Publicly, this is probably true. Privately, the intention was "concentrating bomb-loads on the densest and most vulnerable areas of cities" (RAF archive document).

That was not representative of even the entire Japanese High Command. Yes, there were lunatics who wanted to keep fighting, but that didn't stop Hirohito from issuing the surrender order.

Dresden did have industrial areas. The bombers deliberately targeted the civilian areas, not the factories.

Thank you. I'll see if I can lay my hands on that book. I have my doubts about Hastings, since he acts too often as a right-wing ideologue (he writes for the Daily Heil), but that particular book gets decent reviews, and he does do his research.

they also wanted to keep parts of their Empire, including Korea, as a starting point in negotiations.

At some point you are moving into a counterfactual history. Is your scenario possible? Yes, it is. Was this a driving force behind their actions? That's another matter. Europe was divided the same way. There was a cold war, but no World War III

Operation Sealion cancelled late 1940. Last units moved to other duties 1942.

Given the tendency to ignore or justify the actions of Allied war criminals (with the exception of Soviet ones), I wasn't about to make that assumption

Yep. I added a few paragraphs about Truman elsewhere.

I discuss Truman elsewhere in the thread.

I'm not sure that you can justify war crimes on the basis of strategic benefit, but the bombings of German population centres didn't have strategic benefit either. They were conducted as terror operations that the perpetrators would have known would be ineffective or counterproductive, having seen the effects of a…

Missing: President H Truman

If you are going to compile a list of people who committed major war crimes, in this case the murder of tens of thousands of civilians in order to instill terror in a population, Harris and LeMay should certainly be there.

No, but it wasn't the Roman habit to send aspiring engineers to university in Nineveh either. Taking what they wanted was more their modus operandi. Of course, we'll never know how the Romans learned how to build aqueducts, but we do know they didn't get there first.

And I'm telling you that your own government's figures say otherwise. There's no doubt you are eating, on average, a lot of meat, but the link above says on average, you're getting through more vegetables than you seem to think. In terms of dietary recommendations it's way inadequate, but that's not the point.

I'm using your government's figures for average vegetable and meat consumption. It's the average here that matters, not some Texan Neanderthal subsisting on a diet of raw beef. I'm sure the latter exists, but that's not the point. Those vegetable figures are for fresh vegetables, on average, over the course of the…

I'm sure some of you do. It explains a lot of things. I'm looking at average and aggregate consumption, not nitpicking about cumin and tomato ketchup.

The bread would count under "grains" - a separate category. Your burger might well show up as "indeterminate", because, unless you could definitively trace the source of the infection, it might have come from improperly cooked meat, infected cheese or unwashed lettuce.

It's hard to compare these figures, because they're not given in any sort of universal measurement.

You are correct, I haven't. That said, these are also aggregated figures for the whole of the US, where such figures vary.