Food Insider
Published 25 Dec 2019We visited Lea & Perrins factory in Worcester to see how they produce their ever-popular Worcestershire sauce.
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January 15, 2023
How Lea & Perrins Makes Worcestershire Sauce Using A 185-Year-Old Recipe | Regional Eats
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January 13, 2023
In a surprising bit of news, Canadian defence companies still don’t know what the government plans to acquire
On the CBC News website, Murray Brewster explains why Canadian defence industries haven’t gone to anything like a “war footing” because the federal government hasn’t told them what they plan to purchase or when, despite pleas that they “get with the program”:
The association representing Canada’s defence contractors says it’s going to take a lot more than talk to put the industry on a so-called “war footing.”
In a bluntly-worded opinion piece published online Wednesday, Christyn Cianfarani, executive director of the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries, said that Canada — unlike its allies — has not put in place a framework to ramp up production to meet the demand triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Instead, Cianfarani wrote, the industry has heard “vague pleas” from the Liberal government “for companies to get with the program,” without any clear sense of which items of equipment are needed and what the long-term expectations might be.
“Canadian defence companies can and would step up if they knew exactly what, and how much, to step up with,” she wrote.
In an interview with CBC News last summer, Defence Minister Anita Anand described the enlistment of weapons manufacturers in the struggle to save Ukraine as a “moral imperative.” Gen. Wayne Eyre, the country’s top military commander, also publicly urged the defence industry to get on a “war footing” in response to the crisis.
“No one in industry has a clue what government will require from companies to achieve that end, or even what ‘wartime footing’ means to government in the modern context,” wrote Cianfarani, adding that the last time the country’s defence industry was on a war footing was during the Second World War.
“No firm will take vague exhortations to ‘increase their production lines’ seriously without meaningful and systematic commitment from the government. No respectable CEO is going to take the risk of ordering tens of millions of dollars worth of parts to then see them sitting on a shelf awaiting integration, while simultaneously telling investors to trust them that a buyer will materialize in this highly managed protectionist market.”
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January 3, 2023
1943 in Numbers – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 1 Jan 2023This war is massive. Our chronological coverage helps give us an understanding of it, but sometimes statistics help us understand the bigger picture.
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December 31, 2022
Tour of the AREX Defense Factory in Slovenia
Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Aug 2022During my visit to Slovenia, I had a chance to tour the AREX Defense factory in Šentjernej. I came away really impressed by the quality and the breadth of operations that the factory performs in-house. They have only been making their own handgun designs for about 5 years, but they have been a subcontractor making parts for other big-name companies (like FN) for decades.
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December 8, 2022
Is the Luftwaffe Defeated in 1943? – WW2 Documentary Special
World War Two
Published 7 Dec 2022Outnumbered and outproduced, the once mighty Luftwaffe is battling to hold its own across three fronts. Every month brings new pain for the force. But the Luftwaffe still has a few tricks up its sleeves and can make the Allies bleed heavily. If only Hitler and the Nazi leadership weren’t sabotaging its chances …
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October 25, 2022
A Multi-Trillion Dollar Pipe Dream
PragerU
Published 16 Jun 2022Are we heading toward an all-renewable energy future, spearheaded by wind and solar? Or are those energy sources wholly inadequate for the task? Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Cloud Revolution, compares the energy dream to the energy reality.
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October 4, 2022
QotD: “The world bought British and British was best”
So much has been promised in the past, so much has come to nothing, no wonder they are sceptical. And impatient. Already I can hear some of them saying: “The Conservatives have been in five months. Things do not seem to be that much better. What is happening? Do you think the Conservatives can really do it?” We say to them this: Yes, the Conservatives can do it. And we will do it. But it will take time. Time to tackle problems that have been neglected for years; time to change people’s approach to what Governments can do for people, and to what people should do for themselves; time to shake off the self-doubt induced by decades of dependence on the state as master, not as servant. It will take time and it will not be easy.
The world has never offered us an easy living. There is no reason why it should. We have always had to go out and earn our living — the hard way. In the past we did not hesitate. We had great technical skill, quality, reliability. We built well, sold well. We delivered on time. The world bought British and British was best. Not German. Not Japanese. British. It was more than that. We knew that to keep ahead we had to change. People looked to us as the front runner for the future.
Our success was not based on Government hand-outs, on protecting yesterday’s jobs and fighting off tomorrow’s. It was not based on envy or truculence or on endless battles between management and men, or between worker and fellow worker. We did not become the workshop of the world by being the nation with the most strikes.
I remember the words written on an old trade union banner: “United to support, not combined to injure”. That is the way we were. Today we still have great firms and industries. Today we still make much of value, but not enough. Industries that were once head and shoulders above their competitors have stumbled and fallen.
It is said that we were exhausted by the war. Those who were utterly defeated can hardly have been less exhausted. Yet they have done infinitely better in peace. It is said that Britain’s time is up, that we have had our finest hour and the best we can look forward to is a future fit for Mr Benn to live in. I do not accept those alibis. Of course we face great problems, problems that have fed on each other year after year, becoming harder and harder to solve. We all know them. They go to the root of the hopes and fears of ordinary people — high inflation, high unemployment, high taxation, appalling industrial relations, the lowest productivity in the Western world.
People have been led to believe that they had to choose between a capitalist wealth-creating society on the one hand and a caring and compassionate society on the other. But that is not the choice. The industrial countries that out-produce and outsell us are precisely those countries with better social services and better pensions than we have. It is because they have strong wealth-creating industries that they have better benefits than we have. Our people seem to have lost belief in the balance between production and welfare. This is the balance that we have got to find. To persuade our people that it is possible, through their own efforts, not only to halt our national decline, but to reverse it and that requires new thinking, tenacity, and a willingness to look at things in a completely different way. Is the nation ready to face reality? I believe that it is. People are tired of false dawns and facile promises. If this country’s story is to change we the Conservatives must rekindle the spirit which the socialist years have all but exhausted.
Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to Conservative Party Conference”, 1979-10-12.
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September 3, 2022
The impact of the first wave of globalization
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers the world in terms of trade before and after the transportation revolution which changed long-distance trade from primarily luxury goods to commodities for the mass market:
Long-distance trade has of course been common since ancient times. Archaeologists often find Byzantine-made glassware from the sixth century all the way out in India, China, and even Japan. Or beads from seventh-century Southeast Asia all the way out in Libya, Spain, and even Britain. Yet such long-distance trades often involved goods that were entirely unique to particular areas — gems, spices, indigo, coffee, tea — or were sufficiently valuable to make the high costs of transportation worthwhile, such as expert-made glassware, silks, and muslin cloths with impossibly high thread counts. Long-distance trade may have been ancient but was restricted to luxuries. It did not involve the everyday goods of life.
That all changed, however, when the innovations of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries caused transportation costs to dramatically fall. With better sailing ships, canals, and navigational techniques, followed by better roads, railways, refrigeration, steam power, and dynamite (which meant railways could cross mountain ranges, canals could link oceans, and new deep-water ports could be dug), it was soon profitable to transport even the cheapest and bulkiest of goods over vast distances — goods like meat, coal, and grain.
The entire world was brought into a single market, in which even the bulkiest commodities of each continent were suddenly in direct competition with one another. The decisions of farmers in Ukraine, for example, in the nineteenth century came to affect the farmers in America, China, India, or even Australia, and all of them vice versa. The prices of commodities all over the world thus converged to similar levels, falling in some places, but rising in the economies that had previously been too distant from the ready markets of the industrialised nations.
The result was what economic historians call a terms-of-trade boom, with the more agrarian economies’ commodity exports becoming more valuable relative to manufactured imports. Thus, their grain, raw fibres, minerals, and ores suddenly bought many more foreign manufactures like textiles. Countries that specialised in commodities thus specialised even further, devoting even more of their workers, resources and capital to extracting them. They were incentivised to extend their frontiers — to put more of the wilderness under pasture or plough, and to dig deeper for the mineral wealth beneath their feet.
Meanwhile, for the industrial economies, the opposite happened. By gaining access to many more and cheaper sources of raw resources and food, they were able to make their own manufactured exports cheaper too. And this, in turn, further exacerbated the terms-of-trade boom among their newly globalised commodity suppliers. As the great Saint-Lucian economist Sir W. Arthur Lewis put it, the world in the late nineteenth century separated into an increasingly industrialised “core”, fed by an increasingly farming- and mining-focused “periphery”.
Much has changed in the century that followed, and some of the old core/periphery distinctions have moved or entirely broken down. But the world has remained globalised. Even in periods of higher tariffs, like between the world wars, no amount of protectionism was able to counteract or undo the effects of the dramatic drop in global transportation costs. With the advent of telegraphs, telephones, fax machines, and now the Internet, even many services are becoming globalised as well — a process likely sped up by the pandemic. Those who can easily work from home will increasingly, like nineteenth-century workers the world over, find themselves either the victims or beneficiaries of global price convergence. (Incidentally, I’m not convinced that the very services-heavy economies of Europe or North America are even remotely prepared for this, to the extent that they can prepare at all for what is the economic equivalent of a planetary-scale force of nature.)
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August 31, 2022
Tank Chats #153 | Jagdpanther | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 6 May 2022Discover the origins of Jagdpanther with Curator David Willey and learn more about this German tank destroyer.
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August 29, 2022
The Astonishing Nazi Underground Slave Factories – WAH 075 – August 28, 1943
World War Two
Published 28 Aug 2022While the RAF and USAAF continue to try to bomb Germany into submission, the German Nazis move their war production underground. In the process they create an underground slave camp that defies imagination.
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1930s German Rearmament: JP Sauer’s Pre-K98k Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 May 2022When the German Army announced in 1934 that it would be adopting a new standard rifle, the JP Sauer company jumped at the chance to submit a model for consideration. Sauer had a complete production line for the Mauser pattern rifles, having produced Gewehr 98s during World War One, and it had access to Mauser’s “Gewehr für Deutsches Reichspost” rifles that were clearly the basis for what the Army wanted. So Sauer didn’t just submit a model for Army consideration, they actually put it into full production without waiting for the Army’s decision (Mauser did the same).
As it turned out, the Sauer rifle differed from the final K98k standard only in its barrel-band retention system. After this pattern was announced in June 1935, the company transitioned its production to meet those details. The rifles already made were still taken into military service, though.
This example is marked S/147/K, indicating Sauer production in 1934. It is the highest known serial number of this year, and a beautiful example. It is all matching, and still has very good finish and very nice stock markings. A really interesting piece of the story of German 1930s rearmament!
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August 19, 2022
The DeLorean Story
Big Car
Published 5 Jan 2020There’s much more to the DeLorean Motor Company than Doc’s 88mph time machine in Back to the Future. It’s a story of a playboy founder with a meteoric rise, a story of hope and regeneration in an area torn apart after a decade of fighting, and of a cocaine smuggling fall from grace. Yes, this story has it all!
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August 14, 2022
Book Review: FN Mauser Rifles by Anthony Vanderlinden
Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 Jan 2017Buy the book here: http://www.fnbrowning.com/fn-mauser-r…
When I was waiting for my copy of Anthony Vanderlinden’s new book FN Mauser Rifles to arrive, I was expecting a typical sort of dry reference work. You know, the sort of thing that is essential for looking up details like the serial number range for a specific contract, or the sling swivel location on some specific nation’s version of a rifle. When the book arrived and I cracked it open, I found something quite different.
What I found was an authentically engrossing history of Belgium, the Fabrique Nationale company, and the rifles it produced. It would have been a savvy move to deliberately expound on the context of FN’s Mausers to make them more interesting (let’s be honest; Mauser contract variations are not the most riveting subject in arms history), but I think the book took this path because of the author’s genuine passion for the subject and a desire to share that passion with others. Good grief, the man owns a 1926 FN car! If that’s not devotion to a subject, I don’t know what is (and it’s really cool!).
Anyway, the first half of the book is a tale of Belgian history and arms production. The trials that led to the adoption of the 18
9189 Mauser and the subsequent formation of the FN conglomerate by the preeminent armsmakers of Liege in order to secure a contract to make those 189189s. The production leading up to WWI, and the Belgian response to that war, including production in the United States and England. The company’s recovery after the war, including its efforts in the automotive industry. The buildup to WWII, and the response to yet another German occupation. Sabotage of German production. Recovery after that war as well, and FN’s role in post-war Europe as Mauser production came to an end. And throughout this tale, the simultaneous story of the Congo Free Sate as it became the Belgian Congo and took part in Belgium’s trials and tribulations.In the more technical sections of the book, Vanderlinder presents information that has heretofore been pretty hazy, like the actual differences between FN Mauser model designations, and exactly who ordered what and when. He also provides excellent detail on the manufacture, repair, and later conversions of the Model 18
9189 rifles for the Belgian military as well as the Congolese armed forces.As you have probably realized by this point, I found the book an excellent and compelling read … not the sort of thing one would normally expect from this subject matter. You don’t need to be an avid enthusiast of FN or Belgian history to appreciate it. Quite the opposite, in fact — if you (like most people) have only the most cursory knowledge of the subject, it is an excellent way for you to really find an appreciation for the company and country. Just be warned that the cover price doesn’t include the rifles you will want to buy once you’ve started reading!
FN Mauser Rifles is available directly from the publisher (who is also the author, but this is not a self-published work) at www.FNBrowning.com. Ordering there instead of from other dealers will get you an autographed copy, which is a nice bonus.
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August 9, 2022
July 21, 2022
Hidden flaws in vintage wooden planes
Rex Krueger
Published 20 Jul 2022Find the problems that can make wooden planes unusable. Find them BEFORE you buy.
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