MI9’s secret escape missions - HistoryExtra - "‘An airman that actually managed to escape. And he cycled, astonishingly, 400 kilometers across Nazi-occupied Europe. Fantastic. Until he came to a roundabout, you can probably guess what's coming, he went round the roundabout the wrong way. And there was a policeman on the corner thought, hang on a minute… some of the stuff that that they advised. You know, how to walk, you know, not to walk in a British way and things like that. It just tickles you pink really. But back to the gadgets... one of the most famous were the miniature campuses, and over 1.3 million of these were made throughout the war… prisoners were allowed, of course, to have leisure activities, and MI9 took advantage of that, they created sort of fictitious companies or charities… these charities would send parcels and gifts into the prisoner of war camps and one of them was a Monopoly set, very, very famously...
She wrote, the despair, the humiliation, the anger, at German occupation was so deep, that one felt ready to do anything to regain the priceless treasure of freedom. And this to me is really important. She says it is only when one has lost freedom, that one realizes it is the most precious thing."
Frank McDonough On The Downfall Of The Third Reich | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘This was the thing about the Nazi system, that it devolved power to people who then told thought they have tons and tons of power themselves. And there's a famous phrase… that they work towards the Fuhrer. But in a way, when you actually look at the decisions they take, there's no way that they can be working towards the Fuhrer. They're working towards their own problem solving in a particular instance. And it may not be really linked to ideology, it may be just look, this ghetto is full, we need to get rid of some people from this ghetto, and someone says, yeah, we could take them to a small place outside called Chelmno. And maybe we could gas some people. And that becomes a solution to what is in effect, an overcrowding problem. It's not like where they sit down and say, Oh, we must exterminate these Jews. It's that there's too many Jews here, we can't feed them. What do we do? And these are the problems as we see, with the mass shooting in the Soviet Union. It starts out as mass shooting, and then Himmler visits one of these mass shootings in Minsk. And he starts to say, he's not worried about the victims. He's worried about the psychological effect on the men who are carrying out the machine gunning of all these victims and says, we must find a more humane way of doing it, not more humane for the victims, but more humane for the perpetrators. And then we get towards, don't we, the extermination camps and even in the extermination camps, there's no one system about how to kill people you know, you have at Auschwitz-Birkenau you have Cyclon B is used, but not exclusively, carbon monoxide is also use and these other extermination camps. It's normally a carbon monoxide engine, the pipes in the gas that kills them. So it's not like a uniform way of doing things. I also show and I think this is something new, is how much that the Holocaust was done on the cheap. That really, it was all very much a cost cutting exercise. It wasn't actually, you know, organized by a government department. They didn't have tons and tons of money, it was actually supposed to be self financing. And that was to be financed from the victims by taking their valuables. Also by some of the prisoners, they got off the trains, it will be used as these Sonderkommando to do all the dirty work and very little SS personnel. At a place like Treblinka, you’ve only got 20 SS salaried men running a, running, you know, a camp that kills a million people, by outsourcing to all these different people, for example, they recruit Ukrainian guards into those extermination camps... There's the war that goes on with the Western allies... the Geneva Convention principles… over 98% of British prisoners of war came home, whereas only 13% of Soviet prisoners of war made it home, and they were starved and they weren't given Red Cross parcels, there was no, no Red Cross parcels. The Geneva Convention wasn't applied to the Soviet Union on the basis that the Soviet Union themselves hadn't signed the Geneva Convention. But of course, Germany had signed the Geneva Convention, and was also bound by it. And that came out of the Nuremberg trials. So that was a fallacious argument... there was kind of more nobility in the West, the soldiers in the West, when, when the soldiers of the West talk about the war, they talk in respectful terms about the Germans, you know, they're not horrific people who come into the town, take all the women and children to the edge of town and then get them to dig a big pit and then mow them down with with machine guns, that doesn't happen in the West. You see the difference, just purely in the use of say something like flame throwers, used massively in the attack on the Soviet Union, in the German-Soviet war, but used very sparingly in the West, and not against civilians, and we don't see the same, there's not the same order to get all the civilians and kill them in the West. We don't see that at all. In Africa, it's a kind of, you know, it's almost like a nice cricket match, really, you know, and we have Rommel, you know, Rommel comes out of the war quite well, because he was one of the few German generals, you know, who didn't engage in atrocities, because he wasn't on the Eastern Front. Of course, you know, had he been on the Eastern Front, I’m pretty sure he would have sanctioned atrocities… it's not just that the, you know, that the Germans are awful, but the Soviets are willing to be awful as well. So we have on both sides, we have instances of, of rape, and towards the end, we have lots of instances of the Soviet Red Army, engaging in rape, and we have instances as well, don't we, with the German army, you know, of, of mass executions as they go into these towns. And even later in the war, they operate a scorched earth policy as well, which they don't do in the West. So yes, there are two wars...
Four out of every five German soldiers who were killed, were killed by a soldier of the Red Army"
David Hepworth On British Pop In 1960s America | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Paul McCartney, when he was going there thought to himself, why would the Americans want us? Surely they've got loads of groups? Well, the curious thing was, they didn't really have loads of groups. They had loads of solo singers, and the, you know, the great tradition of American, then, and now, tends to be the solo act… what people really, and what the American teenagers keyed into that the Beatles was this sense of them being a group, that a group was like a family, it was an alternative family, they're probably slightly better than your own family… they provided everybody with peace, material prosperity. But there was a little bit of emotional malnourishment. Like, which I think the Beatles definitely keyed into… there is a rich tradition of kind of cheek and insubordination in British culture, which the Beatles exemplified better than anybody. And I think America really liked the idea of that... The period of British American obsession with English pop music was quite, is about three years, I suppose. During which time, as Bruce Springsteen will tell you, they used to try and impress the girls in the record shops by speaking in a British accent, what they imagined was the British accent. Of course, as we all know, there is no such thing as a British accent...
You got to find new markets, new worlds to conquer. And if you can't conquer America, it's a very difficult thing to sustain. You know, the jam, tried American, genuinely tried a number of times. And then I think about the seventh time they just, that's it, it's not going to work. And they broke up quite soon afterwards. And you can kind of see why. Because if you’re not going to make it in America, whereas if you do make in America, they never break up. Because it can go forever. Because there's the great irony about popular music. Is this was supposed to be the life of the, the mayfly life expectancy. It's turned out to be the longest lasting job of any kind. You can be Mick Jagger far longer than you can be a movie star or a politician or financier or anything. Nobody guessed that was going to happen"
Britain’s Swinging Sixties: Everything You Wanted To Know Podcast - HistoryExtra - "'That's not true in 1962. And again, it's not... swinging is old hat by sort of 1968. So it's very much in the middle years, probably 64 as I said, 64 to 67 of the decade when Britishness is cool. But of course… it's pretty much an elite thing. So if you're living in Barnsley, life's not very swinging... less than 5% of people or so who've been to university, and have lots of money… most people who don't live in London have never been to London, that they're not part of that world, that world is all happening somewhere else. And I think for most people life just went on, you know, pretty much as it had in in the 1950s just a bit richer and sort of shinier...
‘Was the 1960s as promiscuous as their reputation?’...
‘People are maybe a tiny bit. I mean, I'm talking about a tiny bit, that's sort of a fraction of a percent more promiscuous than they had been, they had slightly more partners and were active a little bit more, a bit earlier. But for most people, you know, life, as I said, was pretty much unchanged from the 1950s or so. So the idea that there's this kind of colossal step change, and everybody is having orgies and behaving in a sort of really debauched way, is completely erroneous. Now, often, people say, well, didn't the pill change everything? Didn't that revolutionize people's habits. But actually, until the end of the 1960s, you could really only get the pill if you're married. So by definition, married people tend not to be immensely promiscuous. So actually, it's in the 1970s and 80s, that that change really began to work itself out’...
People tend to conflate the British and American stories. And that's partly because of the sort of Americanization of global culture through the internet, and it's also because so many people study the civil rights movement. So they sort of assume, well, the civil rights movement is the big story of the 60s and most people in the 60s in Britain must have really been interested in it and it must have been massively important. And our own story of immigration is exactly the same and all the rest of it. That's not really true at all. Actually, when you go through British papers in the 60s, it's there, but it's foreign news, it's often sort of buried away a little bit, it's not a big deal in the same way that, you know, in the way that it now looms in our consciousness...
There was one school in London that ends up basically being shut down where the teachers were accused of using getting the children to play Monopoly so they could learn how to overthrow capitalism. Now, this was a bit of an exaggeration. But there were, I think, the 60s and 70s is the point at which the progressive ideas entered the educational mainstream, and in some cases they’re seen as going too far. And then there's a backlash from about 1978 onwards, first driven by Jim Callaghan, and then driven by Margaret Thatcher, which is that progressive education has gone too far’"
The Industrial Revolution: Everything You Wanted To Know Podcast - HistoryExtra - "'Historians aren't always entirely in agreement about what the industrial revolution is. So this is my interpretation of what I think the industrial revolution is. I think prior to industrialization, most people, everything they ate came from the land, just as it does today. But everything that they wore also came from the land, and every, all their buildings, their wooden buildings were made of wood, that had obviously come from the land in some way, people got around on transport. So these are horses that are fed through things that come out of the ground. So everybody's got this very close connection with the land, not just for what they eat, but for all their clothing and for all their other human needs. And industrialization is really the process where we move away from this very intimate connection between our needs, and the seasons and the land. And very often, it's the land that's very, very local to you… industrialization is all about a switch, where we’re no longer are dependent on our immediate environment, that we manage to source our needs, and particularly things like our clothes, our buildings, our transport, and things that people never did need before, such as our mobile phones and our music and everything else that we consume in different ways. We consume it in a completely different way. And we get it in a completely different way'…
‘When was the Industrial Revolution. And I should preface that by saying we're talking about Britain here’
‘Because we're not looking at a political revolution, where we can say that this is the person, this is the date, this is the day, this is the time, we can kind of report and record all these details. Industrialization is a slow, long drawn out process, particularly in England, because there was no template, nobody knew exactly how to industrialize, nobody knew they were industrializing, even the language comes much, much later. So it's a slow process. We are starting to look quite different from other parts of the world by the late 18th century, in that we are using machines to do a lot of our making. And we are starting to make things that are not local. So cotton, for example, is taking off but cotton is not local to Britain, cotton comes from very distant parts of the world. And we're using machines and machinery to do the making of the cotton, to turn the raw cotton plants and the fibers into cloth. So this all started to develop in the 18th century. But for me, industrialization really takes off when we start using steam engines to power our economy, to power the factories, to power the trains. To do the work. So prior to that the work has all been done by us or by horses or by water or by wind, maybe by wood, we start to use coal, and we start to use much, much more power, much, much more energy in our economy. And you can actually date that quite closely. In the case of Britain, steam engines start to spread through transport and through industry in the 1820s, in the 1830s. So although those 18th century origins are fair, and they're really important, for me, industrial revolution proper is a 19th century phenomenon...
We mustn't over romanticize the pre industrial past, if that was so great, why does everybody want to industrialize? I mean, there's a reason that we don't live that life nowadays, because it was really tough and very uncomfortable.’...
'You have very little evidence of workers started their life maybe as a farm laborer, moving to the city and doing industrial work, and then going back to the countryside. They almost never go back. I think that tells its story as well. However unpalatable the city work is, there's something about it that’s more attractive than the rural work, because they just don't make the journey back to the village and start working on the land'"
So much for demonising capitalism for tricking us all into working longer hours and being more miserable. But of course the excuse will be that almost everyone suffered from false consciousness
Brexit’s long historical roots - HistoryExtra - "‘The story of Britain and Europe can't really be viewed in isolation. It's inevitably shaped by and responsible for shaping events much further afield. I'm thinking particularly, for example, in terms of imperialism, where does the story of empire fit into this European story?’
‘I guess there are two ways. I mean, okay, so a preliminary comment would be that Britain is by no means the only, or perhaps even the most Imperial, of the European states, the European countries. I mean, I would say that the the Empire has left a legacy, which is somewhat more important for us. Partly because of the, of the 20th century, the history of the 20th century, the history of two world wars, in which major allies were the Empire, the Commonwealth, the Americans. And, you know, if there's one thing that we all, we all know, it's that our survival in two World Wars was largely owing to overseas alliances, in a way that is not true for any other, of any other European country. And also, of course, those those alliances, to some extent, still exist, or indeed, to some extent, are still crucial for our security. And hence, at various levels, economic, military, and cultural links, outside Europe, I would say are more important than those of any other European state. I mean, one consequence of that, which is well, pretty well known, I think, is that Britain, although a member of the EEC, and the EU for nearly 50 years, has never been as integrated economically, as its other member countries. People always say, well, except for Malta. So you need to put in brackets except for Malta… we were the only of, one of the large European countries that was not part of the Eurozone. And one of my arguments in the book is that had we joined the eurozone, which we nearly did and could have done, if Tony Blair had his way, then we would not have left the EU, we would not have voted in 2016 to leave, because the dangers of leaving the eurozone are much greater...
The Portuguese, the Spanish Empire largely ended, most of it in the early part of the 19th century, so much longer ago. And although there are clearly important cultural ties between Spain and South America, I don't think there is important as our ties now are with the United States, let's say, either economically or in terms of security. And as far as France is concerned, well, the French do make big efforts to maintain im-, post Imperial links, I think they make probably more of an effort to do so than we do. But nevertheless, the French Empire did break up in very traumatic circumstances. And their relationship now with what were the most important, their most important colonies which were Algeria, Morocco, Vietnam are very much less important to them than our, or our relationships with, let's say well, the United States, Canada, Australia.'...
'During the Middle Ages, it was, Britain was a pretty wild and woolly if rich country on the edge of civilization. In the early modern period, it was the defender of Protestantism. In the 20th century too of course, for many people, it was one of the, the defenders of European freedom against totalitarianism. Now, I think, there is a, I saw a very interesting opinion poll, which asked people in different countries, which countries they would be willing to help in case of crisis. And the British said they would be willing to help everybody in Europe, and nearly all European countries said they wouldn't be willing to help Britain. So I think that Brexit and the way it's been reported has certainly had quite an impact on, on the way that the Europeans think of us. I think incomprehension. For some, sense of betrayal. For a minority a sense that we're doing the right thing and showing the way. But I think on the whole a feeling of, of not understanding. The, why the British are doing this. And either they're doing it for reasons that, so I'm now rambling. You know, either there's some terrible, there's some British plot. There's a French newspaper a week or so ago said something like, how can we understand the dark designs of perfidious Albion? And others just think we've gone crazy. So I think in a way, that has not been often the case in the past. But I think it's often been the case that the British have been perceived to be different and unpredictable...
Britain's very different experience of the 20th century and particularly of the period of the Second World War, means that we have a somewhat different attitude towards the EU as a project. Because if you think of the EU as being the way you prevent another war, or the way you you prevent Europe from falling into a dictatorship or, or something like that, then I think that's not something that we, we see so vividly, as if you're French or German. So I think it means that well, as I think I've might say in the book, the 20th century is simply less traumatic for us. And therefore, in some sense, it marks us less'"
Daniel Ogden On Werewolves Of The Ancient World | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Do we have a sense of why wolves in particular? I mean, I guess there were other legends of shapeshifting to other animals. What, what did the transformation to a wolf specifically say?’
‘Well, this is a question of course, that’s bigger than classical antiquity, just as the werewolf is bigger than classical antiquity. In classical antiquity itself, you're right. I mean, anybody who's familiar with Ovid's metamorphosis, of course, that people are changing to all sorts of creatures, all sorts of plants, even, all over the place in Greek myth, but none, nonetheless, outside that particular realm, when we move more into sort of, we might call a sort of a folkloric area, the wolf does seem to be as it were the animal of choice for transformation as in other cultures. I would have two things to say about this, maybe three. The wolf is a useful animal simply because it does easily convey as well, that wildness and savageness, that opposite pole, to civilization. And so that's a good reason for choosing as it were a wolf to be the animal of the, animal of transformation. Another reason is that oh, I suppose I mean, loads of, you know, very well, very savage creatures out there. But another reason is that wolves are roughly ballpark sort of human sized, or at least one can imagine a sort of an easy transition between between a wolf body and the human body in terms of in terms of size. I mean, the, the other creature that sort of gets focused upon again, in the Euro, and wider European tradition for transformation is the bear in in I mentioned Norse culture briefly. Alongside werewolves in Norse culture, you also get werebears and again, I would say, you know, that again, there's something sort of human in size, underneath, even in sort of, you might say, configuration, about a bear. So that I think that that is significant, however, to go back to wolves, I think, actually, paradoxically, although the wildness is so important in choosing the animal, I think wolves are chosen also because they in themselves strangely embody these two qualities of the wildness, the savagery, but also the civilization. Because again, I'm sure we've all seen the documentaries now about about wolf packs. And these are very ordered, very cooperative, very collaborative societies. And the ancients, the ancients, by the way, were aware of that, too, it's important to note, and of course, it's the sort of a wolf ability to collaborate and cooperate and be part of a community. But of course, that allowed the wolf to give us the dog, which we integrate into into our own community. So I think strangely, werewolves are wolves, because wolves themselves are in a sense already werewolves, they they themselves already embody those two, those two qualities of the wildness and civilizedness’
‘And is there any relevance to the fact that there are quite a lot of other ancient myths involving wolves, not necessarily shapeshifting wolves, you know, something like Romulus and Remus. Does that figure into this at all?’
‘I'm going to say depends on the myth. Really. No, I don't think that the Romulus and Remus myth is is part of the story of the werewolves. But I suppose you could, you could say that in the figure of the mother wolf there, you do have those two qualities again, as it was, so the the twins are sort of cast out into the world into the wilderness into ultimate peril into into the world of wildness, hence, hence the wolf comes along. But of course, she is a very tame, civilized nurturing wolf so she, I suppose we do get those two ideas woven together there in in that myth as well. I suppose that there are, there are other myths involving wolves as well, which are more tightly involved with with werewolves or is are akin to werewolves. So we have the myth of Lycaon who starts off being a man and is transformed into a wolf by Zeus because he tries to feed him human flesh in a in a sacrifice… the Lycaon myth is a sort of like the foundation myth for a complex of cults that took place on Mount Lykaion in Arcadia. And the notion of werewolfism was strongly integrated into those into those cults. Because at the big sacrifice every year, some young men would take their clothes off, hang them on a tree, swim across a pond and be transformed into wolves and and live as wolves for a certain period of time. And if they didn't eat anybody during their times as wolves, they would return eventually back across the pond, recover their clothes from the tree and become human again. So that's a nice sort of cultic expression of werewolfism.’"
The Renaissance: Everything You Wanted To Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘England is a really interesting case, because I often argue that classically, England doesn't have a Renaissance. Under the Henry the Eighth, there's a buying in of humanist learning and scholars, but not for the sake of learning. Basically, for Henry's case, to try and support his divorce, you don't have the flowering of the arts, you don’t have great visual culture. In a way, it's only bought later, by monarchs like Charles the First. So England is a very different case’...
‘How aware were ordinary people of their wider cultural changes?... Did people at the time believe that they were in an exciting era and that things were changing?’...
‘Not as much as we might like to think. Because if you if you look at a lot of the artworks that we celebrate as quintessentially Renaissance, what you might call ordinary or working people, no wouldn't see, many of them, you wouldn't be seeing Holbein’s Ambassadors, because they're in courts, right? Levels of literacy are relatively low, especially for women, of course. So you're not going to be reading a lot of those texts, you might be being told how religion is changing... when you get the shift from Catholicism to Protestantism. How much do people understand the detail of that theology? I'm not sure as much as we might have imagined… this is a period which is probably filled with more violence, more warfare, than earlier or even later periods. So we think about the Renaissance, and we think about golden period, and Leonardo, and Florence and it’s all lovely. Not really, because there's both warfare throughout the Italian peninsula. And then by the 1520s, Europe itself is burning with the Reformation. People are being, you know, killed for their religious beliefs...
It's magical, something like printing is magic. It's an extraordinary thing. And absolutely, I think the sense in which the discovery of the Americas... the shock of the new, the fact that a whole new continent has been discovered. That's not in the Bible. This, people say, well, how can how can God not have talked about the Americans? So these things are massive shocks, and I think really make people think again about all forms of religious authority or political authority... that goes with a wider sense of of the world is changing very quickly. And if you think in this period, more so the problems of travel, most people never get beyond their small village and their predominantly agrarian community. Nevertheless, we as historians do keep finding that, oh, yeah, however, people in this place are wearing silk, or people in this place are working with printed books, or there are things that we see that are making those differences'...
‘Why are there so many nude people in the Renaissance paintings?’
‘Another great question, I guess, I guess has a sort of an academic answer, which is, there's a return to the classics. So classical Greek or Roman statuary is often of course naked, so it's an emulation. But alongside that, you know, we forget that there's a massive erotic power, which is often sidelines. A recent show of Titian's at the National Gallery, showing his erotic paintings and we look at them and we talk about his kind of classical fascination with the past. and you know, stories from Ovid. What people don't often say is that they were commissioned by Philip The Second as dirty paintings for his bedroom. That's just a fact. It's not just me being sort of whatever, modish about it, it's there in all the documentation. So we know that a lot of the artists were of course, using this fascination with the nude because there was a certain sexual dimension to that. Of course, for men and women. Often, of course, the statuary is female. So there's an investment in the sort of sexualization of the woman's body. But also, of course, you know, you can look at a lot of the way in which there's a homoerotic dimension to a lot of male naked statues as well. Michelangelo's David, most famously. You look next to him in the, in the square in Florence, you've got Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa, a very beautiful young boy, killing a naked woman… politically, people can support that...
It's a difficult one to talk about Renaissance literature. I teach a module at my university on Renaissance literature. Now, first thing I say is there's no such thing as Renaissance literature. And let's start with that. Because what do we mean by that? We can talk about modern and modernist fiction. But talking about Renaissance literature, where’re you going to start. You want to start by reading Thomas More's Utopia? Well, you know, it's in Latin, and it seems to be as much an educational treatise as a piece of fiction. Do you want to look at Erasmus, his Praise of Folly? Well, you know, Erasmus is writing all these humanist textbooks, again, for students, and also he's writing self help book for princes. So is that literature? Yeah, I'm happy to call it that. So we can't really talk about a reading public as much in this period, either. Because, again, we're back to those questions about literacy, and also how these books are being circulated in print. Yes, sometimes. But again, printed texts, you know, are not massively in circulation, print runs of 1000. It's not, it's not getting out to many people really, is it.’"
Helen Czerski On How Oceans Shaped Human Civilisation | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘The Western world has a very combative relationship with the ocean. You know, if you look at ocean, you know, sort of landscape paintings from earlier than that, there were a few. And if you look at, you know, even if you look at, you know, the, you know, paintings in Elizabeth the First’s time, you know, the Armada and all of those things. The ocean is this kind of, there are big waves, and it's complicated, and these little ships are kind of floating on top. And the ocean is this barrier. It's, it's angry, it's out to get you. It's dangerous, you know, if you go and you come back, then you're very lucky. And so, so people did understand the ocean. And it was actually uncommon for people to be able to swim, even sailors. There were superstitions around being able to swim and so, so it was uncommon for people, it was just a nasty thing, basically, that you didn't go near unless you had to. And if you've got to the other side of it, then you were a great hero, because you, you know, you've beaten this thing. So yeah, so so Westerners were quite late. But again, other nations didn't have that combative relationship, they saw, you know, they had a more holistic view, they saw the ocean as part of their world. If you speak to the Polynesians, for example, they will say the ocean is what connects them. That actually, you know, so, but the nature of geology is that islands tend to come in little lines because of, especially if they're formed by volcanism, right, like, like the island chain of Hawaii... they were more likely to know the people across the ocean than the ones around the back of their own island. Because the ocean was what connected them’"
Spectacular discoveries at Sutton Hoo - HistoryExtra - "'They held an inquest who owns this million pound grave, and they held it in the village hall in Sutton, and the magistrate found that the owner was Mrs. Pretty, that the law that the magistrate was working on was some medieval treasure trove law, which is basically, if somebody is buried something with the intention of going back and recovering it, then it is government property, because they were trying to evade tax. That's the thinking. A layman's version of the thinking. But if on the other hand, it’s buried with no intention of retrieving it, then it belongs to the landowner… they gave converging evidence that this was a burial, even though they didn't have a body… Therefore, it was the property of Mrs. Pretty. And Mrs Pretty is thought to have consulted her medium, according to Charles Phillips, and then the next day, she said, I give this to the nation. And they said, well, the nation makes you a Dame of the British Empire. And she said, no thank you, I don't need that. This is no achievement of mine'"
Dad left fuming after café mistakenly added coffee to his toddler son's babycino - "Dad Conor Stapleton says the tot was served one and a half shots of coffee by mistake, after he ordered a babycino for the 18-month-old... his son was awake until 11pm that night."
What’s the Matter With a Little Brother/Sister Action? - ""Genetic defects from inbreeding." Yes, but they were using two forms of birth control. (And in the vanishingly small chance of pregnancy, Julie can get an abortion.) "It will mess them up emotionally." On the contrary, they enjoyed the act and it brought them closer together. "It's illegal." Not in France. "It's disgusting." For you, maybe, but not for them (obviously). Do you really want to say that private acts are morally wrong just because a lot of people find those acts disgusting? And so on. The scenario, of course, is designed to ward off the most common moral objections to incest, and in doing so demonstrate that much of moral reasoning is a post-hoc affair—a way of justifying judgments that you've already reached though an emotional gut response to a situation... we must recognize even the people we consider to be the epitome of pure evil—the Islamic fundamentalists who engineered 9/11, for example—are motivated by moral goals, however distorted we find them to be"
Sister accused of ‘upstaging’ bride after 100-pound weight loss - “My sister freak out upon seeing me. As it turns out she has gained a bit of weight not super noticeable to me she still looks great."
Women With Obesity Are Not as Curvy as They Think: Consequences on Their Everyday Life Behavior - "Women with obesity seem to behave as if they thought they had a larger body than it actually was. These atypical behaviors are related to memories of embarrassing experiences regarding personal body size and stigma. Overweight women exhibit the same behavior but to a lesser and less systematic degree"
Medical student used fat suit to disguise himself as woman and attack ex-girlfriend with acid - "A medical student used a fat suit to disguise himself as a woman and throw acid over his ex-girlfriend, a court has heard. Dr Rym Alaoui, 25, suffered “life-changing” injuries when she was attacked on the doorstep of her Brighton home in May by Milad Rouf, her ex-boyfriend ."
Michael Tracey on Twitter - "In 2017 the GOP controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress. By 2021 they have lost all three. It's a very strange "fascism" that is content with forfeiting its hold on state power just to get some judges and tax cuts"
Did Xi Jinping Portraits Xi-eld Home From Demolition? - "Fact #1 : This Happened In March 2016...
Fact #2 : It Was Not A House...
Fact #3 : It Was An Illegal Structure...
Fact #4 : The Xi Jinping Portraits Were Taken Down...
Fact #5 : This Xi-ield Was Inspired By The Cultural Revolution
The idea of shielding (or Xi-elding in this case) with a Chinese leader’s portrait goes all the way back to the Cultural Revolution. Back then, the act of defacing Chairman Mao’s image was considered extremely blasphemous to the zealous Red Guard bands. So people protected ancient Chinese relics and cultural treasures by covering them with Chairman Mao’s posters."