Billy Rees
Published 19 Aug 2015ITV programme from 2005 presented by Joan Collins.
June 1, 2021
The Avengers – Must See TV
Comments Off on The Avengers – Must See TV
May 31, 2021
The History of HSTs in the West
Ruairidh MacVeigh
Published 29 May 2021Hello again! 😀
With the recent withdrawal of the last HST operations into London, I wanted to make a series of videos chronicling the history of these mighty trains in terms of their years of each region they were assigned to, the Great Western, East Coast, Midland, West Coast and Cross Country Routes.
With that in mind, we start with the first of the BR Regions to employ the venerable HST, but also the first to withdraw them from long distance services, the Great Western, a line that, since its inception under the auspices of Brunel, has played host to many different types of trains, but none have had greater impact that the superb HSTs.
All video content and images in this production have been provided with permission wherever possible. While I endeavour to ensure that all accreditations properly name the original creator, some of my sources do not list them as they are usually provided by other, unrelated YouTubers. Therefore, if I have mistakenly put the accreditation of “Unknown”, and you are aware of the original creator, please send me a personal message at my Gmail (this is more effective than comments as I am often unable to read all of them): rorymacveigh@gmail.com
The views and opinions expressed in this video are my personal appraisal and are not the views and opinions of any of these individuals or bodies who have kindly supplied me with footage and images.
If you enjoyed this video, why not leave a like, and consider subscribing for more great content coming soon.
Thanks again, everyone, and enjoy! 😀
References:
– 125Group (and their respective sources)
– Wikipedia (and its respective references)
Comments Off on The History of HSTs in the West
May 30, 2021
Rommel’s Desert Dash – The Whole Bloody Afrika Korps! – Gazala – WW2 – 144 – May 30, 1942
World War Two
Published 29 May 2021Erwin Rommel begins his surprise new offensive with “Rommel’s Moonlight Ride”, bringing all of his mighty mobile units to the fray in North Africa, while in the Pacific, dozens of warships and tens of thousands of men set sail from Japan — their mission? Attack the Aleutian Islands and Midway Island, but above all, destroy the US Pacific Fleet!
(more…)
Comments Off on Rommel’s Desert Dash – The Whole Bloody Afrika Korps! – Gazala – WW2 – 144 – May 30, 1942
The History of the English Flag
History With Hilbert
Published 13 Apr 2018Most people know that the Union Flag (sometimes incorrectly called the Union Jack by normies) is made up of the various flags of the United Kingdom combining things like the Scottish Saltire and the English Saint George’s Cross. But what is the history behind these symbols and why were they adopted by these nations, and what is more, why these flags, and what about the competitors who if history had been different might have come to symbolise these nations. In today’s episode, I’m going to explore the history and symbolism behind England’s flag, the Saint George’s Cross, as well as the other banners that were once seen as being representative of the English people.
Music Used:
“Sneaky Snitch” – Kevin MacLeod
“Pippin the Hunchback” – Kevin MacLeod
“Angevin” – Kevin MacLeod
“Gregorian Chant” – Kevin MacLeod
“Ever Mindful” – Kevin MacLeod
“Ever Mindful” – Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 LicenseAll images are from the Public Domain of Wikimedia Commons and Pixabay.
Comments Off on The History of the English Flag
May 29, 2021
Prototype Jungle Carbine: A No1 MkV Becomes a No5 MkI
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Feb 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
When the British began developing a shortened version of the No4 Lee Enfield in 1943 (which would become the No5 MkI “Jungle Carbine”), the development process included work with some rather older rifles. What we have here is a 1922 production No1 MkV rifle cut down as a trials prototype for the carbine development program. The No1 MkV was a trials gun itself from the early 1920s which basically gave a rear aperture sight to the classic MkIII SMLE. Unfortunately, I don’t have any specific details on the testing or use of this particular example, but I think it is a fascinating example!
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
Comments Off on Prototype Jungle Carbine: A No1 MkV Becomes a No5 MkI
May 28, 2021
The Plot to Kill Hitler’s Hangman – Operation Anthropoid – WAH 035 – May 1942, Pt. 2
World War Two
Published 27 May 2021Arthur Harris and his RAF Bombers carry out a massive bombing raid on Cologne. Meanwhile, one of the architects of the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich is the target of a spectacular assassination attempt.
(more…)
Comments Off on The Plot to Kill Hitler’s Hangman – Operation Anthropoid – WAH 035 – May 1942, Pt. 2
May 27, 2021
Charles Darwin “was 19th century euro upper class. It’d be stranger if he WASN’T ‘problematic’ by today’s standards”
Robert Wright argues that Charles Darwin is not guilty of the most recent set of sins alleged in an editorial in the journal Science:
Charles Darwin, circa 1874.
Photo by Leonard Darwin via Wikipedia Commons.
The author of the Science piece (which ran under the heading “editorial”) was Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist at Princeton. He contended that Darwin’s 1871 book The Descent of Man “offers a racist and sexist view of humanity” and is “often problematic, prejudiced, and injurious”. So students who are taught that Darwin was a great scientist “should also be taught Darwin as an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices that warped his view of data and experience”.
There are things about this essay I like. For example: I understood it, which distinguishes it from many things written by contemporary anthropologists. Also, it’s hard to argue with its claim that Darwin said things about race and gender that would get a guy canceled today. (As one person put it on Twitter, Darwin, “was 19th century euro upper class. It’d be stranger if he WASN’T ‘problematic’ by today’s standards”.)
Still, Fuentes does seem to have gotten one important thing about Darwin wrong. And in the process he demonstrated a kind of confusion I consider so pernicious that I’ve decided to add it to my list of “existential psychological threats”, along with such cognitive biases as attribution error and confirmation bias (“existential” in the sense of grave threats to Planet Earth, a subject pondered often in this newsletter).
Here’s the confusion: In reading Darwin, Fuentes fails to distinguish between an explanation of something and a justification of something.
I want to emphasize that, though Fuentes seems to be on the left, this conflation of explanation and justification is common on both sides of the political spectrum. If you suggest that some terrorist act committed in America was a response to America’s bombing of majority-Muslim countries, someone on the right may respond to this attempt to explain why the terrorism happened by saying, “Oh, so you’re justifying the slaughter of Americans? You’re excusing the terrorists?”
The fact that I’m often on the receiving end of this kind of question may be one reason I’ve come to see this conflation — let’s call it the “explain/excuse conflation” — as something whose extinction would be a wonderful thing. But there’s another reason: I believe this conflation is a genuine impediment to solving some of the world’s biggest problems. If people get shouted down every time they start a sentence with, “I think the reason bad thing X happened is …” then we’ll have trouble understanding enough about bad things to reduce their frequency.
Here’s the assertion by Fuentes that, so far as I can tell, is flat-out wrong. After (accurately) writing that Darwin “asserted evolutionary differences between races,” he adds: “He went beyond simple racial rankings, offering justification of empire and colonialism, and genocide, through ‘survival of the fittest.'”
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
Comments Off on Charles Darwin “was 19th century euro upper class. It’d be stranger if he WASN’T ‘problematic’ by today’s standards”
May 25, 2021
Wait, Go Back! The SMLE MkIII* Wartime Simplification
Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Feb 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
The British entered World War One with a technically excellent rifle, with lots of bells and whistles. By 1916, the war was taking a previously unimaginable toll on the industrial capacity of the Empire and rifle production had to be economized. This led to the adoption of the MkIII* pattern of the Lee Enfield, to reduce cost and speed up production. The MkIII* omitted the windage adjustments on the rear sight, the front and rear volley sight elements, and the magazine cutoff. Around the same time, stock discs stopped being stamped with unit information (to avoid giving military intelligence of troop distribution when rifles were captured) and eventually deleted entirely.
The Pattern 1907 bayonet was also changed, although this does not coincide with the MkIII* rifle. In 1913, the British decided to delete the quillon from the standard bayonet. A great many bayonet with quillons were already in service, and those would be used in World War One, although many were modified in the field to cut off the quillons to avoid them hanging up on barbed wire or other obstacles.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
Comments Off on Wait, Go Back! The SMLE MkIII* Wartime Simplification
May 24, 2021
“The revolution will be defeated when people stop being scared”
Sean Gabb discusses some outrageous elements of the ongoing cultural revolution against freedom of speech in Britain, the United States and many other western nations:
David Hume Tower at the University of Edinburgh (listed building number 50189).
Photo by Enric via Wikimedia Commons.
If I am a self-employed plumber or electrician, I can speak my mind and laugh at the complaints. If, like the great majority in this country, I am a salaried employee — whether in the state or private sectors is unimportant: the pressures to conformity are the same in both sectors — I must be careful what I say. I am scared of the sack. I am scared of sudden redundancy. I am scared of missing out on promotions. I am scared of generally unfair treatment because of my opinions. I therefore hide my opinions. The Peter Tatchells among us then look round complacently, telling themselves and each other that silence equals agreement, and that the few squeaks of opposition are from “disreputable extremists.”
This explains the present unbalanced debates over slavery and colonialism. Take these examples:
- First, in September 2020, the David Hume Tower at Edinburgh University was “denamed”. Someone had bothered to read the 1748 essay “Of National Characters”, and found in one of its footnotes an unfashionable statement about race. It was at once set aside that Hume was a philosopher of at least considerable note. More important was the “non-overt disrespect, offence, and racism that Black students have to go through at the University of Edinburgh”.
- Second, the Music Department at Oxford is presently worried that its curriculum “structurally centres white European music”, and that this causes “students of colour great distress”. It therefore wants to change its focus from the European classical tradition to things like “Artists Demanding Trump Stop Using Their Songs”. It also wants to discourage students from studying musical notation, as this is a “colonialist representational system”.
I could give a third illustration, and a fourth. I could fill a pamphlet with more. Some would be more alarming, though few less absurd. But these two can stand well enough for all the others. What makes these debates so irritating is that they are not debates. One side can put its case just as it pleases. The other is reduced to accepting all the main charges and begging for mitigation: “What Hume said was evil and unpardonable — but he was important for other things.” Or: “I feel your pain, but Mozart owned no slaves, and everyone knows that Beethoven was really black.” Because it has been so humbly begged, full mitigation will, in both cases, be granted. Hume will continue to be studied in the universities. Music students at Oxford will continue to use the standard notation and to analyse the usual classics. But preventing these things was never part of the agenda. The agenda was and is to transform what were honoured or unquestioned parts of our civilisation into things useful but more or less suspect, things subject to a toleration that may be varied or withdrawn at any time without notice.
It should be plain that we are, in both England and America, living through a revolution. This is not a normal revolution as these things are considered. Unlike in France or Russia, there has been no overthrow of an established order, no burst of state violence, no establishment after that of an overtly new order. There are no secret police. There are no labour camps. No one is beaten to death in a police cell. All the same, we are living through a revolution. It is a revolution that has involved the gradual capture of education, the media, the administration, the charities and the more permeable religious institutions, and the recent aligning of the larger or more glamorous business concerns. I see no point in discussing its ultimate objects. I am not sure if these are wholly agreed. But its provisional object is the destruction of our traditional identity, and of our liberty so far as this stands in the way of that provisional object.
These two elements of the provisional object are equally important. Our civilisation is being pulled apart because doing so strips away the mass of associations that, left in place, might hold up the more alarming parts of the transformation. Opposition is so feeble not only because that is all that will be tolerated: feeble opposition is all that can be tolerated. This is a revolution in which opponents are not murdered, but only scared into silence. They are scared into silence chiefly by fear of destroyed or blighted careers. The revolution will be defeated when people stop being scared. Then, there will be vicious and unrelenting public mockery, and commercial boycotts, and shareholder rebellions, and lost elections, and the general feeling of solidarity and impunity still sometimes found in a football stadium.
Comments Off on “The revolution will be defeated when people stop being scared”
HMS Ark Royal (91) – Guide 100 (Extended)
Drachinifel
Published 15 Dec 2018HMS Ark Royal, an aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy, is today’s subject.
Want to support the channel? – https://www.patreon.com/Drachinifel
Want to talk about ships? https://discord.gg/TYu88mt
Comments Off on HMS Ark Royal (91) – Guide 100 (Extended)
May 23, 2021
AF is short of fresh water – WW2 – 143 – May 23, 1942
World War Two
Published 22 May 2021Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov arrives in London to meet with Churchill, but at home in the USSR the Germans have launched an instantly successful offensive. In North Africa and Malta the British are building up, unaware that Erwin Rommel is just about to strike, and an American ruse discovers secret Japanese attack plans.
(more…)
Comments Off on AF is short of fresh water – WW2 – 143 – May 23, 1942
May 22, 2021
QotD: King Edward I
Long before Henry III had died (of a surfeit of Barons, Bonifaces, etc.) Edward I had taken advantage of the general confusion and of the death of Simon de Montfort (probably of a surfeit of Vergers) to become King before his reign had begun.
Edward I was thus a strong King, and one of the first things he did was to make a strong arrangement about the Law Courts. Hitherto there had been a number of Benches there, on all of which a confused official called the Justinian had tried to sit. Edward had them all amalgamated into one large Bench called the King’s Bench, and sat on it himself.
Edward I, who had already (in his Saladin days) piously decimated several thousand Turks at Nazareth, now felt so strong that he decided to Hammer the Scots, who accordingly now come right into History.
The childless Scotch King Alexander the Great had trotted over a cliff and was thus dead; so the Scots asked Edward to tell them who was King of Scotland, and Edward said that a Balliol man ought to be. Delighted with this decision the Scots crossed the Border and ravaged Cumberland with savage ferocity; in reply to which Edward also crossed the Border and, carrying off the Sacred Scone of Scotland on which the Scottish Kings had been crowned for centuries, buried it with great solemnity in Westminster Abbey.
This was, of course, a Good Thing for the Scots because it was the cause of William the Wallace (not to be confused with Robert Bruce), who immediately defeated the English at Cambuskenneth (Scotch for Stirling) and invaded England with ferocious savagery. In answer to this Edward captured the Bruce and had him horribly executed with savage ferocity. Soon after, Edward died of suffocation at a place called Burrowin-the-Sands and was succeeded by his worthless son Edward II.
W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman, 1066 And All That, 1930.
Comments Off on QotD: King Edward I
May 21, 2021
Life Inside a Japanese PoW Camp – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 20 May 2021The inhuman, torturous, and deadly Japanese PoW Camps famous from Bridge over the River Kwai, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Empire of the Sun, and more recently Unbroken are a world of abuse and mistreatment managed by willfully incompetent and sadistically brutal men.
(more…)
Comments Off on Life Inside a Japanese PoW Camp – WW2 Special
May 20, 2021
The Birth Control Movement and Eugenics – A Curious Link | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.18 – Winter 1923
TimeGhost History
Published 19 May 2021In the winter of 1923, a controversial activist takes a Catholic doctor to trial for libel. The proceedings capture a much bigger moment in the history of the interwar period: the controversial — but inherent — link between birth control and eugenics.
(more…)
Comments Off on The Birth Control Movement and Eugenics – A Curious Link | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.18 – Winter 1923
Men Will Be Boys (1970)
British Pathé
Published 13 Apr 2014Men will be boys. Various locations.
M/S men round lake with boats. C/U man in lake with waders with model boat. C/U another man with model boat. Man lighting boiler. C/U engine working. M/S as model of paddle boat moves through water. M/S paddle boat on water. In foreground a swan. C/U another model boat going through water. M/S pan scale model of Hitler’s yacht. M/S men playing with model cars on race track. C/U cars going round race track. C/U men’s hands on controls. C/U men looking at cars go past. L/S of cars going round race track.
L/S men playing war games with model soldiers. on large table. C/U as man moves soldiers out of line laying them on ground. M/S man moves horses forward. C/U hand placing cannon into position. C/U hand places horse troops in position. M/S lines of soldier. Hand places another in position. M/S of troops being moved.
M/S Mr Victor Martin and wife go through gate by railway crossing dressed up in their uniforms, carrying lamps etc. M/S as they make their way to their signal boxes. C/U railway notice ‘By Midland Railway’. Pa off notice to show Mr Martin approaching his signal box. M/S Martin going into signal box. M/S Mrs Martin going into signal box. C/U Mrs Martin going into signal box. C/U interior. Mr Martin hanging up his jacket inside signal box. He then sits at the controls. C/U signal controls working. C/U of Mr Martin operating signals. Camera zooms back and we see train going past him along track. C/U model train over track. C/U Mrs Martin working in her signal box.
M/S Mrs Martin working signal controls. C/U Mrs Martin. M/S showing trains going over track. C/U trains moving. Camera zooms out to show tracks . C/U trains moving. C/U looking along tunnel showing trains moving. C/U exterior. Signals working. Then camera pans to show where the trains run on an enclosed section out in the open. C/U goods train and passenger train moving. M/S Interior. Trains going over track and Mr Martin at controls.
FILM ID:2241.18A VIDEO FROM BRITISH PATHÉ. EXPLORE OUR ONLINE CHANNEL, BRITISH PATHÉ TV. IT’S FULL OF GREAT DOCUMENTARIES, FASCINATING INTERVIEWS, AND CLASSIC MOVIES. http://www.britishpathe.tv/
FOR LICENSING ENQUIRIES VISIT http://www.britishpathe.com/
British Pathé also represents the Reuters historical collection, which includes more than 136,000 items from the news agencies Gaumont Graphic (1910-1932), Empire News Bulletin (1926-1930), British Paramount (1931-1957), and Gaumont British (1934-1959), as well as Visnews content from 1957 to the end of 1984. All footage can be viewed on the British Pathé website. https://www.britishpathe.com/
Comments Off on Men Will Be Boys (1970)
