Quotulatiousness

September 18, 2019

Paul Sellers | Splitting and Paring Tenons

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published on 15 Sep 2012

Paul Sellers demonstrates his somewhat unique method for cutting tenons. In this short video he shows how to split and pare tenons and where and when the different techniques should be used. For more information about Paul Sellers and the projects he is involved with visit http://paulsellers.com

To see a beginner friendly guide on how to make a mortise and tenon joint, see our sister site: https://commonwoodworking.com/courses…

QotD: Debunking the notion of “peaceful” Vikings

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Going through the Viking exhibit, for instance, we kept being told time after time how powerful women had been among the Vikings, and also there were things like treasure troves, which in one case they said “was a woman’s treasure trove, probably to honor women in her ancestry.” At which point I looked at the case enquiringly, because these idiots don’t seem to understand someone’s unearthed treasure trove is someone else’s panicked burial.

[…]

Which brings us to the next part. All through the exhibit, people told us over and over again that the Vikings were — contrary to legend — peaceful, peaceful I tell you. Most of the Vikings were, after all, farmers and householders.

I wasn’t buying it. Yeah, sure, most Vikings, if you count women, children, and people to old to go aViking, just stayed put. But no civilization where dying in bed gets you sent to Hel (which was cold rather than hot but much like our Hell) is a peaceful one. In the same way I didn’t buy the continuous reassurances there were as many women as men aboard those ships. Cooeeeeee! Really? The men saddled themselves with a liability likely to get pregnant, give birth, etc AND be weaker in battle? That’s … amazing. Oh, I forget. The idiots writing these cards think women are naturally as strong and physically as fast as men and that the “patriarchy” is a six-thousand-year-old conspiracy to hide this. Sure, there probably was the occasional female in a male role. Contrary to much bleating on the left, the patriarchy didn’t enforce strict gender roles, life generally did, and there are always outliers, and Helga the Ugly who could lift a pig under each arm, probably was allowed to join the guys in their expeditions. For one, who was going to tell her no? For another, no guy ever got drunk enough for her to be at risk.

Other than that, sure, there were as many women as men aboard Viking ships. Coming back from a raid. They called those women “slaves.”

[…]

But no, like the beliefs in powerful women Vikings, (who apparently can ONLY be powerful by pillaging and plundering. Being mistress of a farm is not enough), and in peaceful Vikings too they’re simply an upending of long-held beliefs about something. I.e. if Western culture has long believed something, progressives will believe the opposite, because that’s about as hard as any of them can reason, and congruent with their initial mission to topple civilization so perfect communism will emerge.

Sarah Hoyt, “I Aten’t Dead”, According to Hoyt, 2017-07-27.

September 17, 2019

“How did staging dinner-theatre raids to seize eleven grand’s worth of knock-off NFL merchandise become an ICE priority?”

Filed under: Football, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Steyn on a recent you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me raid by ICE:

Because AOC and the open-borders left want to abolish ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the right is obliged to defend it. This is a pity, because ICE is a deeply weird agency with, to put it mildly, increasingly curious and eccentric priorities.

Last week, for example, under crack agent Tatum King, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit staged (that seems the appropriate word) a raid in Oakland of the Oakland Raiders game:

    ICE targeted vendors of unauthorized T-shirts, hats, caps and bandannas. The agency said the raid was done in partnership with NFL brand security representatives and state and local law enforcement. The Oakland Police Department said it was not involved.

    Officials said they seized about $11,000 worth of illegal swag — undoubtedly, most of it silver and black — during the ‘Monday Night Football’ game and its pre- and postgame tailgate parties.

    Tatum King, special agent in charge of the San Francisco Homeland Security Investigations unit, said about 400 pieces of merchandise were seized but no one was arrested. NFL brand officials issued warning letters and may be pursuing civil action, he said.

As they should — and in small claims court, if eleven grand is the best a no-expense-spared federal-state-local raid with everyone in the full Robocop can come up with.

But what business is it of ICE’s “Homeland Security Investigations” division? This arrest-less “raid” and its attendant publicity ballyhoo undoubtedly cost US taxpayers more than the barely five figures’ worth of Oakland Raiders swag they’re now passing round the office.

Like ICE, HSI was created post-9/11 — to enforce four hundred laws “combating terrorism and enhancing national security”. How did staging dinner-theatre raids to seize eleven grand’s worth of knock-off NFL merchandise become an ICE priority? Which it undoubtedly is:

    King said the agency is committed to ensuring the public purchases ‘legitimate products’ instead of cheaper knockoffs often sold outside stadiums like the Coliseum.

[…]

Tatum King appears to be the usual showboating tosspot in this regard. The picture above shows him after a previous raid netted him some Golden State Warriors merchandise. Agent King can’t keep actual MS-13 warriors out of the Golden State, but he can crack down on underpriced baseball caps and sweatshirts.

The President has declared, repeatedly, that there is an emergency at the southern border. I agree with that. He has also said that, therefore, he needs more resources. That’s harder to agree with when a rogue bureaucracy refuses to act as if there’s an emergency and deploy its existing resources accordingly.

In fact, I’m not sure the left’s alleged war on ICE isn’t just their usual sly deflection, intended to provide a bit of useful cover for a subversive immigration bureaucracy to carry on doing as it’s done for a generation now and refuse to enforce existing immigration law — at least for anything that matters.

The Curator’s Dingo | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Tank Museum
Published on 16 Sep 2019

Most Curators don’t own armoured cars… David Willey, Tank Museum Curator, has owned his Daimler Dingo Scout Car for over 20 years. Find out how he came to own it and what he uses it for.

As part of the 75th Anniversary of Operation Market Garden, David will be driving his Dingo in a 200 vehicle convoy retracing the route.

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“Clean” alternative energy sources are not free … in fact, they’re quite expensive

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Earlier this month in Foreign Policy, Jason Hickel wrote about the requirements for expanding current renewable energy generation (wind and solar):

The phrase “clean energy” normally conjures up happy, innocent images of warm sunshine and fresh wind. But while sunshine and wind is obviously clean, the infrastructure we need to capture it is not. Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs.

We need a rapid transition to renewables, yes — but scientists warn that we can’t keep growing energy use at existing rates. No energy is innocent. The only truly clean energy is less energy.

In 2017, the World Bank released a little-noticed report that offered the first comprehensive look at this question. It models the increase in material extraction that would be required to build enough solar and wind utilities to produce an annual output of about 7 terawatts of electricity by 2050. That’s enough to power roughly half of the global economy. By doubling the World Bank figures, we can estimate what it will take to get all the way to zero emissions — and the results are staggering: 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminum, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron.

In some cases, the transition to renewables will require a massive increase over existing levels of extraction. For neodymium — an essential element in wind turbines — extraction will need to rise by nearly 35 percent over current levels. Higher-end estimates reported by the World Bank suggest it could double.

The same is true of silver, which is critical to solar panels. Silver extraction will go up 38 percent and perhaps as much as 105 percent. Demand for indium, also essential to solar technology, will more than triple and could end up skyrocketing by 920 percent.

And then there are all the batteries we’re going to need for power storage. To keep energy flowing when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing will require enormous batteries at the grid level. This means 40 million tons of lithium — an eye-watering 2,700 percent increase over current levels of extraction.

That’s just for electricity. We also need to think about vehicles. This year, a group of leading British scientists submitted a letter to the U.K. Committee on Climate Change outlining their concerns about the ecological impact of electric cars. They agree, of course, that we need to end the sale and use of combustion engines. But they pointed out that unless consumption habits change, replacing the world’s projected fleet of 2 billion vehicles is going to require an explosive increase in mining: Global annual extraction of neodymium and dysprosium will go up by another 70 percent, annual extraction of copper will need to more than double, and cobalt will need to increase by a factor of almost four — all for the entire period from now to 2050.

Wind turbines require a lot of concrete to stabilize them on site (hundreds of tons of it), and that concrete is very carbon-intensive to create in the first place (nearly 930 Kg of CO2 per 1,000 Kg of cement), but even those huge turbine blades have a limited working lifespan and can’t be easily recycled into anything economically, so they generally end up in landfills.

From Bolt Action Lee to LMG: The Charlton Automatic Rifle

Filed under: History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 26 Jul 2019

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The Charlton automatic rifle is one of very, very few examples of a conversion from bolt action to self-loading rifle actually working reasonably well. Typically this sort of project founders in expense and unreliability. Charlton, however, was able to take his vision for providing the New Zealand Home Guard with a new weapon made form obsolete surplus and bring it fully to fruition, with 1500 guns made. They were never fired in anger, but allowed New Zealand to put all of its Bren guns into the field while retaining the Charltons as emergency weapons in case of Japanese invasion. Sadly, virtually all were destroyed in a warehouse fire after the war, leaving them extremely rare today.

Many thanks to the Royal Armouries for allowing me to film and disassemble this very scarce automatic rifle! The NFC collection there – perhaps the best military small arms collection in Western Europe – is available by appointment to researchers:

https://royalarmouries.org/research/n…

You can browse the various Armouries collections online here:

https://royalarmouries.org/collection/

For the whole detailed story on Charlton manufacture, and to download a copy of the manual, check my web site article here:

https://www.forgottenweapons.com/light-machine-guns/charlton-automatic-rifle/

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QotD: Rent-seeking

[Progressives] should also be delighted by public choice scholars’ development of the theory of privilege-seeking (or “rent-seeking“). It’s an old observation, really: when the state’s personnel have favors to dispense, people in the private sector will invest resources to obtain them. Such favors are by nature impositions on third parties. They may take the form of cash subsidies, taxes and regulations that hamper or quash competition and raise incomes in a non-market manner, and other devices. But the principle is the same: private- and government-sector individuals collude to use the state’s coercive power to obtain what they could not obtain through voluntary exchange for mutual benefit. It’s a theory of exploitation the good-faith left should embrace.

By the same token, the state’s personnel, seeing opportunities to sell favors, are just as likely to initiate the privilege-seeking process. In this sense, public choice scholars are right when they see the political arena as a series of exchanges. The big difference with the marketplace, however, is that in the political arena the largest group of people is forced to participate.

The bottom line on privilege-seeking, which should interest the left, is this: the people with the greatest access to power will not be those the left cares most about, but those who run Boeing and ExxonMobil and GE and Lockheed Martin. Wealth transfers will tend overwhelmingly to be upward.

Sheldon Richman, “TGIF: What the Left Should Like about Public Choice”, The Libertarian Institute, 2017-07-28.

September 16, 2019

The Inca Empire – Andean Apocalypse – Extra History – #4

Filed under: Americas, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published on 14 Sep 2019

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Disease — likely, smallpox or measles — had arrived in the Inca empire, and it was ruthless. Two of the (now dead) Emperor Huayna Capac’s sons, Atahualpa and Huáscar, decided that a civil war over who should be Sapa Inca was perfect to do right now — nevermind the fact that Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadores had just showed up.

Election 2019 – “Going negative this early strongly suggests that the Lib’s internal polling is suggesting a fair bit of weakness”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jay Currie’s take on the first week of the Canadian federal election campaign:

Dock Currie (not related) apparently posted something to the internet several years ago which was offensive. So he felt he had to resign as an NDP candidate. [Anyone who sees Dock on Twitter has to wonder if he has ever posted something which is not offensive, but there is is.] Several conservatives have, at various times been in the same crowd of several hundred or thousand people as Canada’s answer to Tokyo Rose, Faith Goldy. The shock, the horror.

I realize that a race between Trudeau, Scheer, Singh and May is not very inspiring. (It would have been so much more interesting had the Conservatives actually run a conservative like Max Bernier rather than whatever the hell Scheer is, but them’s the breaks.) But piling on to candidates for ancient statements or mau-mauing them for distant association with a cartoon fascist simply sets the bar even lower.

Having accomplished nothing of substance in their years in government – they even screwed up the pot file which took real ingenuity – the Libs are reduced to going negative from the outset. Their war room knows that Canadians are unimpressed with “climate change needs higher taxes” as a campaign theme. They also know that Trudeau’s legal and ethics problems offset what charisma he has as a campaigner.

So now it is time for “Project Fear”. Scheer = Harper = Trump. Scheer is going to take away abortion rights, Scheer is not an ally of the gay community because he does not jet all over the country to march in pride parades. The Conservatives hate immigrants, and so on.

Going negative this early strongly suggests that the Lib’s internal polling is suggesting a fair bit of weakness. Conventionally, a party will save the negative stuff for the last couple of weeks of the campaign when it is the most damaging and the hardest to refute. I suspect the Libs have realized that with their own leader either under RCMP investigation or credibly accused of impeding that investigation, they need to distract and terrify the under 30’s, newer immigrants and the ladies if they are going to win.

History-Makers: Herodotus

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 13 Sep 2019

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There is much to do, and many unknowns on our horizon! — One of those unknowns is “How did Herodotus become the Father of History” and why is his book so confusingly organized? All that and more on this installment of History-Makers!

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Vikings at Green Bay – a terrible first quarter dooms the Vikings, 21-16

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Minnesota Vikings visited Green Bay for the first “Border Battle” of the 2019 season. Both teams had won their opening games, so the winner of this match would have the early lead in the NFC North division.

Among the inactives for the game were Vikings cornerbacks Mackensie Alexander and Mike Hughes along with starting left guard Pat Elflein and starting linebacker Ben Gedeon. I didn’t recognize any of the names on the Packers’ inactive list, so I assumed they returned all their starters from week one.

The game could hardly have started better for the hometown Packers, as they scored touchdowns on their first three possessions and looked unstoppable. Minnesota’s defence appeared to have been replaced by tackling dummies, as they could neither cover Pack receivers or stop Pack running backs. Dalvin Cook finally got the Vikings on the scoreboard with a 75-yard touchdown run to pull the Vikings back into the game. The Vikings defence finally got their act together after that, and kept the Packers out of the end zone for the rest of the game.

As several people pointed out on Twitter, it always seems as though the Vikings manage to be the first team to get screwed by new rule changes, as the decision to make pass interference a reviewable call turned into a touchdown taken off the scoreboard as review officials in New York decreed that OPI had taken place on the play and overturned the ruling on the field. Instead of seven points, the Vikings had to settle for a field goal from Dan Bailey. The next official ruling that took points away indirectly was an unsportsmanlike conduct call against Stefon Diggs for removing his helmet after scoring a touchdown. The fifteen yard penalty pushed the extra point attempt back and Green Bay was able to deflect the kick.

The Vikings’ last chance to win the game ended on a Kirk Cousins interception in the end zone. The Vikings defence held the Packers to a three-and-out, but Cousins and the Vikings offence did the same, and the Vikings only got the ball back after that with bare seconds left on the game clock, too far out for even a Hail Mary attempt.

Matthew Coller correctly says the Vikings wasted every comeback chance they had (and they had several):

Through sixteen minutes of football at Lambeau Field on Sunday afternoon, the Green Bay Packers looked like a juggernaut. Over the final 44 minutes, the Packers played only slightly better than one of the teams hoping to draft No. 1 overall. And — to paraphrase Denny Green — the Minnesota Vikings let them off the hook.

Aaron Rodgers and the Packers received the opening kickoff immediately hit Davante Adams for a 39-yard pass. Seconds later they were in the end zone, going 75 yards for a touchdown in just 2:10. Following a Vikings missed field goal, they did it again, driving 63 yards for another TD pass by Rodgers, this time picking on the Vikings’ depth at defensive back, tossing the ball easily over recently-elevated safety Nate Meadors.

Quarterback Kirk Cousins then fumbled twice on the same drive, setting up Rodgers and the Packers at the Minnesota 33-yard line. That drive ended as quickly as the first and with the same result.

Before Packers fans were even inside the building from their morning tailgating efforts, it was a three-score game.

[…]

The Vikings’ loss in Green Bay had a little bit of everything — bad calls, missed kicks, turnovers, big plays and inexplicable decisions. Ultimately Cousins and the offense were given every chance to overcome the bad start and pull off a remarkable comeback. Instead another big game in the Cousins era ends with regret and missed opportunities.

This is York – British Transport Film

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

LMS4767
Published on 30 May 2019

QotD: If we’d been taken over by aliens, how would we know?

Filed under: Education, Environment, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Look around you – if we in the West and we humans, in general, had been invaded by aliens, what would be different?

  • Our schools in America teach that the system under which America lives, from constitutional protections to (relatively … very relatively) free markets are evil and the cause of all evils in the world.
  • Our schools further teach that all the problems in the world at large are the fault of “Imperialists” to include not just America, but the West which is America’s mother culture. They ignore the sins of other nations, many of which, still today, commit female mutilation and slavery, to concentrate ONLY on the West and the sins of the West, thereby obviating any possible pride the students might have in their own culture.
  • Further, the schools, under the guise of environmentalism, promote the view that humanity is the worst plague on the planet. Without pointing out that any species can drive others to extinction, or that humans are the only species capable of self-regulating their impact on the environment, they concentrate on those extinctions humans have caused and fantasize that without humans the world would be a paradise.
  • Without pointing out the difficulty of global censuses or that in fact we don’t and can’t know how large the world population is, our learning institutions, our cultural institutions, even our entertainment continually scare us with the idea of overpopulation. Without taking into account that there are more trees now in North America than when the colonists arrived, they picture humanity as creating deserts. Schools push middle schoolers to sign agreements never to reproduce.
  • As if this weren’t enough, feminists picture women – in Western, well off, more or less equalitarian (at least before the law as it existed before feminist tampering made it take sides with women most of the time) systems – as perpetual victims, stoke a sense of outrage and anger at any and all males, and encourage women to consider normal intercourse “rape” and marriage a prison.
  • As if this weren’t enough, the insanity has descended to preaching that there is no such thing as biological sex, and that one’s gender is a sort of “mood” which can be determined before a child is even fully developed. Parents giving hormones to children, to change their sex before the age of reason (let alone physical or emotional maturity) and effectively encouraging castration/neutering and precluding future generations aren’t considered deranged abusers. In fact, educational and medical establishments will encourage parents to thus destroy their progeny and will take the children away if the parents don’t do it, on the flimsiest of pretexts based on stereotypes, such as a boy who disdains male toys, or a girl who doesn’t like dolls. The rich panoply of human expression is ignored in a – dare we say it – alien attempt to make individual people fit stereotypes.
  • Three generations into this, our leading lights in intellectual life, be it fiction, non-fiction, academia or even research, get plaudits and advancement ONLY from conclusions and policies that objectively hurt humans and prevent humans from reproducing. A subset of this is hate of the West, the most successful culture in the world, ever, in terms of extending life, preventing early death, preventing or curing disease and preventing and curing famine. Another and even more vociferous subset is the hatred of America, which took all of Western virtues and made them more so.

If aliens, hostile to the very idea of humanity and wanting to prevent us from prospering, let alone going into space (another cause that all so called “progressives” hate with a burning passion and try to prevent by all means possible, from telling us that there is still need on Earth so we shouldn’t spend money on going to space, to telling us that we must first learn to “take care of this planet” to just sustained screaming that the human plague shouldn’t propagate) had managed to take control of our culture, what would they do differently?

Sarah Hoyt, “What if We Have Been Invaded by Aliens?”, PJ Media, 2017-07-21.

September 15, 2019

The Nazi Invasion of Britain?! – WW2 – 055 – September 14 1940

Filed under: Britain, China, Europe, Germany, History, Italy, Japan, Middle East, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published on 14 Sep 2019

The Blitz continues as the German army seems close to the execution of Operation Sea Lion: the invasion of Britain.

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From the comments:

World War Two
3 days ago
What if the Germans had invaded Britain this week? We will probably never know, but we get asked to give our views on counterfactual history questions like this all the time. Many did that during our first Q&A session on Instagram last week. We had a great time answering many questions about the war, about TimeGhost and about the production process, and we’ll certainly do similar Instagram Q&A sessions again. If you don’t already, you can follow us by looking up @world_war_two_realtime or https://www.instagram.com/world_war_two_realtime/

Cheers,
Joram

Explaining Brexit to liberal Americans

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Sullivan tries to put the Brexit debate into terms that coastal, urban Americans can understand:

One of the frustrating aspects of reading the U.S. media’s coverage of Brexit is that you’d never get any idea why it happened in the first place. Brexit is treated, automatically, as some kind of pathology, a populist act of wanton self-harm, an absurd idea, etc etc. And from the perspective of an upstanding member of the left-liberal media establishment, that’s all true. If your idea of Britain is formed by jetting in and out of London, a multicultural, global metropolis that is as lively and European as any city on the Continent, you’d think that E.U. membership is a no-brainer. Now that the full hellish economic consequences of exit are in full view, what could possibly be the impulse to stick with it?

I get this. I would have voted Remain. I find London to be far more fun now than it was when I left the place. But allow me to suggest a parallel version of Britain’s situation — but with the U.S. The U.S. negotiated with Canada and Mexico to create a free trade zone called NAFTA, just as the U.K. negotiated entry to what was then a free trade zone called the “European Economic Community” in 1973. Now imagine further that NAFTA required complete freedom of movement for people across all three countries. Any Mexican or Canadian citizen would have the automatic right to live and work in the U.S., including access to public assistance, and every American could live and work in Mexico and Canada on the same grounds. This three-country grouping then establishes its own Supreme Court, which has a veto over the U.S. Supreme Court. And then there’s a new currency to replace the dollar, governed by a new central bank, located in Ottawa.

How many Americans would support this? How many votes would a candidate for president get if he or she proposed it? The questions answer themselves. It would be unimaginable for the U.S. to allow itself to be governed by an entity more authoritative than its own government. It would signify the end of the American experiment, because it would effectively be the end of the American nation-state. But this is precisely the position the U.K. has been in for most of my lifetime. The U.K. has no control over immigration from 27 other countries in Europe, and its less regulated economy has attracted hundreds of thousands of foreigners to work in the country, transforming its culture and stressing its hospitals, schools and transportation system. Its courts ultimately have to answer to the European Court. Most aspects of its economy are governed by rules set in Brussels. It cannot independently negotiate any aspect of its own trade agreements. I think the cost-benefit analysis still favors being a member of the E.U. But it is not crazy to come to the opposite conclusion.

More to the point, the European Economic Community has evolved over the years into something far more ambitious. Through various treaties — Maastricht and Lisbon, for example — what is now called the European Union (note the shift in language) has embarked on a process of ever-greater integration: a common currency, a common foreign policy and now, if Macron has his way, a common central bank. It is requiring the surrender and pooling of more and more national sovereignty from its members. And in this series of surrenders, Britain is unique in its history and identity. In the last century, every other European country has experienced the most severe loss of sovereignty a nation can experience: the occupation of a foreign army on its soil. Britain hasn’t. Its government has retained control of its own island territory now for a thousand years. More salient: this very resistance has come to define the character of the country, idealized by Churchill in the country’s darkest hour. Britain was always going to have more trouble pooling sovereignty than others. And the more ambitious the E.U. became, the more trouble the U.K. had.

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