Shane Short@shorty1969

@_HistoryNerd Memoirs of a revolutionist

An IRA leader explains why killing British soldiers is "an advantage" (1972): In a chilling 1972 interview, an IRA leader identified only as Mr McAn is asked about his reaction to the death of a second British soldier that week. His response reveals the cold strategic calculus at the heart of the Troubles. "Well, my reaction as a member of the IRA would be another FAL casualty for Crown forces, a certain amount of satisfaction," he says. He then briefly acknowledges the human cost: "On the personal level, of course, we realize that this is a terrible personal tragedy for someone's family, that this is possibly some young woman being left a widow, possibly children being left without a father, someone's son has been killed." But he immediately pivots back to his political framing: "But this is the whole tragedy of the situation in Ireland: British troops are not wanted, and while they are forced to remain here against the will of many of them, I'm sure tragedies like this are obviously going to continue." The interviewer presses harder, asking whether these deaths were an advantage or disadvantage to the IRA. McAn does not hesitate: "I would say that the deaths of British troops in Ireland for the first time in 50 years would be a definite advantage." When asked why, he explains the logic: "It has without any doubt done more than anything over the past 50 years to bring it home to the British public that unless their troops are withdrawn from Ireland, unless the just demands of the Irish people are met, these tragedies are going to increase." The interviewer puts the question plainly: "So that you see a political advantage in British troops being killed?" McAn's answer is a single word. "Yes." The exchange captures something rarely stated so openly in conflict: The deliberate use of violence as political messaging aimed not at the soldiers themselves, but at the public watching back home. 1972 would go on to become the bloodiest year of the Troubles.

In 1983 a Mexican pilot on a transatlantic flight from Newark to Munich, running dangerously low on fuel made an emergernecy landing on Mallow Racecourse in Cork. Captain Rubén Ocaña was flying a Gulfstream II executive jet on April 18, 1983 when his instruments showed it was running dangerously low on fuel. His plan had been to refuel at Shannon, but thick fog made that impossible. With air traffic control guiding him, Ocaña scanned the countryside for a flat enough stretch of land. He located Mallow Racecourse against the odds, set down the plane on the grass. The immediate danger was over but now the multimillion dollar Gulfstream jet was stuck. The ground was too soft to take off again, not just during the current weather but like ever again. There was even talk the jet might have to be dismantled and carted away piece by piece. Captain Ocaña was accompanied by three crew members and four passengers, posh businessmen including Emilio Azcarraga-Milmo, who was the high-profile owner of Televisa, Mexico’s largest television network. Them four were whisked away to complete their journey shortly after the landing. Captain Ocaña and his crew had to await orders. Wealthy insurers quickly did the maths and found it was cheaper to build a temporary runway than to take the yoke apart. Local men and women were hired, machinery was brought in, and a 3,000-foot tarmac strip began to take shape beside the racecourse ( oh and the local sugar factory). It took around six weeks. During that time, the charismatic Mexican Captain Ocaña and his crew became honorary Corkonians and were treated with the great hospitality of the Rebel County. They were put up at the Central Hotel, Captain Ocaña was a regular at hurling matches, and even served as a judge for the “Rakes of Mallow” Beauty Contest (that Rakes polka festival is a fascinating rabbithole in itself btw). By the time the makeshift runway was ready 39 days later, the jet had become a local landmark. Kids cycled out to see it and tourists came to take photographs, postcards were even printed. When the day finally came for takeoff, around two thousand people gathered to see Captain Rubén Ocaña and his crew off. Before stepping aboard, he offered a few words as Gaeilge them they lifted safely into the air, and circled twice above the town in salute before vanishing into the clouds. The legendary event inspired the 2010 film The Runway, Captain Ocañas adventure was commemorated forty years later with Ocaña Fest in April 2023 which featured an air show, Mexican mariachi music, and a screening of original footage captured by local enthusiast Alan Wilson. The weekend reached a poignant conclusion when Ocaña’s four daughters fulfilled their father's final wish by scattering his ashes at the racecourse, marking a permanent return to the town that had welcomed him with such extraordinary hospitality decades earlier. Buy the Dublin Time Machine a pint and support the DTM Book ko-fi.com/buchanandublin…

Not my words but I’m sharing , excuse the swearing FUCKING TRAITOR 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬 Nothing could be more of a fucking piss take than a frail inbred parasite wrapped in dead animal fur, dripping in stolen jewels robbed from half the planet, sitting on a solid gold throne in a palace built on centuries of blood, slavery, war, famine and theft, lecturing the public about sacrifice, unity and “the future of the nation” while millions can barely afford to put the heating on. The King’s Speech. Look at the theatre of it. Look at the sheer absurdity. A grown man wearing a diamond-encrusted crown worth more than entire towns, reading words written for him by unelected handlers, pretending this is modern civilisation instead of the last rotting carcass of feudalism dressed up with better cameras and cleaner propaganda. And what was he actually reading? More control. More bureaucracy. More fucking regulation. More promises from the exact same machine that created the collapse in the first place. Talking about “strengthening public services”, “modernising Britain”, “security”, “digital reform”, “public accountability”, “online protections”, “new powers”, “economic growth”, “national resilience”, endless piles of legislation stacked on top of legislation while ordinary people are worked into the fucking ground just trying to survive another month. You’ve got this ancient ceremonial relic, dressed like a medieval emperor, reading out plans for more digital systems, more regulation, more surveillance, more state intervention, more centralised control, while pretending it’s all about “fairness” and “safety”. You genuinely could not invent a more dystopian image if you tried. It looks like something out of the fucking Capitol in Hunger Games. Gold everywhere. Thrones. Jewels. Guards in costumes. Ancient rituals. Billion-pound estates. While the peasants sit at home wondering if they can afford eggs and electric this week. You’ve got people doing 50-hour weeks, parents skipping meals so their kids can eat, pensioners freezing in their homes, young families buried in rent and debt, while this lot sit under chandeliers worth millions talking about “service”. Service to who exactly? Because it sure as fuck isn’t the public. These people have never lived like normal people for a single second of their lives. Private guards, private chefs, private doctors, private drivers, private estates, private schools, private everything, funded by the same public they emotionally blackmail into believing they somehow “represent the nation”. Represent the nation? They don’t even represent reality. And the weirdest part is people still clap for it. That’s the real psychological operation. They’ve convinced millions of people that bowing to bloodlines is somehow noble instead of humiliating. Full-grown adults standing in the rain waving little flags at a family whose entire existence is based on the idea that they were born more important than you because of who slid out of whose womb hundreds of years ago. Strip away the orchestra music, the uniforms and the fake dignity, and it’s absolutely insane. If any politician stood up today and proposed this system from scratch, people would think it was satire. “Right everyone, hear me out. We’re going to give one family billions of pounds, castles, jewels, military ceremonies, constitutional privilege and lifelong protection because their ancestors conquered people with swords.” You’d get laughed straight out of the room. But because it’s old, people defend it. That’s how deep the conditioning goes. They call it “tradition” because “national humiliation” doesn’t sound as marketable. And there he is, sat on a throne made of stolen wealth, literally telling struggling people about economic responsibility and national duty while wearing enough diamonds to feed entire communities for generations. You honestly couldn’t write a more insulting image if you tried.

🚨🎙️| Joe Cole on the Spurs vs Leeds United game and how Leeds got absolutely robbed to help Spurs escape relegation: 🗣️ “Listen, I’m trying to understand how football fans are supposed to trust this anymore because what we saw in that Spurs vs Leeds game was absolute theatre. You freeze the live image and Dominic Calvert-Lewin is CLEARLY onside. You can literally see daylight between him and the last defender. Then suddenly VAR pulls out this cartoon animation with lines drawn from places nobody can even explain properly and now he’s magically offside? Come on. And the worst part is what happened after it. If DCL is onside and from the real broadcast angle he absolutely looks onside, then the entire phase continues and you’re talking about a blatant penalty on him by Destiny Udogie in the box. Udogie doesn’t get the ball, clips the man, stops him getting through, and somehow VAR completely wipes the whole thing away because of an offside call that looks manufactured from a computer model instead of reality. This is the problem with modern officiating. The live image says one thing, the ‘3D model’ says another, and conveniently the decision ends up favouring Tottenham in a relegation battle. That’s what’s going to infuriate people. Because if this happens to Leeds or Everton, everyone says ‘unlucky’. But when it’s Spurs needing points to survive, suddenly we get forensic geometry and invisible body parts deciding football matches. People keep saying ‘trust the process’, what process? Fans are watching a real image with their own eyes and then being told to ignore it because a cartoon graphic generated five seconds later says otherwise. Football’s becoming less about the game and more about who can manipulate freeze frames best. If that’s given at the other end against Leeds, I guarantee nobody overturns it. No chance. That’s why supporters feel like the game is being controlled instead of officiated. Spurs got away with one massively today, and Leeds fans have every right to feel robbed.”

@AngelaRayner More bullshit

Our party has suffered a historic defeat. Many good Labour colleagues have lost their seats despite working hard for those they represented. We have lost good Labour administrations and lost the chance for more. What we are doing isn’t working, and it needs to change. This may be our last chance. The Labour Party must now live up to our name: we must be the party of working people. We’ve heard the same on the doorstep as we’ve seen in the polls - the cost of living is the top issue for voters of all parties. People have turned to populists and nationalists because we have not done enough to fix it. Living standards are barely higher than they were a decade and a half ago. People feel hopeless - that the cost of living crisis will never end, and now they see oil and gas companies use global instability to post record profits. Once again, ordinary people are paying the price for decisions they didn’t make. It’s no wonder that across the UK, working people feel the system is rigged against them. Things can be so much better than this. Countries including Spain and Canada have shown that economies can grow and people can thrive when governments stay true to labour and social democratic values and put people first. We need to learn from that. In London, we lost young people who fear they will never afford a home. In my patch and across the north, we lost working people whose wages are too low and costs too high. In Scotland and Wales, people do not currently see Labour as the answer.  We are in danger of becoming a party of the well-off, not working people. The Peter Mandelson scandal showed a toxic culture of cronyism.  Decisions like cutting winter fuel allowance just weren’t what people expected from a Labour government. For too long, successive governments have allowed wealth and power to concentrate at the top without a plan to ensure the benefits of economic growth are shared fairly. The result is an economy that does not work for the majority, with wealth concentrated in too few hands. This level of inequality, alongside squeezed living standards, is the outcome of a model built on deregulation, privatisation, and trickle-down economics. But we have the chance to fix this.  1/2

@GriftReport Bollocks

Illegal migrants are now sneaking OUT of Britain hidden in lorries because the £49-a-week asylum support isn't enough for them to buy booze or fags, Sue Reid reveals, dozens of young men from Sudan, Egypt and Burkina Faso are paying smugglers just £150 to £400 to climb into trucks at Dover and head back to France and Calais, one Egyptian migrant complained the system “does nothing for us” and said he can’t even afford his favourite £20 pack of cigarettes on the handouts, others moaned they’re stuck in hotels with no right to work and the constant threat of deportation so Britain isn’t the paradise the smugglers promised, around 20 migrants are leaving this way every single week while roughly 100 are still being smuggled INTO the same port,

BOOMERANG PROCESS is available to buy now. Thanks to all who made last nights launch such a great night. Online: tncbooks.co.uk You can also DM me and I’ll get one to you.

@TheDailyDraught I wouldn't rate the Guinness with a line up like that

Is this the worst selection of beers in the world?

@andrewc44104127 He's an actor Not a thespian He entertains Not everyone's cup of tea Hea had several breaks

Does anybody else just totally cringe when they see this man on the telly?

That I think, was the best game of club of club football I've ever seen PSG v Bayern

@BarackObama UK here Nobodies arsed G'nite

Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night's shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy. It’s also a sobering reminder of the courage and sacrifice that U.S. Secret Service Agents show every day. I’m grateful to them – and thankful that the agent who was shot is going to be okay.

@TheGriftReport Lost my thumb nail at work on Tuesday...Sunday now...and after jumping through hoops over the phone..with a late visit/ consultation.. I might finally be getting some antibiotics...what is normally known as an occupational hazard?

Spanish matador admits he can't sleep or eat after bull spears him right up the bum in excruciating arena goring Morante de la Puebla, 46, was knocked down and gored by a 512kg bull named Clandestino during a fight at Seville's Maestranza arena on April 20. The horn caused a 10cm wound that perforated the back wall of his rectum and partially damaged his anal sphincter muscles. He needed more than two hours of complex surgery to clean the wound, repair the rectal wall and reconstruct the sphincter before being put on IV nutrition in hospital. In a video from his bed the matador said "The truth is, I'm in a lot of pain" and admitted he's had "a pretty normal night of little sleep" with zero appetite. He described it as "without a doubt, the most painful goring ever" and is now just hoping to get through it with patience.

@BBCWYS Played 2 across the midfield against 3.....changed a keeper who's made some fantastic saves....

“You could tell the players were perhaps a bit nervous.” Daniel Farke says Leeds United must get used to playing in bigger games and bigger atmospheres after exiting the FA Cup at the semi-final stage with defeat to Chelsea. #LUFC | #BBCFootball | #FACup

@BBCWYS Old Trafford?

No

@TheFootyFeed Shite view

Chelsea instructing their goalkeeper to hit the ground for a tactical pause in the FA Cup semi-final while facing pressure. The FA must take action against this obvious cheating! 👍🏼

@AwayDaysFB Somebody needs a word behind the scenes at Leeds We left our goalkeeper sat on the bench

Chelsea telling their keeper to go down so the can have a tactical break during an FA Cup semi final when they are under pressure. The FA needs to do something about this blatant cheating 👍🏼

She was called "Hey, you" by her own husband. Never by her name. Never once. Her name was Bryna. She crossed an ocean with nothing — no education, no English, no guarantee of anything — just a ticket bought by a man named Herschel who had promised her a better life in America. They settled in Amsterdam, New York, a working-class mill town far from the dreams she had carried on that ship. The better life never came. Herschel collected rags and scraps for a living. What little he earned disappeared into alcohol and card games. He was cold, rough, and careless — the kind of man who raises his voice and never raises his children. Bryna raised them herself. Six daughters and a son, in a house where hunger was a regular visitor. She couldn't read or write. She took in laundry. She scrubbed floors. And when even that wasn't enough, she walked to the Jewish butcher with a quiet, dignified request: "The bones you don't need — may I have them?" She'd take those discarded bones home and boil them for hours. That thin soup fed her family for days. Her youngest son, Issur — everyone called him Izzy — watched all of this. He watched his mother fight for them with everything she had and nothing in her hands. And somehow, impossibly, he told her he wanted to be an actor. She didn't laugh. She didn't tell him to be practical. She looked at this poor ragman's boy from a town nobody had heard of, and she believed him. Izzy left. He struggled. He clawed his way forward. And eventually, the world came to know him as Kirk Douglas — one of Hollywood's greatest stars. Spartacus. Paths of Glory. Lust for Life. A legend. But he never forgot the soup made from bones. He never forgot the woman who made it. When Kirk formed his own film production company, he didn't name it after himself. He named it Bryna Productions — after her. In 1958, Bryna Productions released The Vikings, one of the biggest films of the year. And Kirk had something he needed to show his mother. He took her to Times Square. Among all those lights, all that noise, all that impossible American spectacle — he stopped in front of a massive billboard and pointed. BRYNA PRESENTS THE VIKINGS. Her name. Enormous. Illuminated. Seen by thousands of strangers every single day. The woman who had never learned to read her own name stood in Times Square and wept. Not from pain, for once. From joy. A few months later, in December of 1958, Bryna passed away peacefully — her son by her side. Her last words to him were not of fear or regret. They were a mother's instinct, right to the very end: "Izzy, son, don't be afraid. This happens to everyone." Even dying, she was still trying to protect him. Kirk Douglas went on to live 103 years. He became a Hollywood icon, a philanthropist, the father of actor Michael Douglas. He achieved things that boy boiling bones for soup could never have imagined. But he said it his whole life: she was the reason. Every single time. Every film bearing the words "A Bryna Production" was never really a business credit. It was a love letter. Written in lights. From a son who never forgot that his mother fed a family on bones — and somehow still found enough love left over to fuel a legend. She deserved to have her name in lights. And her son made absolutely certain she lived to see it.

@Airaasayss The A in BLACK is the smallest triangle

Read very carefully!!!!! And look Closely before before You answer......🤔🤔

@Mr_Husky1 I was a barnardo baby The man is a legend.

A 7-year-old boy slept under a bridge in London. No shoes. No food. No one who knew his name. A young stranger stopped and asked him a simple question — and what the child said next changed history forever. His name was Jim. The year was 1866. London was choking under black factory smoke, and the East End was a maze of sewers, starvation, and invisible children. Jim was one of them — filthy clothes, matted hair, eyes that held pain no child should ever know. Thomas Barnardo was just a 21-year-old medical student, quietly preparing to travel to China as a missionary. Then he met Jim crouched in a doorway, shivering. "Are there more like you?" Thomas asked. "Heaps of 'em, sir," Jim whispered. "More than I can count. We sleep where the dogs won't go." A few days later, Jim was dead. He died alone in the cold, another child the city had simply forgotten to notice. Thomas Barnardo never boarded that ship to China. Instead, in 1870, he opened a small home for abandoned boys in East London. Above the door, he hung a sign that read: "No destitute child will ever be refused admission." One night, the home was full and he turned a boy away. Two days later, that same child was found dead from hunger and cold. Thomas wept. He made a vow he never broke: the door would always open. When critics told him he was crazy and would run out of money, he kept building. More homes. Foster families. Vocational training. He gave street children — children people called "rats" — a trade, a name, and a future. He didn't ask for papers. He didn't ask for backgrounds. He simply opened the door. By the time Thomas Barnardo died in 1905, he had rescued more than 60,000 children from the streets of Britain. Today, Barnardo's is still one of the UK's largest children's charities — still keeping a dead boy's whispered words alive, 160 years later. Everything began with one man who stopped walking, looked down, and truly saw a child that the rest of the world had decided wasn't worth seeing. Tag someone who still believes one person can change everything. 💙