Banshee

@HiddenYorkshire What can go wrong with a film with Capt Picard in it?

Watched Excalibur (1981) and LOVE IT. I love the high camp era of British fantasy, Prince of Thieves, early Warhammer, Choose Your Own Adventure books, and cheap fantasy books from the library which would always fall open at the mucky bits. It works because it doesn't try to be the ~real~ King Arthur; it's pretend Arthur, the games of Knights And Castles you played as a kid with plastic figures and castles

You’re sheltered in the Army. Most people you work with are decent. It’s a shock how many twats there are civvy street. But I’ve never come across a more sanctimonious, mendacious and hypocritical bunch than the pro-Palestinians. Nothing they won’t lie about. Disgusting people.

@chrisinstalbans @LionelFlysite And mid to upper 20s in the UK!

@LionelFlysite Stop it

35°C in Paris here in Paris. Is it cold in NZ?

On this day in 1944, the Japanese Imperial Army's greatest defeat in history was reaching its peak in a forgotten corner of India. By nightfall on May 26, 1944, the battle that ended Japan's last offensive of the Second World War was effectively won. Almost nobody outside the Burma campaign knows the story. The Japanese 15th Army, 85,000 men under Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi, had launched Operation U-Go in March. The plan was ambitious to the point of fantasy. Three Japanese divisions would cross the Chindwin river out of Burma, climb 7,000 feet through monsoon-soaked jungle into India, capture the British supply bases at Imphal and Kohima, and trigger the collapse of British rule in South Asia. Mutaguchi told his officers they would feast on captured British rations within weeks. He ordered them to bring only three weeks of food. After that, they would live off the enemy. The British, under Lieutenant General William Slim, fell back into prepared positions on the Imphal plain and at a hill station 80 miles to the north called Kohima. They dug in. They waited. What followed was 81 days of fighting in conditions that veterans on every other front of the war refused to compare to their own. At Kohima, the centre of gravity of the entire battle compressed onto a single tennis court behind the District Commissioner's bungalow. British and Indian troops, mostly the 4th Battalion Royal West Kents and the 1st Assam Regiment, held one side of the tennis court. Japanese soldiers held the other. They fought across it for 16 days with rifles, grenades, and bayonets, at distances of less than 30 yards. Officers threw grenades back and forth like cricket balls. The clay court was churned into a graveyard. The monsoon arrived in mid-May. Trenches flooded waist-deep. Wounded men drowned in their own foxholes. The dead were left where they fell because no one could reach them under Japanese fire. Bodies bloated in the heat. Disease killed almost as many men as bullets did. Typhus. Dysentery. Cerebral malaria. By mid-May, the 2nd British Division had broken through to Kohima and begun counter-attacking south down the road toward Imphal. By May 26, 1944, the Japanese 31st Division, which had attacked Kohima, was disintegrating. Out of food. Out of ammunition. Out of medical supplies. The men were eating roots, bamboo shoots, leaves, and in some documented cases, their own dead. Soldiers too weak to walk were left behind in the jungle with a single grenade and instructions to use it on themselves before the British arrived. By that date, virtually every Japanese position in and around Kohima had been overrun. The road south to Imphal was open. Mutaguchi refused to authorize a retreat. To withdraw was to admit failure, and Japanese military culture treated admitting failure as worse than annihilation. His subordinate divisional commanders, watching their men starve to death, began retreating anyway, in direct defiance of explicit written orders. Major General Kotuku Sato of the 31st Division simply marched his survivors back toward Burma without authorization and dared Mutaguchi to court-martial him. Mutaguchi did not. When the Japanese 15th Army finally fell back across the Chindwin in July, of the 85,000 men who had started Operation U-Go in March, 53,000 were dead, missing, or so broken by starvation and disease that they were no longer combatants. Most of those casualties were not from combat. They were from hunger, dysentery, malaria, exhaustion, and despair. The trail back to Burma was lined with skeletons in tattered uniforms. Indian villagers along the route remembered finding them for years afterward. Mutaguchi was relieved of command, recalled to Tokyo, and forced into retirement. No Japanese ground offensive of comparable size was ever launched again in the Second World War. The defeat at Kohima and Imphal broke the offensive capacity of the Imperial Japanese Army in mainland Asia. The British and Indian troops who held the tennis court are commemorated today by a small stone memorial at Kohima War Cemetery. The inscription on it has become one of the most famous epitaphs of the Second World War: "When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrow, we gave our today." In 2013, British veterans and military historians voted Imphal-Kohima the greatest battle in British military history. Greater than Agincourt. Greater than Waterloo. Greater than D-Day. Most people in Britain have never heard of it.

Shame on the history professors… digitaleditions.telegraph.co.uk/data/2446/read…

@James1940 @WeHaveWaysPod @almurray Read Ken Touts books years ago for the troopers view

New 4-parter on the @WeHaveWaysPod - the British Band of Brothers, in which @almurray & I follow the incredible story of the Sherwood Rangers, the single British unit with more battle honours than any other in the war. We’ll get through their entire story in time but we’re starting with D-Day and the fighting of June 1940. Amazing men. I’m in awe.

@robert_lyman @ReadingCAMRA Finally visited with relatives for grub and cider last week

And in other news, our wonderful pub, The Bell Inn at Waltham St Lawrence, has won @ReadingCAMRA Pub of the Year 2026 Come and pay us a visit!

@aljhlester Alan - please stop promulgating government misinformation? I suggest you start reading here davidturver.substack.com/p/high-uk-elec…

Useful information from the government makes a nice change from the usual energy misinformation from Reform & Conservatives.

@WEschenbach @FranceskAlbs Perhaps Israel should issue letters of Marque and Reprisal. They can hardly be signatories of the Declaration of Paris (1856)

Dear heavens, this looney bitch gets more deranged every day! It's not "piracy", you fool, it's a blockade that is 100% legal under international law. And even if it weren't, it STILL wouldn't be piracy. Piracy is an act by private citizens, not countries. Pull down your skirt, your insane hatred of Jews is showing … w.

ALERT! Yet another act of piracy by the Israeli army in international waters: intercepting the flotilla carrying basic necessities to a desperate population in Gaza. Shame on European govts who are not acting to stop Israel! When will Israel's impunity end?

"No, I don't subscribe to this 'kindness' - I'll tell the truth instead." I spoke at the Cambridge Union last night about LGBs, children's safety and women's rights. Full video here:

New Zealand has no excuse not to learn from the consequences of Australia's tobacco policy choices.

So @winstonpeters asked the Speaker at the beginning of question time why there are so many flags raised outside Parliament that have meant that the two visiting delegations from overseas have had to have their flags flown elsewhere. Turns out there are the rainbow flag, the triangle rainbow flag, the trans flag, bisexual flag, & intersex flag are all flying today. Why? Who is asking for this? I still can't figure out why we do Pride in Feb & June. Now we do May? Then there are like 95 trans days. Can we just fly our national flag and visiting delegation flags and leave it at that? Homophobia is fine anyway. Just ask Labour.

@aljhlester 1 - Most folk are looking at decades of mismanagement, not just 14. 2 -optics suggest it's a matter of degree only. 3 - It's one factor but a cumulative factor - and all are the politicians fault. 4 -I'm sure you are right!

3. Despite all you’re told, it’s not immigrants’ fault and anyway, immigration has reduced drastically. 4. Things were looking up regarding the cost of living until Trump attacked Iran & it closed Hormuz. Things will look up again.

I get that much of the Reform vote in local elections was a protest against the slow pace of change. But there are some hard lessons that voters must learn in the years before a general election:

If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal. If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a fundamentalist. If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you're a totalitarian. If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you're a terrorist.

In a nutshell 👍 like many of us have been saying for the last 2.5 years until this @UKLabour Gov. accepts the biggest threat to 🇬🇧 National Security is Islamic extremism..

👏👏👏

@EricCrampton Love that track! Shame I missed even knowing about this show!

Retro? GO! Apollo? GO! Guidance? GO! Control? GO! Retro? GO! Fido? GO! Guidance? GO! GO! GO! GO! GO! youtube.com/watch?v=v8hzqw…

The Public Service Broadcasting show in Wellington this weekend was superb. If there were ever to be a left-abundance and right-abundance synthesis conference, they ought to be asked to come in and play for the closing night. youtube.com/watch?v=x1ZbdG…

This is one of the most jaw-dropping, chilling interviews I have seen. Watch this Rabbi from London, respond to question about the terror stabbing in Golders Green!