Bede vs Gregory of Tours. Medieval Movies & links to history podcasts. Antiques friendly Moving permanently to @morangles.bsky.social
Humberside
Joined January 2009
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T S P retweeted
Man, oh man. Obama just roasted Trump and some of his cabinet members for minutes in Atlanta. Stop what you're doing and watch this. There is no way Trump is sleeping tonight.
T S P retweeted
In the middle of World War Two, German soldiers in southeastern Poland started avoiding a cluster of villages.
They wouldn't go in. They wouldn't take people out for forced labor. They put up warning signs and stayed away.
They believed the area was infected with typhus.
It wasn't. Two doctors had invented the whole thing.
The man behind it was Eugene Lazowski, a young Polish doctor working for the Red Cross in the town of Rozwadów. He was watching the Nazi occupation tear his country apart. Executions. Deportations. People shipped off to labor camps, many never coming back.
He wanted to stop it. He had no weapons, no army, and no way to fight.
What he had was medicine.
His friend and fellow doctor, Stanisław Matulewicz, had discovered something strange. If you injected a person with a harmless, dead strain of a certain bacteria, their blood would test positive for typhus.
They wouldn't be sick at all. But on paper, they'd look like they had one of the most feared diseases of the war.
And the Germans were terrified of typhus. It spread fast, it killed, and it could tear through an army. When the Germans found it, they quarantined the area and kept their distance.
Lazowski realized what that meant. If he could make enough people look infected, the Germans would leave the whole region alone.
So he started injecting his patients.
He chose carefully. He sent the blood samples to German labs for testing, exactly as the rules required. The results came back positive. Again and again.
The Germans declared an epidemic zone. Villages were quarantined. Soldiers kept out. People who would have been seized for forced labor or worse were left alone, because nobody wanted to go near them.
Lazowski had to be careful. If too many cases looked fake, someone would ask why nobody was dying. So he spread out the injections over time and kept the outbreak believable.
Eventually the Germans did get suspicious. They sent a team of doctors to inspect.
Lazowski met them with food and vodka and played the gracious host. He guided them toward the sickest looking, dirtiest patients he could find, in the most crowded rooms. The German doctors, worried about catching typhus themselves, took a few samples and left in a hurry.
The tests came back positive.
The fake epidemic lasted until the end of the war. Estimates say it may have protected around 8,000 people.
Lazowski also secretly helped Jews from the nearby ghetto, giving them medical care at enormous risk.
After the war he moved to the United States and became a professor of pediatrics in Chicago. For decades he barely talked about what he'd done. Late in life he finally wrote a memoir. He called it My Private War.
He died in 2006.
He never fired a shot. He beat the Nazis with a needle and a lab test.
T S P retweeted
In 1933, a beautiful, young Austrian woman took off her clothes for a movie director. She ran through the woods, naked. She swam in a lake, naked. The most popular movie in 1933 was King Kong. But everyone in Hollywood was talking about that scandalous movie with the gorgeous, young Austrian woman.
Louis B. Mayer, of the giant studio MGM, said she was the most beautiful woman in the world. The film was banned practically everywhere, which of course made it even more popular and valuable. Mussolini reportedly refused to sell his copy at any price.
The star of the film, called "Ecstasy," was Hedwig Kiesler. She said the secret of her beauty was "to stand there and look stupid." In reality, Kiesler was anything but stupid.
At the time she made Ecstasy, Kiesler was married to one of the richest men in Austria. Friedrich Mandl was Austria's leading arms maker. His firm would become a key supplier to the Nazis. Mandl used his beautiful young wife as a showpiece at important business dinners with representatives of the Austrian, Italian, and German fascist forces. One of Mandl's favorite topics at these gatherings - which included meals with Hitler and Mussolini - was the technology surrounding radio-controlled missiles and torpedoes.
As a Jew, Kiesler hated the Nazis. She abhorred her husband's business ambitions. Mandl responded to his willful wife by imprisoning her in his castle, Schloss Schwarzenau. In 1937, she managed to escape. She drugged her maid, snuck out of the castle wearing the maid's clothes and sold her jewelry to finance a trip to London. (She got out just in time. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria. The Nazis seized Mandl's factory. He was half Jewish. Mandl fled to Brazil. (Later, he became an adviser to Argentina's iconic populist president, Juan Peron.)
In London, Kiesler arranged a meeting with Louis B. Mayer. She signed a long-term contract with him, becoming one of MGM's biggest stars. She appeared in more than 20 films. She was a co-star to Clark Gable, Judy Garland, and even Bob Hope. Each of her first seven MGM movies was a blockbuster. But Kiesler cared far more about fighting the Nazis than about making movies.
At the height of her fame, in 1942, she developed a new kind of communications system, optimized for sending coded messages that couldn't be "jammed." She was building a system that would allow torpedoes and guided bombs to always reach their targets. She was building a system to kill Nazis. By the 1940s, both the Nazis and the Allied forces were using the kind of single frequency radio-controlled technology Kiesler's ex-husband had been peddling.
Most of you won't recognize the name Kiesler. And no one would remember the name Hedy Markey. But it's a fair bet than anyone reading this post of a certain age, will remember one of the great beauties of Hollywood's golden age - Hedy Lamarr. That's the name
🤖 Made with AI
T S P retweeted
We’ve always known. Letterman was so good at this. Yeah, he’s a racist. (And no, not Letterman)
T S P retweeted
Tomorrow, when you see the front pages of the right-wing press telling you how dreadful the budget was, remember their track record.
Also remember that right-wingers won’t ever be happy with any budget that doesn’t push down on those at the bottom to benefit those at the top.
T S P retweeted
This is absolute cinema 🎥
🇺🇸Journalist Kernen: "You made a ton of money in crypto. Do you even know about those crypto deals?"
🇺🇸Trump: "Yeah I know. Nothing illegal there."
🇺🇸Kernen: "Title 18, Section 208. It’s criminal law that stops gov workers from making money off official stuff."
🇺🇸Trump: "Don’t know it."
That’s a journalist with SPINE 👏.
In a real democracy, Trump would have face 5 years in prison for this crime.
T S P retweeted
This video of President Barack Obama always makes me cry and I’m not a crier.I think it’s because I see what an incredible honorable empathic caring man & President he is and it makes me wish he was still in office instead of the Ass man Donald Trump.
T S P retweeted
A young and beautiful Chloe Wofford who would later rename herself Toni Morrison.
Before the world knew her as Toni Morrison, she was Chloe Anthony Wofford, a young girl growing up in Lorain, Ohio. Born in 1931, she was raised in a working-class family whose parents had migrated north from the South. Her father and mother filled their home with stories, music, and a strong sense of Black history and culture, influences that would remain visible throughout her writing.
Morrison developed a love of books early in life and became an exceptional student. She graduated from Lorain High School with honors in 1949 and went on to Howard University, where she studied English and the classics. It was during this period that she began using the name Toni. Anthony had been the name she chose at baptism, and Toni eventually became the nickname by which the literary world would know her.
After Howard, she earned a master's degree in English from Cornell University and began teaching. She later became an editor at Random House, where she played an important role in bringing the work of Black writers to a wider audience. Her own first novel, *The Bluest Eye*, was published in 1970, when she was 39.
Morrison would go on to write some of the most influential novels in American literature, including *Sula*, *Song of Solomon*, *Beloved* and *Jazz*. Her work placed Black lives, memory, womanhood, family, trauma and history at the center of stories that had often been pushed to the margins. In 1988, *Beloved* won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and in 1993 she became the first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The young woman pictured here could not yet know where her love of language would take her. But the imagination, discipline and curiosity she developed in Lorain
T S P retweeted
She threw a tantrum in class, the way six-year-olds do. The school called the police.
They handcuffed Salecia Johnson and took her to the station, and at the station they had to work out what to charge a first-grader with.
Milledgeville, Georgia, April 2012. Creekside Elementary School.
Salecia Johnson, six years old, had a tantrum. Reports describe her knocking things over in the principal's office and damaging a shelf.
The school called the police department.
Officers handcuffed her and took her to the station. Her family says she was held there until they arrived.
She was initially looked at for simple assault and damage to property. The charges did not proceed — a six-year-old is below the age at which Georgia could prosecute.
Which raises the question the whole of today is built on. If the law in that state had already decided a six-year-old cannot be criminally responsible for anything, what exactly were the handcuffs for?
They were not for public safety. She weighed about as much as a bag of rice.
They were not to secure a prosecution. There could not be one.
The only thing handcuffs do to a six-year-old is teach her something.
Her family said afterwards that she wet herself at the police station, and that she was frightened of going back to school.
The district reviewed its policy. The chief defended the arrest as procedure for a child who was being destructive.
And that is the honest answer, and it is worse than malice. It was procedure. There was a form for it. Somebody had written the step down in advance, and the officer followed it.
T S P retweeted
"The Show Must Go On"
She was 24, a Swiss model and financial services professional, recruited by Jill Harth to the Donald J. Trump American Dream Pageant. At a press luncheon at the Trump-owned Plaza, she says Trump approached her and talked to her for about 15 minutes. He promised to arrange her U.S. visa through his associate Paolo Zampolli and to get her into NYU, saying variations of "I will take care of you."
Then, she says, Jeffrey Epstein walked up and introduced himself: "I'm Jeffrey, Don's best friend." He invited her to a party at Mar-a-Lago and offered to cover her flights and accommodations, saying "We organize many parties with Don."
Later that day, she says, a Trump representative invited her upstairs to a suite for a meeting she thought would help her career and education. She alleges Trump grabbed her from behind and raped her, tearing her dress and leaving her bleeding and bruised in multiple places.
Afterward, she says, he sat her on the bed, repeated the visa and NYU promises, and told her to stay quiet: "the show must go on." She finished the pageant in a "terrified daze," went home to Switzerland, skipped a later Trump pageant in Hawaii, and turned down his offers when he called her months later.
T S P retweeted
Trump’s 10 historic presidential accomplishments!
Renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
Renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America.
Renamed Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Super Intelligence (SI).
Brought back plastic straws.
Liberated American showerheads.
Fought for stronger toilet flushing.
Took on weak bathroom faucets.
Defended dishwashers from government regulations.
Protected washing machines from efficiency standards.
Ordered the end of penny production.
And all of this in less than two years!
Future generations will surely remember the president who made American showers great again.
Promises made. Promises kept.
T S P retweeted
Un exploit de la télé publique croate qui mérite d'être salué: le 29 octobre 2026, soit demain, sort le film le plus cher de son histoire: "Dioclétien, le dernier dieu romain" dd Božidar Domagoj Burić.
A noter que les dialogues sont en latin populaire, et un grand effort semble avoir été fait sur les tenues (sauf celles des femmes!) et les décors fin IIIe/ début IVe siècle !
Ce drame historique retrace l'ascension au pouvoir de l'empereur Dioclétien au milieu d'intenses conflits politiques et personnels à la cour de la Rome antique. Dioclétien est né en Dalmatie (actuelle Croatie) et règnera de 285 jusqu'à son abdication en 305 où il se retira malade dans son palais dalmate qui donnera la ville de Split. Il ne séjournera à Rome , lui préférant Nicomédie en actuelle Turquie : il n'appréciait ni la ville ni ses habitants!
Excellent militaire, ça sera aussi un grand réformateur de l'Etat, mais il est aussi connu à la fin de son règne par les terribles persécutions contre les chrétiens et manichéens dans la moitié orientale de l'Empire.
Espérons qu'une plateforme de streaming nous le proposera bientôt en France! Voir la bande annonce ⤵️
T S P retweeted
When Meghan initially spoke on having received that letter, she remembered it was in 2018.
The MET initially had amnesia, stating they didn't know if such a letter existed. Of course she was then labelled a liar 🙄
She went on to checkmate them and state she could provide a copy of her letter. So the amnesia cleared and the MET suddenly remembered they received the letter in question, in 2019. Meghans team issued a statement saying that if the MET had time stamped the letter as being received in 2019, then to take that as the time it was received.
The MET have now stated the letter has been lost, and have asked Meghan to provide them with a copy of hers. So how on earth did they ascertain that they received the letter in question in 2019 if they have lost it?
T S P retweeted
I have never supported and do not support the antisemite Ilhan Omar, and I try not to read anything related to her. But now a major scandal has erupted. No matter how you look at it, she is a congresswoman, and the Trump administration has started making a fuss and wants to get her deported. Investigators claim that she provided false information when filling out the documents to obtain citizenship. In other words, false information was entered into the documents — her date of birth.
But why is this being done now, when it happened in 1990, 36 years ago? Also, why have they decided to go after only her?
Now people are beginning to talk about the fact that if this has happened to her, why shouldn't the same thing happen to Melania Trump and Elon Musk?
It is a known fact: Elon Musk admitted on camera that he entered the United States illegally. According to him, he arrived on a student visa, which requires full-time study. But, as is known, he never enrolled in an educational institution and worked instead. Working instead of studying full-time while holding a student visa is illegal. Even his brother, Kimbal, admitted: “We were illegal immigrants.”
Why not go after him and investigate the circumstances under which he obtained US citizenship?
And here is another real candidate for investigation.
Melania Knauss (Trump) arrived in the United States in August 1996 on a visitor tourist visa. In October 1996, she received an H-1B work visa. This visa was granted to her as a “highly skilled foreign specialist” through a modeling agency.
In 2001, Melania received a green card, permanent residency, under the EB-1 visa category (Visa for Extraordinary Ability).
This type of permanent residency is granted to individuals with “extraordinary abilities” in science, the arts, education, business, or sports.
It is often informally called the “Einstein Visa.”
In 2005, Melania married Donald Trump, and in 2006 she obtained American citizenship, since by that time she had already lived in America for five years.
So there you have it — just dig a little into these two, and...
The whole thing is clearly stitched together with white thread!
They could easily be stripped of their citizenship and deported!
