists look at their screens, type at high speed on their computers with their scrawny fingers, then send the under-educated ethnic hero out on a dangerous journey to destroy it. He somehow survives the suicide mission, saves the planet, and wins back his ex-wife and kids who thought he was really a loser.
Truth is, Jupiter has been hit a few times again since the Shoemaker-Levy impacts of 1994, only observed because of the tell-tale (and Earth-sized!) post-impact scars left in the atmosphere – the scientists didn’t see them coming. They only knew about the Shoemaker-Levi impacts in advance because they were caused by a comet, and therefore luminous!
The Jupiter comet impact did teach us one thing however – breaking up one of these giant bodies is a bad idea. The comet broke up into several pieces before impact, and instead of one massive impact, there were lots of huge impacts, making a potential hit on the populated areas of Earth much more likely, like a scatter-gun effect.
These objects are cartainly out there, but we have to take solace from the fact that giant Earth impacts have usually heralded a spurt of more evolved life. Maybe the next intelligent species inheriting the Earth will look after it better…

Would the British economic climate be any better if the UK was overrun by the Germans in 1940?

For the Germans, certainly, but not the conquered Brits, who would have been gently encouraged to swap all their worldly goods for the odd bowl of gruel, hard graft, and some barbed wire walls.
Some parts of the UK were considered to be populated by ‘untermensch’ by the Nazis, such as the descendants of Pictish tribes on the Scottish east coast, and would have probably faired much worse than, say, the Gaels or Anglo-Saxons, whom the Germans considered their equals.
Shows how idiotic their ideology was – the Picts originally came from northern Germany and Scandinavia across the land-bridge after the last Ice-Age, whereas the Gaels were from Celtic stock migrating from the Basque area of Spain through Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland…