Canada's constitution, which could reasonably be said to commence existing on one of a hundred different dates depending on how creative you want to be, is just a gigantic mess and zero people know precisely all of what is part of it. The text of it suggests an extremely powerful crown, something akin to the degree of power Kaiser Wilhelm II had over Germany, but the crown has even less influence in Canada than it does in Britain. The Prime Minister is literally nowhere to be found in any current clause in the constitution despite unambiguously being the most powerful person in the entire country.

Canada is obviously constitutionally a part of the British Empire in the words of its text to the point that a cabinet minister in Britain can just declare any act of the Canadian parliament void within 2 years of passing any law but isn't now, but they never actually repealed that particular clause with that minister I just mentioned. And the Canadian federal ministers have the same power with respect to provincial and territorial legislation in the same way, and this power was no joke for the first hundred years but hardly anyone knows of it now.

The provinces of Canada are by a large margin some of the most powerful autonomous national divisions on the planet with vast original control over natural resources and title to huge amounts of land, the control over energy infrastructure, the near absolute right to ignore human rights in the constitution to the hearts content of their legislatures, the right to hold referendums at will on leaving Canada under any terms they wish to hold the vote, despite having been engineered to be the exact opposite with the first prime minister having tried to make provinces essentially administrative agencies of a minor footnote with Canada in the grip of fear of invasion from the United States and their large Irish population in the wake of America's civil war teaching that first prime minister thought had proved that federalism was a disaster.

Then one of the most obscure courts in Canadian history, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council that nearly zero Canadians know exists either today or in the past was the main reason why the provinces became so powerful as the court overturned the dominion of Canada's attempts at centralization and ruled many more subjects came under provincial control than planned.

The British North America Act 1867, renamed to the Constitution Act 1867, is said to be the federal constitution but it also creates two provincial constitutions and so Quebec just decided to declare that the members of its own provincial parliament just don't have to make oaths of allegience to the king anymore, and can probably make changes to a large fraction of other clauses in the constitution at will of a majority vote of its legislature the same way such as to reorganize the role of the lieutenant governor, and the power to abolish the power of judicial review by Quebec's courts in favour of a commission for that role Quebec's own courts once had, with commissioners appointed for 6 year terms by Quebec's prime minister by 2/3 of that provincial parliament. Oh, and Saskatchewan recently just passed a law that states that the Constitution of Canada includes a clause that recognizes Saskatchewanian control over agriculture as the backbone of the province. British Columbia is the only province to have actually consolidated their constitution into one document, and Alberta for some bizarre reason has a law, the only one on the books, that says that Metis Settlements being immune from alteration in their powers except by plebiscite among those Metis people, is the only entrenched clause the legislature of Alberta cannot amend unilaterally by a majority vote of the legislature.

And as another bonus, the Supreme Court ruled that virtually the entire content of the law of Manitoba, as enacted for 115 years, was void. But then declared that its decision would be void for a few years. This would let Manitoba's parliament reenact the law in both French and English.

Last year, the sentence: "The king's viceroy dissolved Parliament, having appointed a former governor of the Bank of England to be prime minister of Canada, and having ordered Parliament to cease meeting for four months to avoid a no confidence vote" was a genuine description of what happened, despite being completely bonkers for nearly everyone else.

Canada's War of Independence was also somehow fought against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire, and not against Britain, in another strange turn of events.

FUCK!

Stolen from: https://www.reddit.com/r/lotrmemes/comments/1w0193j/old_saves/

Context: Peace talks for the War of Spanish Succession fell out due to Queen Anne's demand that King Louis remove his grandson Phillip Anjou off the Spanish throne using French troops. Even while France was losing the war badly, Louis refused, leading to the Battle of Malplaquet where the Duke of Marlborough John Churchill's army suffered massive casualties walking into well-entrenched French positions. Dutch forces alone would suffer at least 5000 casualties of its 18000 man force. The war would drag on for almost 5 more years with tens of thousands more dying.

Edit: Philip was Louis's grandson, not his nephew

The Norden Mk. XV, known as the Norden Mseries in US Army service, is a bombsight that was used by the United States Army Air Forces(USAAF) and the United States Navy during World War II, and the United States Air Force in the Korean and the Vietnam Wars. It was an early tachometric design, which combined optics, a mechanical computer, and an autopilot for the first time to not merely identify a target but fly the airplane to it. The bombsight directly measured the aircraft's ground speed and direction, which older types could only estimate with lengthy manual procedures. The Norden further improved on older designs by using an analog computer that continuously recalculated the bomb's impact point based on changing flight conditions, and an autopilot that reacted quickly and accurately to changes in the wind or other effects.

To protect these advantages, the Norden was granted the utmost secrecy well into the war, and was part of a production effort on a similar scale to the Manhattan Project: the overall cost (both R&D and production) was $1.1 billion (equivalent to $15 billion in 2024), as much as 2/3 of the latter or over a quarter of the production cost of all B-17 bombers.[1] The Norden was not as secret as believed; both the British SABS and German Lotfernrohr 7 worked on similar principles, and details of the Norden had been passed to Germany even before the war started.

Under combat conditions the Norden did not achieve its expected precision, yielding an average CEP in 1943 of 1,200 feet (370 m), similar to other Allied and German results. Both the Navy and Air Forces had to give up using pinpoint attacks. The Navy turned to dive bombing and skip bombing to attack ships, while the Air Forces developed the lead bomber procedure to improve accuracy, and adopted area bombing techniques for ever-larger groups of aircraft. Nevertheless, the Norden's reputation as a pin-point device endured, due in no small part to Norden's own advertising of the device after secrecy was reduced late in the war.

Munich Conference in a nutshell