Do you know what the funny thing is about mixed signals, OCC? In most instances mixed signals are actually one loud, clear, unmistakable signal: “I’m a fucking mess! Run! Run! Run!” The reason you can’t decipher the singular signal Alaska Boy is sending you, OCC, is because you’re suffering from a bad case of Wishful Thinking Syndrome (WTS). This man is damaged goods, OCC, but you’re so in love with him that you can’t see him for what he is.
So how do we know he’s damaged goods? Let’s count the ways: For starters he’s a single man who chooses to live in Alaska, which should be renamed the Alaskan National Damaged Goods Refuge.
Dan Savage, Savage Love, 2005-03-23.
June 19, 2021
QotD: Living in Alaska
June 18, 2021
Innovation was minimal in the Roman Empire, because slave societies think they don’t need new inventions
Mark Koyama writes for the Foundation for Economic Education on the similarities and differences of the economy of the Roman Empire at its second-century peak and the booming European economies of the 17th and early 18th centuries:
The most obvious institutional difference between the ancient world and the modern was slavery. Recently historians have tried to elevate slavery and labor coercion as a crucial causal mechanism in explaining the industrial revolution. These attempts are unconvincing […] but slavery certainly did dominate the ancient economy.
In its attempt to draw together the various strands through which slavery permeated the ancient economy, [Aldo] Schiavone’s chapter “Slaves, Nature, Machines” [in The End of the Past] is a tour de force. At once he captures the ubiquity of slavery in the ancient economy, its unremitting brutality — for instance, private firms that specialized in branding, retrieving, and punishing runaway slaves — and, at the same time, touches the central economic questions raised by ancient slavery: to what extent was slavery crucial to the economic expansion of the period between 200 BCE and 150 AD? And did the prevalence of slavery impede innovation?
It is impossible to do justice to the argument in a single post. Suffice to say that after much discussion, and many fascinating interludes, Schiavone suggests that ultimately the economic stagnation of the ancient world was due to a peculiar equilibrium that centered around slavery.
One can think of this equilibrium as resting on two legs. The first is the observation that the apparent modernity of the ancient economy — its manufacturing, trade, and commerce rested largely on slave labor. The expansion of trade and commerce in the Mediterranean after 200 BC both rested on and drove the expansion of slavery. Here Schiavone notes that the ancient reliance on slaves as human automatons — machines with souls — removed or at least weakened, the incentive to develop machines for productive purposes.
The existence of slavery, however, was not the only reason for the neglect of productive innovation. There was also a specific cultural attitude that formed the second leg of the equilibrium:
None of the great engineers and architects, none of the incomparable builders of bridges, roads, and aqueducts, none of the experts in the employment of the apparatus of war, and none of their customers, either in the public administration or in the large landowning families, understood that the most advantageous arena for the use and improvement of machines — devices that were either already in use or easily created by association, or that could be designed to meet existing needs — would have been farms and workshops
The relevance of slavery colored ancient attitudes towards almost all forms of manual work or craftsmanship. The dominant cultural meme was as follows: since such work was usually done by the unfree, it must be lowly, dirty and demeaning:
technology, cooperative production, the various kinds of manual labor that were different from the solitary exertion of the peasants on his land — could not but end up socially and intellectually abandoned to the lowliest members of the community, in direct contact with the exploitation of the slaves, for whom the necessity and demand increased out of all proportion … the labor of slaves was in symmetry with and concealed behind (so to speak) the freedom of the aristocratic thought, while this in turn was in symmetry with the flight from a mechanical and quantitative vision of nature
Thus this attitude also manifests itself in the disdain the ancients had for practical mechanics:
Similar condescension was shown to small businessmen and to most trade (only truly large-scale trade was free from this taint). The ancient world does not seem to have produced self-reproducing mercantile elites. Plausible this was in part because of the cultural dominance of the landowning aristocracy.
The phenomenon coined by Fernand Braudel, the “Betrayal of the Bourgeois”, was particularly powerful in ancient Rome. Great merchants flourished, but “in order to be truly valued, they eventually had to become rentiers, as Cicero affirmed without hesitation: ‘Nay, it even seems to deserve the highest respect, if those who are engaged in it [trade], satiated, or rather, I should say, satisfied with the fortunes they have made, make their way from port to a country estate, as they have often made it from the sea into port. But of all the occupations by which gain is secured, none is better than agriculture, none more delightful, none more becoming to a freeman'” (Schiavone, 2000, 103).
Such a cultural argument fits perfectly with Deirdre McCloskey’s claim in her recent trilogy that it was the adoption of bourgeois cultural norms and specifically bourgeois rhetoric that distinguished and caused the rise of north-western Europe after 1650.
Heydrich, Architect of the Holocaust, Dies – WAH 036 – June 1942, Pt. 1
World War Two
Published 17 Jun 2021Reinhard Heydrich is fighting for his life, as the hunt of his assassins continues. Meanwhile, news of the Nazi atrocities starts to reach the Allied countries.
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Feeding “the masses”
Sarah Hoyt looked at the perennial question “Dude, where’s my (flying) car?” and the even more relevant to most women “Where’s my automated house?”:
The cry of my generation, for years now, has been: “Dude, where’s my flying car?”
My friend Jeff Greason is fond of explaining that as an engineering problem, a flying car is no issue at all. It is as a legal problem that flying cars get interesting, because of course the FAA won’t let such a thing exist without clutching it madly and distorting it with its hands made of bureaucracy and crazy. (Okay, he doesn’t put it that way, but I do.)
[…]
But in all this, I have to say: Dude, where’s my automated house?
It was fifteen years ago or so, while out at lunch with an older writer friend, that she said “We always thought that when it came to this time, there would be communal lunch rooms and cafeterias that would do all the cooking so women would be free to work.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew our politics weren’t congruent, but really the only societies that managed that “Cafeterias, where everyone eats” were the most totalitarian ones, and that food was nothing you wanted to eat. If there was food. Because the only way to feed everyone industrial style is to take away their right to choose how to feed themselves and what to eat. And that, over an entire nation, would be a nightmare. Consider the eighties, when the funny critters decided that we should all live on a Russian Peasant diet of carbs, carbs and more carbs. Potatoes were healthy and good for you, and you should live on them.
It will surprise you to know – not — that just as with the mask idiocy, no study of any kind supports feeding the population on mostly vegetables, much less starches. What those whole “recommendations” were based on was “diet for a small planet” and the bureaucrats invincible ignorance, stupidity and assumption of their own intelligence and superiority. I.e. most of what they knew — that population was exploding, that people would soon be starving, that growing vegetables is less taxing on the environment and produces more calories than growing animals to eat — just wasn’t so. But they “knew” and by gum were going to force everyone to follow “the plan”. (BTW one of the ways you know that Q-Anon is in fact a black ops operation from the other side; no one on the right in this country trusts a plan, much less one that can’t be shared or discussed.) Then the complete idiots were shocked, surprised, nay, astonished when their proposed diet led to an “epidemic of obesity” and diabetes. Even though anyone who suffered through the peasant diet in communist countries, could have told the that’s where it would lead, and to both obesity and Mal-nutrition at once.
So, yeah, communal cafeterias are not a solution to anything.
My concern about the “automated house of the future” is nicely prefigured by the “wonders” of Big Tech surveillance devices we’ve voluntarily imported into our homes for the convenience, while awarding untold volumes of free data for the tech firms to market. Plus, the mindset that “you must be online at all times” that many/most of these devices require means you’re out of luck if your internet connection is a bit wobbly (looking at you, Rogers).
Boob Armor: 4 Things You Need to Know
Jill Bearup
Published 1 Mar 2021Designing some armour for ladies? Female torso armour specifically? Welcome. Get a year of streaming some of your favourite creators and HQ documentaries for under $15 at http://curiositystream.com/jillbearup
Boob armour, or boob plate, or lady armour. Or fantasy lady armour, come to that: how does it work then? Let’s have a look at Wonder Woman, The Mandalorian, Warhammer 40K and various examples of historical armour, as well as costume considerations, which will make designing a look for your female fighters that is practical and looks awesome a breeze.
TIMESTAMPS!
00:00 So you need some lady armour?
00:37 1. You don’t need boob plate
02:23 Alternate options
03:14 2. Divots are a disadvantage
03:56 Muscle cuirasses
04:35 Boob shelf designs
05:11 Cleavage divots
05:39 Wasp waist armor
06:44 Sticky weapons
08:02 Codpieces
08:40 3. Consider mobility (including experiments)
09:35 Two handed weapons and giant swords
10:29 Underlayers and materials used in experiments
11:03 Low guards and power generation in boob plate
11:46 Not painting a ‘look, a lady!’ target on yourself with your armor
12:17 4. Breathing is important
13:44 Corsets are not like armor, and scifi armor with flex
15:44 Fencing chest protectors are not armor, extra content on Nebula, this video is sponsored by Curiosity Stream
16:49 Lightning round#boobplate #femalearmor #armor
Music by epidemicsound.com
“Meet Me in the Hills” – Howard Harper-Barnes
“To Begin” – Raymond Grouse
“Honorable Salute” – Sage Orsler
“Plains of Illeyneth” – Dragon Tamer
“Sparkle and Swirl” – Raymond Grouse
“Sergeant Wise” – Stationary Sign
“Optimist At Heart” – Jerry Lacey
“Fluz de la Riviere” – Howard Harper-Barnes
“Sailing for Gold” – Howard Harper-Barnes
“Endless Flirtation” – Jerry Lacey
QotD: Canadians and the nanny state
By demanding that “the government” — any government, feds, provincial, municipal, preferably all of them — carry on frantically legislating into the wind, the angry talk-show callers were, in effect, being just as victimologically inclined as the somnolent correspondents of big media. Fuming and furious, they were tonally different but philosophically indistinguishable, both parties subscribing to the view that Canadian citizens are the passive charges of the nanny state and that nanny needs to put more safety bars round the nursery.
Mark Steyn, “We need professional help”, Western Standard, 2005-04-04.
June 17, 2021
Build a Mission Bench with Simple Nailed Joinery // Hand tool woodworking
Rex Krueger
Published 16 Jun 2021Build an authentic Mission Bench with simple tools and a small amount of wood.
Get the Plans: https://www.rexkrueger.com/store/xyg2…
Get my new book!: https://amzn.to/3uQtdQr
More video and exclusive content: http://www.patreon.com/rexkruegerCheck out Woodworkforhumans.com: http://www.woodworkforhumans.com
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Build the Lightweight Traveler Workbench: https://youtu.be/lPiMjv7lkqI
Get the Plans: https://www.woodworkforhumans.com/sto…———————————————————————-
Links to tools in this build (affiliate):
Square Cut nails: https://amzn.to/2TDjKz6
Tapered Drill Bits: https://amzn.to/3iKoQUx
(I used #8 for this build, but buying the set allows you to get the right bit for your project.)
Protractor: https://amzn.to/35ohVbM
Hand-screw clamps: https://amzn.to/35pSZk7___________________________________________
Make the tools from this build!
The Advanced Shooting Board
Video: https://youtu.be/JbpwDufvzSo
Plans: https://www.rexkrueger.com/store/adva…Make a Turning Saw from Scraps
Video: https://youtu.be/8Agk6tJtRs0
Plans: https://www.rexkrueger.com/store/diy-…———————————————————————-
Visit La Purisima Mission: https://www.lapurisimamission.org/
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Wood Work for Humans Tool List (affiliate):
*Cutting*
Gyokucho Ryoba Saw: https://amzn.to/2Z5Wmda
Dewalt Panel Saw: https://amzn.to/2HJqGmO
Suizan Dozuki Handsaw: https://amzn.to/3abRyXB
(Winner of the affordable dovetail-saw shootout.)
Spear and Jackson Tenon Saw: https://amzn.to/2zykhs6
(Needs tune-up to work well.)
Crown Tenon Saw: https://amzn.to/3l89Dut
(Works out of the box)
Carving Knife: https://amzn.to/2DkbsnM
Narex True Imperial Chisels: https://amzn.to/2EX4xls
(My favorite affordable new chisels.)
Blue-Handled Marples Chisels: https://amzn.to/2tVJARY
(I use these to make the DIY specialty planes, but I also like them for general work.)*Sharpening*
Honing Guide: https://amzn.to/2TaJEZM
Norton Coarse/Fine Oil Stone: https://amzn.to/36seh2m
Natural Arkansas Fine Oil Stone: https://amzn.to/3irDQmq
Green buffing compound: https://amzn.to/2XuUBE2*Marking and Measuring*
Stockman Knife: https://amzn.to/2Pp4bWP
(For marking and the built-in awl).
Speed Square: https://amzn.to/3gSi6jK
Stanley Marking Knife: https://amzn.to/2Ewrxo3
(Excellent, inexpensive marking knife.)
Blue Kreg measuring jig: https://amzn.to/2QTnKYd
Round-head Protractor: https://amzn.to/37fJ6oz*Drilling*
Forstner Bits: https://amzn.to/3jpBgPl
Spade Bits: https://amzn.to/2U5kvML*Work-Holding*
Orange F Clamps: https://amzn.to/2u3tp4X
Screw Clamp: https://amzn.to/3gCa5i8Get my woodturning book: http://www.rexkrueger.com/book
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Encouraging innovation by … rejigging the honours system
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers how one man’s efforts to encourage and reward innovation in the United Kingdom eventually led to “mere inventors” receiving honours that once were dedicated to military paladins and political giants:
One of my all-time favourite innovation evangelists is the nineteenth-century barrister, journalist, and politician Henry Brougham. He was an innovator himself, in the late 1830s designing a form of horse-drawn carriage, and as a teenager even managed to get his experiments on light published in the Royal Society’s prestigious Transactions. But his main achievements were as an organiser. Clever, dashing, and articulate, the son of minor gentry, he was an evangelist extraordinaire. In the 1820s he helped George Birkbeck to found the London Mechanics’ Institute (which survives today as Birkbeck, University of London), was instrumental in the creation of University College London (to provide a university in England where you didn’t have to swear an oath to the Church of England), and founded the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (to print reference works and textbooks cheaply and in bulk). They were all organisations intended to widen access to education, spreading science to the masses.
He also presided at the opening of many more worker-run mechanics’ institutions, libraries, and scientific societies. As a Member of Parliament who went out of his way to support workers’ efforts at self-education, even though none of them could vote, Brougham thus became something of a celebrity to working-class inventors. John Condie, born in Gorbals, Glasgow, to poor parents, and apprenticed to a cabinet maker, would become a prolific and successful improver of iron-making, locomotive springs, and photography, as well as an inspiring lecturer on scientific subjects in his own right — his students at the Eaglesham Mechanics’ Institution were reportedly so engrossed that they would attend his evening classes until midnight. Having once exhibited a model steam engine at the opening of the Carlisle Mechanics’ Institution, however, Condie was reportedly “not a little proud” that Brougham — who had presided at the opening — recalled the model over thirty years later. The detail comes from Condie’s obituary notice in the local papers; I like to think that it was a story upon which he frequently dined out.
Brougham’s celebrity, I suspect, made him appreciate the usefulness of status and prestige, and his influence only grew when in 1830 he was made a lord and appointed Lord High Chancellor — a high-ranking ministerial position, which he held for four years. Brougham was soon behind many efforts to increase the visibility of inventive role-models. The nineteenth-century mania for putting up statues — to people like Johannes Gutenberg, Isaac Newton, and James Watt — often had Brougham or his political allies behind them. Brougham even hoped that while the “temples of the pagans had been adorned by statues of warriors, who had dealt desolation … ours shall be graced with the statues of those who have contributed to the triumph of humanity and science”.
His hero-making extended to print, too, when in the 1840s his Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge embarked on publishing a comprehensive biographical dictionary — an early forerunner to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but with the extraordinary aim of covering notable individuals from all over the world. It managed to print seven volumes covering the letter “A” before financial considerations forced the whole society to cease, but in 1845 Brougham published Lives of Men of Letters and Science who Flourished in the Time of George III, in which he showcased a handful of eighteenth-century literati and scientists from whom readers were to draw inspiration.
And Brougham tried to raise the status of inventors who were still living. This was done by co-opting a Hanoverian order of chivalry, the Royal Guelphic Order (by this stage the kings of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland were also simultaneously the kings of Hanover). The order was generally used to recognise soldiers, but an interesting precedent had been set when the astronomer Frederick William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus, had been made a knight of the order in 1816. So when Brougham rose to power in the 1830s, he envisaged using it more widely, to recognise inventors, scientists, and medical pioneers, as well as literary scholars like museum curators, archivists, antiquarians, historians, heralds, and linguists. Thanks to Brougham’s machinations, the knighthood of the order was offered to the mathematician James Ivory, the scientist and inventor David Brewster, and the neurologist Charles Bell (after whom Bell’s Palsy is named). It was later also awarded to serial inventors like John Robison, who improved the accuracy of metal screws, experimented with cast iron canal locks and the water resistance of boats, and applied pneumatic presses to cheesemaking.
One problem, however, was that the Royal Guelphic Order was considered second-rate. It was technically a foreign order, and did not actually entitle one to be called “Sir” in the UK. The mathematician and computing pioneer Charles Babbage was apparently insulted to have been fobbed off with the offer of a Guelphic knighthood instead of a British one. Although William Herschel had accidentally been called “Sir” during his lifetime, this was soon realised to be a mistake in protocol. When his son John — a scientific pioneer in his own right — was also made a knight of the order, he was also quietly knighted normally a few days later so that the rest of the family would be none the wiser. And regardless, the whole scheme came to an end with the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 — as a woman, she did not inherit the throne of Hanover, and so appointments to the Guelphic order simply passed out of British control.
The Real Indiana Jones and his Jurassic Quests | BETWEEN 2 WARS I E.20 Summer 1923
TimeGhost History
Published 16 Jun 2021On their search for the origins of humanity, the expedition led by Roy Chapman Andrews makes some amazing discoveries in the Gobi Desert, including the uncovering of dinosaur eggs and velociraptors. Who knew paleontology could be so cool?
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Canada’s most recent bout of mourning sickness
In Wednesday’s NP Platformed, Colby Cosh reports on a shocking incident in Dunnville, Ontario where a Catholic priest discovered and threw away some shoes that had been deposited on a bench in front of his church. This ***obviously*** was some sort of hate crime by the priest personally and the entire hierarchy of the Catholic church collectively all the way up to the Pope which must now be tearfully acknowledged and repented of in multiple media appearances, because the items were part of an informal, unofficial memorial to the long-deceased children whose unmarked graves were discovered at a former residential school in British Columbia.
Ne Hiyawak seemingly didn’t ask permission to leave the shoes at the church, or give the pastor any notice; the next day, when others seeking to do the same thing explained what they were up to, the priest allowed an enormous pile of stuffed animals and handmade signs to be created on the front steps of the building.
A natural next question may be whether these mementoes will be allowed to obstruct the church door forever. Can it be that these items, too, are certain to end up in the garbage after sitting around amid the elements for a few days? (If you want to recycle an old stuffed animal and thereby guarantee that it finds its way into the hands of a child, actually finding such a child yourself is the only appropriate procedure.)
NP Platformed would like to suggest very gently that temporary “memorials” constructed by leaving stuff on common property, or on someone else’s property, should be discouraged by the press rather than encouraged. We have all driven past a mildewed or long-rotted bundle of plastic-wrapped flowers lying in a ditch or on a corner where someone died: this has somehow become the last acceptable form of littering, a vice our civilization once embraced, and had to work hard to mitigate.
Eventually, someone or other, probably a custodial professional paid peanuts, has to pick all that stuff up. We’re not sure how this isn’t obvious, or why it ought to be controversial. If you want to festoon a church with protest materials, and you do this precisely because you have a well-founded disrespect for the church, we are not sure anyone can justly complain when the materials are removed.
The Catholic Church may be monstrous, but the creation of memorials consisting of piles of items like shoes puts its stewards in an impossible position. If you remove the items too soon, you’re being disrespectful. If you leave them lying around long enough to become an eyesore, that’s surely no less disrespectful. There is a stubborn segment of the public that cannot resist this sociopathic behaviour, but it should be observed that in publicizing these stunning and brave makeshift memorials, the news media always photograph them at their very nicest (which is never all that nice) and walk away. Those who have to collect the detritus are never asked their opinion, nor are those unfortunates who merely live nearby.
MG-34: The Universal Machine Gun Concept
Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Oct 2017The MG34 was the first German implementation of the universal machine gun concept — and really the first such fielded by any army. The idea was to have a single weapon which could be used as a light machine gun, heavy machine gun, vehicle gun, fortification gun, and antiaircraft gun. The MG34 was designed to be light enough for use as an LMG, to have a high enough rate of fire to serve as an antiaircraft gun, to be compact and flexible enough for use in vehicles and fortifications, and to be mounted on a complex and advanced tripod for use as a heavy machine gun.
Mechanically, the MG34 is a recoil operated gun using a rotating bolt for locking. It is chambered for 8mm Mauser, and feeds from 50-round belt segments with a clever and unique quick-change barrel mechanism. The early versions were fitted with adjustable rate reducers in the grips allowing firing from 400 to 900 rounds per minute, and also had an option for a top cover which would fit a 75-round double drum magazine. Both of these features were rather quickly discarded, however, in the interest of more efficient production. However, the gun fulfilled its universal role remarkably well.
The MG34 was considered a state secret when first developed, and despite entering production in 1936 it would not be formally adopted until 1939 — by which time 50,000 or so had already been manufactured. It would comprise about 47% of the machine guns in German service when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, but would be fully standardized by March of 1941. It was replaced by the MG42 later in the war, as that weapon was both faster and cheaper to produce and also required substantially less of the high-grade steel alloys that Germany had limited supplies of. However, it would continue to be produced through the war, particularly for vehicle mounts.
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June 16, 2021
By Sea, By Land – A Global History of the Marines – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 15 Jun 2021Naval infantrymen have long been a feature of warfare. In the build-up to 1939, they took on new functions and tactics. The Royal Marines, the US Marine Corps, Black Death, Kaiheidan, and more are ready for all-out amphibious warfare in the Pacific Theatre and beyond.
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“One nation, indivisible”?
As a child in England and then in Canada, I was used to the relatively low-key acknowledgements of the Crown and the nation which may be why I was quite befuddled watching American TV portrayal of the in-your-face patriotic displays of the United States, especially the Pledge of Allegiance required of schoolchildren. It seemed oddly statist and even collectivist (although I didn’t know those terms at the time) for a country that constantly seemed to be patting itself on the back as the “home of the free”. I later learned that the Pledge hadn’t even been invented until nearly a century after the nation had been established (and the current version was devised and popularized by a noted utopian socialist, then adopted by Congress in 1942). Tom Mullen explores how the Pledge came about and considers the idea that it is time to drop it:
An Atlanta, Georgia, charter school announced last week its intention to discontinue the practice of having students stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance during its schoolwide morning meetings at the beginning of each school day, opting to allow students to recite the pledge in their classrooms instead. Predictably, conservatives were immediately triggered by this “anti-American” decision, prompting the school to reverse its decision shortly after.
The uproar over periodic resistance to reciting the pledge typically originates with Constitution-waving, Tea Party conservatives. Ironically, the pledge itself is not only un-American but antithetical to the most important principle underpinning the Constitution as originally ratified.
[…]
Then, there’s “indivisible”. One would think a federation born by its constituent states seceding from the nation to which they formerly belonged would make the point obvious enough. But the Declaration makes it explicit:
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
It would be impossible to exercise that right — that duty, as the Declaration later calls it — if the republic were indivisible. The strictest constructionists of the time didn’t consider the nation indivisible. Thomas Jefferson didn’t threaten to send troops to New England when some of its states considered seceding upon his election. Quite the opposite. And in an 1804 letter to Joseph Priestly, he deemed a potential split in the union between “Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies” not only possible but “not very important to the happiness of either part.”
The people advocating “one nation, indivisible” in those days were big government Federalists like Hamilton, whose proposals to remake the United States into precisely that were flatly rejected in 1787.
Proponents of absolute, national rule like to quip this question was “settled” by the American Civil War. That’s like saying Polish independence was “settled” by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939.
In fact, it is precisely the trend towards “one nation” that has caused American politics to become so rancorous, to the point of boiling over into violence, over the course of the last several decades. This continent is inhabited by a multitude of very different cultures, which can coexist peacefully if left to govern themselves. But as the “federal” government increasingly seeks to impose a one-size-fits-all legal framework over people who never agreed to give it that power, the resistance is going to get more and more strident. If there is any chance to achieve peace among America’s warring factions, a return to a more truly federal system is likely the only way.
Getting rid of the un-American pledge to the imaginary nation would be a good, symbolic start.
Tank Chats #111 | Sherman M4A1 (76) W | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 20 Nov 2020Join The Tank Museum’s Historian David Fletcher as he discusses the Sherman M4A1 (76) W, a late war variant of the Sherman M4A1 which was introduced into service in the summer of 1944. The M4A1 (76) W still had a cast hull, but improved frontal armour, a more powerful version of the Continental radial engine and was up-gunned from the original M4A1, with a 76mm gun.
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