Hey gang! Last night was rough, but I think during that time I finally topped the summit of this flu I’ve been dealing with and I started down the other side of that mountain this afternoon.
On the most recent The Practical Woodsman podcast episode I had somebody on YouTube complaining about the number of ads and they apparently blame me for it. I had to remind them that I don’t own YouTube. I have no control whatsoever over how many ads YouTube shows or with what frequency. Frankly, I get sick of the obnoxious frequency of ads YouTube throws in my face when I try to watch something there, too.
Here’s a tip: If you subscribe to The Practical Woodsman on Rumble, in addition to YouTube, you can watch the exact same content there with practically zero ad interruptions. The only drawback is that I almost always upload to YouTube first, since the majority of my audience is there. Because uploads can take me so much time, I frequently can’t get the same video uploaded to Rumble until a day or so later. Also, I’m able to upload in 4K to YouTube, while Rumble restricts me to lower resolutions.
But, if you hate ads as much as this feller who commented on my video this morning does, Rumble is a nice option for avoiding them practically altogether. Rumble is also a champion of free speech, a principle I am happy to support in any way that I can. YouTube is an outright enemy of free speech. I use it currently because I have to, not because it is my preference.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
