On May 10, 1765, per the British Longitude Act, clockmaker John Harrison [1] was awarded £10,000 for the invention of a practical naval longitude clock. Latitude calculations had been made for hundreds of years with sextants, but the Longitude Problem was finally solved only by Harrison’s invention of a precision clock that could keep accurate time for many months. This ushered in the era of relatively precise modern maritime navigation.
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May 10th is the birthday of the late Col. Jeff Cooper [2] (born 1920, died September 25, 2006).
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May 10th is also the birthday of the late Janis Pinups (born 1925, died 15 June 2007). He was one of the last of the active Forest Brothers [3] anti-communist resistance fighters. He came out of hiding, after five decades, to obtain a Latvian passport in 1994, after the collapse of eastern European communism. (He was never issued any communist government identity papers and by necessity lived as a nonexistent ghost during the entire Soviet occupation of Latvia.) The history of the Forest Brothers [4] movement certainly deserves more recognition.
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Today’s feature article is a guest piece by global affairs analyst Brandon Smith, the publisher of the highly-recommended Alt-Market.us blog [5].
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We are in need of a few more entries to have a full roster for Round 118 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest [6]. More than $950,000 worth of prizes have been awarded since we started running this contest. Round 118 ends on May 31st, so get busy writing and e-mail [7] us your entry. Remember that there is a 1,500-word minimum, and that articles on practical “how-to” skills for survival have an advantage in the judging. In 2023, we polled blog readers, asking for suggested article topics [8]. Please refer to that poll if you haven’t yet chosen an article topic.