When china 'invaded' Vietnam in retribution of 'Nam's invasion of Kampuchea, how come it wasn't a complete cakewalk for the Chinese? was it really that the vietnamese used guerilla warfare so effectively, or were there other major factors at play?

I am wondering whether coaches and sport scientists back then were publicly encouraging the use of steroids in athletes or whether that has always been something that was kept secret.

Have athletes ever been outspoken of the positive effects of steroids?

Was there a time when there was absolutely no negative stigma around steroids?

Most times I cook Italian food I can't help but notice the colours of the Italian flag staring at me.

Could it be the Italians had the gall to snub history or other foobar ideology and chose to hoist a flag that represents their most common ingredients used in their dishes?

what is the history of the Italian flag and the red/white/green?

and while we are here .. why blue for their sports?

Did the annexators ship in their own talent to run the plants? are there anectdotes about seized tech that the occupier had no talent to figure out how to continue making <x> product? Were their banks that got seized that behaved differently due to occupation?

I've never quite understood the following. Could someone explain it to me?

Anglo-Saxon refers to British people, but Saxony is in Germany. Are they related?

Is the term "Britain" related to "Briton?" How does it relate to Brittany, which is in France?

How did Britain have a house of Normandy, if Normandy is in France?

Is Mercia related to Murcia, Spain?

In recent history, some communist or authoritarian governments have come to power with names falsely proclaiming democracy. I had in mind the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the German Democratic Republic. Why do these countries feel the need to express how democratic they are with their names?

I was curious about this and I wondered if they had the same reaction as American and other Western troops. The Soviet foot soldier would have experienced an unimaginable Hell in fighting in the East and probably lost many family members. The Russians were not known for being friendly to Jews either and I wonder if they thought maybe they were just as unlucky as anyone else who encountered the Germans.

This may sound dumb, but obviously nobody knew that Jesus was going to be born. So how did the majority of people say what year it was? Did people born in BC times who within their lifetimes switched over to AD times know that they were in AD?

Had stories of the fates of captured German soldiers somehow made it back to Germany?

How did the common soldier know that the Soviets were going to be worse than the French, whom they also invaded, or the British, whom they had bombed?

Be it the American Revolution, the US Civil War or the Irish Revolution of 1916 or any other uprising; where did the upstarts get uniforms in numbers sufficient to clothe an army?

It seems to me that a single parent families are increasingly popular in our society, given the way that many older people react to single mothers/fathers and the couple never being married. Is the single parent family a fairly new phenomenon, or has the taboo just decreased and they were found throughout history?

My main question was in terms of how the prisoners interacted. Di they have prison bitches? Was there people who could get things or was it too heavily guarded?

Lately I've been thinking, and I wondered: did Soviet Russia's Communist Party become all powerful because the country needed a strong leader? I've read that the Party took power after the revolutions took place, but I don't think a dictatorship/totalitarian party was really what Russians were looking for after their bad experience with Tsars. However, I can't find anything for or against that thought.