Maggie's Farm

Well, that may be true, and if so it's one lesson taught by Sweden's example American Progressives tend to ignore: IIRC, right from the beginning of their post-WWII expansion of the welfare state, the Swedes recognized the golden goose (Business) that was going to fund it and decided killing it would be a bad idea. Sweden's reforms over the last 20 or so years seem to bear that in mind.

Here the notion seems to be to tax everybody punitively while compromising the ability of Business to do business as much as possible.

Not that, in the end, I admire much Sweden's example even if their welfare system has worked on its own terms. Tends to produce a increasingly comfortable but anesthetized society, in my view, but that may not be yours and obviously isn't theirs.

That fighter plane story is getting linked all over the place. I think captures the imagination in the same way stories of being lost at sea do - you're alive but you're trapped without resources in a punishing environment. And, here, the evidence of the "shipwreck" is preserved so well, to the point of being able to see the pilot's footprints -- it's haunting.

Ah yeah I saw that!! Fascinating.

It's amazing how much WWII era war materiel is still floating around out there, especially in Europe.

At the end of the war the Germans were making more armaments and munitions they could practicably use due to a lack of manpower and fuel; there are scores of Youtube videos by relic hunters digging up guns, ammo, unfired artillery shells, unused Panzerfausts etc., especially on the Eastern front from late in the war when the Germans were getting rolled back too fast to take everything with them.

There are some fascinating videos taken in Northeastern Europe of people pulling entire tanks out of bogs, some purposely sunk there by the Germans to keep the Russians from getting them. Because of the low levels of oxygen in those peat-type bogs, they come out almost perfectly preserved. There's a particularly fascinating one of a Russian T-34 tank that had been captured and used by the Germans and then sunk in a bog; the clips show it being hauled out and the treads aren't even frozen. IIRC they got it running again after doing little more than flushing the engine, replacing small parts like hoses and such & adding new lubricant.